Companies can realise major benefits when they turn over their manual and repetitive processes to robotic process automation (RPA) systems. Greater accuracy and efficiency, reduced costs and increased productivity are among them.
Novelis, a world leader in aluminum product manufacturing, wanted to automate routine and recurring tasks to free up more time for employees to focus on data analysis, decision-making, and customer and employee service. One of the main companies of the India-based Aditya Birla Group, Novelis chose DXC Technology to bring RPA to its operations in Brazil.
DXC was responsible for identifying, mapping and documenting processes that were good candidates for automation, and supporting and executing them. DXC determined that 27 processes could benefit from RPA, including tax, logistics, HR and IT tasks. Today 32 robots coordinate processes for paying bank slips, making advances to suppliers, organising taxes and managing aluminum transportation, among others. RPA is responsible for executing more than 10,000 tasks per month, generating savings of more than 2,700 hours per year in all areas of activity.
"With the robots focused on repetitive processes, the teams can invest their time in strategic tasks. And our partnership with business areas got stronger and closer,” says Renata Lima, IT manager at Novelis Brazil.
“Companies will only reap the full benefits of automation if they invest in robotising the right tasks and processes,” says Ricardo Ferreira, DXC Technology vice president and general manager in the Latin America region. To be considered for RPA, a process must be highly manual, repetitive, mature and stable, with rules-based and electronic input data standards, and it should have a low exception rate.
DXC has more than 250 robots managing end-to-end processes for large clients. “When Novelis approached us,” Ferreira says, “we understood how we could use our existing expertise in other markets, such as petrochemicals and manufacturing, adapting it to what they needed.”
