Company
Hitachi Vantara is a data storage systems provider, previously known as Hitachi Data Systems (HDS). Headquartered in Santa Clara, California, Hitachi Vantara is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd. and part of the company’s Information Systems & Telecommunications Division.
Automation Objectives
Hitachi Vantara decided to leverage RPA to not only improve process quality and reliability, but their key objective was to free up team members from routine, low-value tasks. This would allow them to focus on more challenging and engaging activities in their daily work—activities that would be of much higher value, as well as interest, to the workers. The company expected to gain efficiencies at scale while minimizing employee turnover. Hitachi Vantara’s RPA vision also involved reducing costs, eliminating errors, and speeding up processes.
Vendor Selection
After evaluating leading RPA vendors, Hitachi Vantara chose Automation Anywhere. In addition to its standard RPA solution, Hitachi Vantara selected Automation Anywhere’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) cognitive offering, IQ Bot, which can extract semi-structured data from documents and process it effortlessly.
Automation Details
Starting its RPA journey, Hitachi Vantara focused on two main areas. In IT, the company wanted to automate its service desk provisioning and de-provisioning processes. This involved ten distinct processes. In Finance, they wanted to streamline order-to-cash, record-to-report, and procure-to-pay processes. These added up to 20 processes, with a total of 30 processes targeted for automation in the initial round of the initiative. Ultimately, 41 processes were automated during Phase 1.
Taking a closer look at the procure-to-pay process, previously, employees would read the information from vendor invoices—such as the PO number, the date, the service, or product procured, and the amount—and key them into an Oracle ERP system. This was tedious, repetitive work. To realize how big a job this was, it’s noteworthy to mention that Hitachi Vantara processes more than 80,000 invoices annually from more than 1,000 vendors, in more than 20 languages. All of this needed to be done manually.
Today, Hitachi Vantara has 35 bots in production that can intelligently extract information from all these invoices, regardless of vendor, format, or language. Thanks to Automation Anywhere’s IQ Bot, the firm can also do 75% straight-through processing of invoices.
Benefits
- 10 Months to production
- 41 Processes automated
- 24/7 Continuous work shifts for RPA software robots
- 100% Reduction in errors