Bilfinger Industrial Services Belgium/Netherlands is a leading industrial services provider within the Maintenance & Engineering Division of the multinational Bilfinger Group. With 3000 members of staff and contractors, the company offers a wide variety of services to industrial clients in the BeNe region.
The digital transformation is an essential part of the company’s strategy of continuous innovation and development, and in July 2020 they took the first step towards process automation. Although Bilfinger already had the data, for example, the measurements of scaffolding, digitized and readily available on their own system, the client’s system did not allow them to create a client interface to upload that data and so the department had employees spending 5 to 6 hours a day manually entering digital data into the client’s system. With the department processing an average of 150 work orders a week, automating the task, therefore, promised to deliver the business up to 70% saving in terms of man-hours. And that was only one part of the Order to Cash process that had to be done for the client.
The first UiPath robot was built in just 4 weeks by the combined Bilfinger and Ciphix team and given the name Chappie, rapidly showed its worth, and management was convinced of the way forward. Thus began the upscaling of the RPA deployment within the company. Driven by the Project Administration department in collaboration with IT and Innovation, the objective is not only to scale up the automation to include more and more processes relating to one specific client but also to build on and leverage already existing and repeatable robotic components to automate processes with other clients faster and more efficiently.
After a successful pilot project built using the UiPath RPA software platform, with the support and expertise of leading RPA implementation partner Ciphix, Bilfinger now has 5 robots that help drive quality and efficiencies across the company’s Order to Cash processes. Bilfinger hopes to double this number by the end of 2021.
Key Benefits
- More data quality
- Reduced lead times
- Minimal errors
- 70% of time saved on data input processes
- Less manual admin work for staff
- More time to control processes and improve them
