Danone
Sector:
Supply Chain
Location:
Sydney, Australia
Challenge
Danone is a world-leading food company focusing on Dairy and Plant-Based Products, Waters, and Early Life Nutrition. In Oceania, Danone has offices in Sydney, Melbourne, and Auckland, supported by production facilities in Kiewa, Balclutha and Auckland.
Incepto has been working with Danone Oceania since 2019. Our relationship started with a pilot project to help Danone start its RPA journey. Since then, we have worked on other projects to automate some of Danone’s complex and challenging business processes.
Challenge
Danone started its RPA journey in 2019, and after the initial research and selection process, they selected UiPath as their preferred global RPA solution provider. Following that, Incepto was chosen as the local implementation partner because of UiPath partner status and our pragmatic and simplified approach that included not only the RPA build process but also covered education sessions with Danone’s key stakeholders.
It was agreed to start with a pilot project to assess the impact of RPA on Danone’s business, being a new technology for them and see how the teams could work together to automate highly complex manual tasks. Together with the team, Danone chose a rather time-consuming manual process that involved their supply chain and customer services team.
Danone’s challenge was that they had to fulfil an ongoing overdemand of orders from a specific customer segment (small to medium pharmacies). Those orders had to be matched with a limited product supply and delivered based on agreed allocations for each customer. This highly convoluted process involving people, systems (including a macro-based Excel solution) and data from different business units that had to be managed, reviewed, and manually updated with a focus on products delivered to Danone’s customers’ satisfaction.
Solution
Incepto successfully helped to develop, implement and test a robot (process automation) that was able to replace the manual process described above.
This resulted in a time saving of about 8hrs a week of manual, tedious work that was prone to mistakes, rework and sometimes customer dissatisfaction.
We achieved this outcome with an agile project approach in under eight weeks. As with many manual processes, some details were hidden in established ways of working rather than being readily documented and had to be identified to inform the automation process.
After testing, Danone was able to deploy the robot to production successfully. Based on this successful pilot project, Danone continued to work with us and has now automated another five business processes.
Outcome
“Incepto did an excellent job involving every stakeholder in the process while simultaneously challenging us to improve the existing processes as we implemented the solution.
The Incepto team has been part of our RPA journey from day one, and we have established a very close working relationship. They not only understand RPA and the complexities of automation but have been instrumental in involving our people in a technology that is new to many.
The people at Incepto spoke our language, and they included every team member in the design, implementation and testing of our RPA solutions. The best feedback any consultant can have is if the business stakeholders come back and appreciate their involvement and openly communicate the solution's benefits.
We would recommend Incepto to anyone requiring help with business process automation.”
Project Team
Larisa Pistorius
Kanad Mehta
Andrew Worboys
Jens Pistorius