Merck & Co., Inc. is an American multinational pharmaceutical company headquartered in Kenilworth, New Jersey. The company is named after the Merck family, which set up Merck Group in Germany in 1668. In 1891 Merck & Co. was established as an American affiliate. Merck develops and produces medicines, vaccines, biological therapies, and animal health products. The company is ranked 69th on the 2021 Fortune 500.
By leveraging the automation expertise of IT consulting and systems integration company CGI Inc. which is a UiPath partner, Merck & Co. Inc. has automated various healthcare areas that have maximized results.
“The journey started about two years ago, and started with this small team, and has evolved ever since. We started just a handful of folks. We’ve evolved from the size of our team, matured operationally, and expanded our capabilities along that journey to where we are today. And it continues to evolve as technology changes. And it’s been exciting to see the adoption at Merck, across the enterprise. It’s been an educational process, but it’s been exciting just to see that understanding of the power that automation can deliver to them. And they see the value, and making it real to them has been key, then once it’s real and they get excited, and the word spreads, and they appreciate the value right before their eyes.”
Dan Boyd, Automation Leader, Merck
One of the use cases where Merck with help of CGI applied Uipath RPA, was automated invoice processing. The staff had the following problem – they needed to get the invoices out of SAP for customers. So that was on the one side of the process, on the other was a customer portal where the customers needed access near real-time to those invoices. When they came to Dan Boyd, they had the invoices set up to be emailed out of SAP. So they had that process set up. The problem was how do they get them over into the customer portal?
The backup plan was to have temporary workers come on and do that manually, handle that open emails with the invoices attachments and get them loaded. Fortunately, the process was straightforward, whereas invoices were coming through in email attachments, and that was set up. Dan and his team automated the reading of the emails, the processing of the PDF attachments, and saved them into a shared driver where there was another process to load them into SAP. The volume was really large on a daily basis. Initially, it was estimated at approximately 2,500 emails per day with these invoices. The estimate was to take about 125 hours of people’s time to do that manually. That was automated. And in the end, it was average over 3000 a day. So the solution really came in, and the automation team was able to deliver that.
You can get extra information about RPA use cases at Merck by watching the complete video interview below, where Dan Boyd, Automation Leader at Merck, and Bill Engle, Sr. Automation Architect at CGI are talking with Lisa Martin & Dave Vellante at UiPath FORWARD IV in Las Vegas.
