FLSmidth is a Danish multinational engineering company based in Copenhagen, Denmark. With almost 11,700 employees worldwide, it provides global cement and mineral industries with factories, machinery, services, and know-how.
At FLSmidth, the digital transformation journey began by implementing Intelligent Automation a few years back. They first deployed RPA tools in 2018 in partnership with Automation Anywhere for simple but repetitive tasks that didn’t require decision-making. They have subsequently leveraged the partnership with Automation Anywhere to automate more complex processes such as cash applications, automatic payment processing, and invoice processing. In 2019, the human equivalent of 27,000 hours of work was performed by software bots, 2020 has made the Automation journey even more progressive.
The vision now is to continue this positive growth trajectory and leverage automation to further improve core operations and automate more complex tasks. In fact, the team at FLSmidth is currently leveraging software bots to identify processes that are well-suited for automation and creating a self-fulfilling virtuous cycle of augmented business processes. This can be achieved by deploying cognitive and AI-based technologies to extract multi-language unstructured data from various vendors.
The short time span of developing and deploying bots has convinced stakeholders at FLSmidth that barriers to automation can easily be conquered and end-to-end processes can be automated to deliver value in a measurable and standardized manner. This is driving the adoption of automation in multiple locations and also leading to the setup of the Centre of Excellence (CoE) to augment further implementation of Intelligent Automation.
Get more details in the following video that shows testimonials about how this project was started when FLSmidth created almost 10 bots and automated 4 different processes in less than 6 weeks.