Automation transforms North American tire-replacement company, saving 30k hours annually

ORGANIZATION PROFILE

A tire company ahead of the curve, this Automation Anywhere customer is one of North America’s largest marketers of automotive replacement tires. Its worldwide operations span wholesale, retail, and franchise. It also provides automotive maintenance and repair services with best-in-class brands.

CHALLENGE

Management observed many time-consuming, manual tasks burdening employees, including printing and manually stamping invoices, scanning and digitally filing individual documents on a shared drive, and manipulating data in Excel worksheets. They knew more efficient methods were necessary to regain time for value-added work. As a result, a Continuous Improvement team was formed to drive digital transformation and create a culture around the automation mindset.

30k

Hours saved annually

$1.7M

Saved annually

70+

Processes automated with 100+ bots

$500k

Additional YoY savings planned

Business users leverage intelligent automation to focus on strategic activities instead of repetitive and time-consuming tasks.

Robotic Process Automation Manager quote

Solution

A small Continuous Improvement team was first created that established a robotic automation program using Automation Anywhere software. Although start-up was slow, confidence in automation quickly evolved, allowing for the rapid growth of the company’s automation program. Support from management also boosted associate interest and adoption of intelligent automation, supercharging their total number of processes in production to more than 70.

Processes Automated

Accounts payable invoice automation

Enterprise-wide data storage system

Retail appointment schedule by store

Bulk price updates for orders

Inventory variance analysis

STORY DETAILS

A small Continuous Improvement team was formed in January 2019. The challenge given to the group was to lead strategic, transformational, and operational improvement projects working with cross-functional teams to enable process and technology automation.

They set out to introduce and educate associates on just how powerful and advantageous automation would be for their work life. The group met with individual teams to understand pain points and areas of repetitive non-value-added processes to see what could be automated. Initially, progress was slow until the teams gained confidence in what automation could do for them.

As more and more teams realized the value, it became easier to continue to grow the pipeline of requests as they provided more use cases to automate. This allowed the team to rapidly expand the program from just a few automations to over 70 processes.

The team is proud of their accomplishments as they have developed a more structured organization. In the past year they:

Defined structure, responsibilities, and service level agreements to set expectations with users.
Set up metrics and resolution reporting to continue to evolve and improve service delivery.
Worked with IT to define monitoring and troubleshooting support based on the severity categorization of each particular bot.

THE FUTURE

The company is currently upgrading to the complete Automation Success Platform, which will provide additional functionality such as chatbots, process discovery, machine learning, and artificial intelligence. This will help identify potential opportunities for automation and bring the program to the next level. The team plans to scale the pipeline of requests through a partnership with the Automation Governance team, Automation Anywhere, and Neoris. The Automation Governance team will help drive additional requests and will assist in evaluating ROI for opportunities in the pipeline. They also plan to perform individual team-focused workshops and proof of value projects as well as launch an internal automation marketing campaign.

We have gained tremendous support from top management and associates in support of our automation program.

Continuous Improvement Process Manager quote

CASE STUDY

Download a copy to keep or share