Toner Order Automation
The solution aims to automate the manual process of toner ordering for B2B photocopier and printing solutions. The process results in automatic reading of alerts and notifications, a web interface showing visual graphs to display toner history and usage pattern to send orders to robot.
Introduced Robotic Process Automation to improve productivity, accelerated ordering, reduce errors.
industry
Printer Manufacturing
location
Australia
work
Business Process Analysis, RPA(UiPath™), Web Development (ASP.NET, .NET framework, IIS, SQL Server), System & Exception Testing.
implementation time
6-8 weeks
The Challenge
The process of toner ordering at the right time
Our valued client partner caters to the printing needs of customers across a broad range of industries. While working with them they shared the process of toner ordering based on consumption rates, current level, and types, and its importance of dispatching at the “Right Time”
The manual effort of monitoring the status of the color toners of their client’s printing machines and generating a refill request based on that was a complex process hence they were looking for a solution that can reduce their overall effort and ease out the entire process.
The Discovery
A major part of automation would involve handling the exception rules.
We undertook a number of video meetings to define the scope of the Toner Order Automation. We sought to understand the existing manual business process, different modules and entities in use analyzing the toner levels, business rule exceptions, toner types, consumption rate, excel sheets involved for fetching and labeling, ordering.
Through these meetings, we discovered that we needed to do define an As-is VS To-be approach to determine the processes that can be replaced with assisted and non-assisted robots.
We also learned that the support of the client’s business and support team would be integral to the ongoing success of the automation. A major part of automation would involve handling the exception rules to ensure the ordering is at the right time for the right product. This automation would then evolve for the further processes related to Toner order.
The Solution
Extraction of the data fetched, in the ready-to-use format.
Handed off email reading to Robots
We automated the service request alerts and notifications: This process continuously monitored the alerts emails and collected the data in a sheet.
Customized Web Panel and assisted Robots
We built a custom web panel with assisted robots showing the machine details from the robot-generated sheet and showed the toner history and usage pattern in the graphical format. It allowed KissPS to select toner colors for a refill as per the graphical analytics, picked up by the robot to create a corresponding job in Jim2, the accounting system.
Streamlined Job Creation Process
The robots read the machine serial number for the process of creating a corresponding job for each machine serial number, item number, consumables, etc. The process ends when all machines have been processed that were sent to the robot from the web panel. Extraction of the data fetched, in the ready-to-use format, after getting jobs created, the automated process read the required job information from the database and prepared the excel file for the warehouse.
The Results
Removing manual repetitive jobs and reducing errors.
- Empower employees to do more.
- Streamlined and strengthened processes.
- Reduced Operational Costs.
Through this automation, the client aims to empower teams to do more productive work by freeing them from manual repetitive jobs, reducing errors due to manual handling of business exceptions.
We are working with them to optimize and strengthen the processes further.