For the food trade, up-to-date inventory management is indispensable. Manual, error-prone process steps or the use of legacy mainframe systems can disrupt processes. A large German food trading company therefore relies on Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in inventory management. The result: Exceeded expectations and more than 90 percent faster process management.
Food spoils quickly. If products are not in stock, customers buy elsewhere. For these reasons, the food retailer wants to optimize a business-critical storage process. The prerequisite: the product inventory and new store orders must be correctly recorded in the central merchandise management system at the head office on fixed dates.
Challenges: Decentralization & Mainframe
However, each market works with its own SAP system. The central merchandise management system at the head office also runs on a mainframe application. Although this application is highly stable, it is technologically outdated and does not offer any interfaces for data exchange with SAP systems. As a result, several employees are assigned to manual data transfer to the mainframe system on a monthly basis. A lengthy, monotonous and above all error-prone process. The consequences:- Unsatisfied customers and loss in turnover. Because of outdated and incorrect inventory management, products are not available in the markets.
- No transparency for management, logistics & reporting. For reporting and forward-looking logistics and financial planning, management needs a constantly up-to-date view of the correct inventory.

Inventory management with RPA: better, faster, up-to-date

Due to the complex, manual process, the company opted for automation with the RPA solution XceleratorOne (X1) from Servicetrace. The reading of inventory data from the decentralized SAP systems as well as data checking and transfer to the central merchandise management system are now completely automated. The interface is an Excel file in which the data from the SAP systems is consolidated. Then the automatic input and further processing into the mainframe application begins.
The result: The complete automation process for data transmission now only takes one and a half hours instead of several working days. At the same time, data quality and process stability have increased to almost 100%. This leads to an always up-to-date and transparent inventory management, which serves as an important basis for decision-making for the management.
A further side effect: The employees are relieved of manual work. This gives them three more working days per month for value-adding tasks.