The challenge
Our client is a multinational frozen food company that operates a vast network of warehouses and distribution centers across multiple locations. Due to the high volume of vendor appointments that often require frequent changes, the company faced challenges managing appointment information efficiently and accurately.
Initially, the client’s employees were required to manually extract crucial appointment details from emails sent from approximately 20 warehouse sites on a daily basis. This manual process for managing warehouse appointment notifications, changes and cancellations was not only time consuming, but also prone to errors.
The client was looking for a solution that could automate these tasks to enhance the overall appointment management process and reduce the need for human intervention.
The TELUS Digital solution
The client chose TELUS Digital as its automation partner to collaboratively implement an RPA bot to perform the following primary functions:
New appointment and appointment change notifications
The bot is designed to extract the appropriate information from the daily emails and helps expedite submissions into the client’s appointment management portal. It is equipped to deal with a high volume of daily inputs and has the capabilities to search for matching shipment details — a portion of the process that was especially time consuming and prone to data inaccuracies.
Appointment cancellation notification
The manual handling of email notifications related to appointment cancellations involved voiding appointment groupings and entering cancellation comments into the client’s appointment management portal. With the implementation of our RPA solution, the client is able to automate cancellation requests, streamlining the cancellation notification workflow.
The results
The implementation of the bot has yielded several key benefits, including:
- Increased efficiency: The automation of manual tasks has significantly reduced the time and effort required to manage appointments, allowing staff to focus on more value-added tasks. The optimization of processes has resulted in $300,000 in annual savings for the client.
- Improved timeliness: The bot performs tasks in a continuous loop, ensuring that appointment updates are made promptly to prevent delays and disruptions in warehouse operations.
- Enhanced accuracy: The automation of data-entry tasks has eliminated human error in the workflow for greater accuracy and reliability.
- Elevated transparency: The solution includes a regular reporting mechanism that provides clear insights into the bot’s performance, allowing for continuous improvement and easy troubleshooting.
