Robotic Process Automation for a Leading Modular Storage Company

The Brief

A large modular storage enterprise was struggling to maintain an accurate perspective on the quality of their inventory. Units coming in from the field were evaluated differently and required a ‘single version of truth’ to fix. Apexon’s team was brought in to address these ongoing challenges and lead the client to the adoption of an RPA solution that created clarity and the elusive truth they needed.

The Challenge

Storage units that were leased to customers were evaluated by field employees in terms of reparability, damages, etc. and while a standard was originally developed, this was not adhered to universally and led to discrepancies around unit quality and repair efforts. Branch managers did not always have the confidence that their ‘active’ inventory was customer-ready.

The finance department spent much of their time manually reviewing roughly 140,000 storage units every month. This included applying the unit codes used to assess damage as intended, evaluating the field employees input, updating units manually in cases of discrepancies, and communicating with Branch Managers due to data quality issues. These data issues continued to increase as the client acquired businesses over time, making this manual work even more exhausting. On top of it all, this data was hosted on a massive spreadsheet, instead of managed within a centralized system.

The Solution

Apexon stepped in to put an Automation Anywhere solution in place using a dedicated Bot to both review and update fleet unit inventory values daily according to a standardized set of values and assumptions. This ‘logic’ was used to create the Bot, which is hyper focused on the rules that flow from the standards.

The solution only requires basic IT work to deploy and is able to be managed with confidence and security as it is an Enterprise-grade product (without the sticker-shock).

The Results

After deployment, Apexon adjusted tens of thousands of Fleet unit codes and essentially ‘fixed’ the ongoing variances, representing 40% of the enterprise Fleet. This also corresponds to a monthly net drop in the time spent by finance / management that has been quoted as 40-50 hours on one team alone!

An RPA solution was adopted to continuously review and update the now aligned Fleet inventory measurements, which allowed employees to spend less time on manual assessments, which ultimately increased productivity throughout the enterprise.

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