Magnitogorsk Iron and Steel Works is one of the world's largest steel producers and holds a leading position among Russian ferrous metallurgy enterprises.
The company has a special unit whose goal is to introduce innovations and improve the efficiency of business processes using the RPA robotic process automation technology. Today at MMK various processes of accounting, procurement, logistics and work with personnel are robotized.
One of the most difficult cases implemented by the company is the robotization of payment for scrap metal supplies. This multi-step complex process, involving several divisions within the MMK Group, is now successfully performed by twenty-five software robots.
The scrap metal market is represented by a large number of suppliers and manufacturers working on a prepaid basis due to the specifics of the business and low liquidity. The share of unscrupulous market participants and companies with low financial reliability, unfortunately, remains very high, which significantly increases the financial risks when working with scrap suppliers on terms of advance payment.
The main goal of the robotization of work with scrap suppliers was to expand the list of suppliers and the volume of raw materials purchased with minimal financial risks for MMK.
Main goals
To achieve this goal, it was important to organize control at all stages of delivery:
- ,
- ERP
Carrying out such control manually would require an increase in the number of workers involved in the process and would not eliminate the risk of manual errors. In this regard, it was decided to digitize these processes. As a result, we chose robotization, since it does not change existing business processes and does not require significant costs for changing the IT infrastructure.
With the help of the development of the robot, it was possible to close all business processes for working with contractors for the supply of scrap metal: payment, accounting for supplies, accounting, database maintenance. The total duration of the implementation of this RPA project was almost six months. The case was implemented by the forces of the RPA Competence and Innovation Center of LLC MMK-Informservice.
Implementation details
When implementing an RPA solution, we faced many different barriers, one of the most critical were information security issues. The robot performed most of its work in our internal accounting systems, ERP based on Oracle, BI, bank clients, etc. It was necessary to think over the details of integrating robots into the corporate ERP system and methods of administering its rights. The complexity was in the many different roles and entities in ERP - for each, it was necessary to write scripts for interacting with the robot.
When we began to add a robot in the form of a technological record to the system, we faced the fact that only a real person who is registered in our personnel management system can work through the interface. When the form began to process button clicks or data entry, the HR system gave a signal that no employee was attached to the process and did not allow further action.
We tied each robot to a worker responsible for the operation.
In the operations performed by the robot in the client bank, in agreement with the bank, the robot was prohibited from performing actions requiring approval to pay for transactions. He can only create a payment template, but he cannot agree on any actions.
We chose the ERP system as the basis for the robotization of the process, because the high level of automation in it made it possible to successfully integrate the RPA solution and organically integrate it into the processes of interaction with a large number of suppliers. Our specialists managed to quickly establish a connection with all counterparties, including banks. By the way, some of the bank's colleagues did not even understand that we had connected the robot and wondered how we were able to perform such large volumes of work without errors.
The robot does in a single process:
- receiving an invoice from suppliers
- checking the dispatch of wagons
The robot enters the transport system of Russian Railways, confirms that the car is "on wheels", and follows the entire business process up to the issuance of an advance payment to the counterparty.
- ERP
- ERP
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The robot goes through the entire business process of paying an advance to scrap suppliers. It is, in fact, a cross-functional solution that fully records supplies and pays for scrap metal. This is not just a script that distributes statements, it can go through all our business processes, replacing a huge number of people in different departments.
The whole process for the purchase of scrap metal includes more than 20 large sub-processes, each of which is launched at its own time and is a full-fledged business process. We divided the interface into two isolated environments - for RPA administration and separately for business users.
We collect all information from the RPA system on a dedicated interactive web portal based on Oracle Apex, where the data is presented in a convenient form. From here, all robots are centrally controlled. Employees who have access can give them commands and download the appropriate reports.
results
The implementation of RPA helped automate and increase the processing speed of 32 thousand business transactions and 20 thousand files, taking into account the control over the delivery, which reduced the labor costs of the scrap procurement process (now it employs only 4 people).
The solution increased the transparency of operations, providing the ability to monitor the status of the cargo in real time. Information on transactions with scrap metal suppliers has become systematic and centralized, it is collected and displayed in one place.
As a result, the robot helped expand the possibilities for purchasing raw materials. Before the implementation of the robot, the process had many participants; its scaling would lead to the need to hire new workers. With RPA, we can now handle orders of magnitude more advance payments without staff expansion, while managing the risk of no return.
Perspectives
We have scaled the robot to suppliers - residents of the Russian Federation. The RPA platform made it possible to do this quickly enough, despite the difference in business processes. The volume of documents that residents work with is greater and the load on the robot has increased 5 times, but at the same time we did not spend significant resources on scaling itself.
In the long-term plans, the visualization of analytics based on the data collected by the robot, we want to understand what quality scrap comes from each supplier. Identify contractors supplying trashy scrap and add them to the black lists of suppliers.
It is also planned to introduce several robots at MMK for factoring, for parsing and issuing payments for corporate and VIP cards, for roboticizing routine processes for working with an ERP system and many other robots.