Boehringer Ingelheim is one of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, and the largest private one. Headquartered in Ingelheim (Germany), it operates globally with 146 affiliates and more than 47,700 employees.
Challenge
Medications must comply with strict regulations to safely enter the market at the imposed quality standards. Each drug, material, or substance must be stored in very specific conditions. This requires consideration of temperature, packaging, pH value, and potentially hazardous substances before storage. Boehringer Ingelheim, a key player in the pharmaceutical industry, aimed to improve their material storage verification process, which relied on manual data input. With each new variable that needed to be integrated into the process, the effort to perform the verification increased.
Vendor
BearingPoint is an independent management and technology consultancy with European roots and a global reach. The firm has a global consulting network with more than 10,000 people and supports clients in over 70 countries, engaging with them to achieve measurable and sustainable success.
Solution
Realizing the potential of cutting-edge technologies, Boehringer Ingelheim decided to leverage RPA to automate and standardize the material verification process and optimize their storage management.
BearingPoint gathered data from each manual step involved in the process by using UiPath’s Task Capture® product. A Process Definition Document was created, with a detailed As-Is and To-Be process description. BearingPoint then transferred the current manual methodology into a master file template, which could be adjusted easily whenever a change occurred. The template also provided integrated and consistent data for a bot to read. The development approach, incorporating possible exceptions, was detailed in the Solution Design Document, which was used for developing the bot. Finally, BearingPoint replicated the data from the visual chart workflow into a software-based one using the UiPath Studio® platform.
Business Impact
Boehringer Ingelheim now has a more efficient material verification process, with an automated execution and the lowest risk of human errors. The bot instantly processes the specific conditions for each material and issues an email notification to assigned staff. The material managers can run through a vast amount of conditions in seconds. The time-to-perform of approximately 2000 conditions was reduced by 90%.
