Process Automation Example

Case Study:
A clothes manufacturing company has a number of agents who sell garments.  At the end of every month unsold clothes has to be balanced against sales in order to calculate the agent commissions.

The sales and stock balances are recorded in Pastel (Accounting Software).  The manufacturing company performs additional calculations in MS Excel before the each agent receives a stock balance and commission printout.

The Process:
  • Manually screen the Pastel Ledger to obtain relevant figures.
  • Re-enter the data into the MS Excel spreadsheet for processing.
  • Repeat the process for every agent.

The nature of the ledger is such that their was no direct relationship between data in Pastel and the desired position of data in Excel.

Optimisation:
P3Projects optimised the process and transferred the information electronically.  The data is now extracted, sorted, processed and inserted for every agent without any user input apart from the initial clicking of the "Create Register" button.

Advantages and Benefits:
P3Projects process improvement resulted in the following direct benefits and advantages:
  • Processing time was reduced from 6 to 8 hours to under 10 minutes.
  • The process is 100% repeatable without risk of data entry mistakes and related human errors.
  • The original process is preserved but without manual interaction.
  • The original MS Excel spreadsheet is preserved.
  • Full MS Excel functionality is retained by all users.
  • Very little training is required for new staff to run background processes.

Schematic Comparison:


Creatively Managing the Engineering of Information