Groceries Inc. is a leading retail grocery chain in Canada that offers a wide range of best quality products and services at a competitive price to its customers. There are 1200 company-owned stores Canada-wide, 500 franchises stores, 40 distribution centers in all provinces of Canada. Groceries Inc. employs 80,000 full-time and 10,000 part-time employees in Canada. On average, it lists 75,000 items in the store and 4500 vendors who supply them. Groceries Inc. also has its brand manufactured and provided to Groceries Inc. by 3rd party food processing vendors. Groceries inc. is a publicly listed company on the Toronto stock exchange. Its current share price is 85 CAD. Financial details are as follows: Revenue 30,000 Mil Gross Profit 9,000 Mil Cos of Revenue 18,000 Mil Net Income 1,200 Mil Sales Growth 10 % Net Income Growth 2.5 % Groceries Inc. is the market leader by holding a 25% market share. Its nearest competitor has a 23% market share. Groceries inc. faces tough competition from brick & mortar stores as well as online retailers. Groceries Inc. is known for its best customer service at an 80% customer satisfaction rating. Groceries Inc. has commenced its Digital Transformation journey. Its vision, policies, and strategies incorporate Digital Transformation. Groceries Inc. IT team has 750 employees. IT team is responsible for ALL aspects of IT, including application, infrastructure, integration, security maintenance and monitoring. IT team is also responsible for application development and enhancements. Currently, the IT team has six months of work backlog and cannot retain talent due to high workload, mundane tasks, lack of career growth. Groceries Inc. uses 35 different applications hosted in 2 data centers in Canada. Both data centers are 90% occupied and have no space to add additional infrastructure. Groceries Inc. IT Technologies are coming to the end of support, and there is no plan to upgrade or replace. Current technologies are unable to meet business and market needs. As a result, many business units in the organization have started their work around solutions by having many offline excel spreadsheets. In short, the IT Team and Technologies are becoming the bottleneck for business growth. Executive management expects Digital Transformation to solve Business and IT issues. RPA Application: Recently, Groceries Inc. surveyed all its vendors. The survey went to 5000 vendors ranging from small family-owned businesses to large corporations like Pepsi. 95% of vendors participated in the study, and the results were alarming. 90% of vendors were happy to do business with Groceries Inc., but 87% of vendors rated Groceries Inc. Invoice Payment capability as three out ten where rating 1 is 'Not Happy,' and rating 10 is 'Very Happy.' The Business Analyst team investigated the reasons for the low vendor rating. Fundamental analysis revealed the following facts: Number of vendors 5000 Number of invoices 10,000 per week Average invoice processing time 10 minutes per invoice Invoice processing staff 25 full-time employees (20 CAD per hour 8 hrs. shift) Invoice processing backlog 40,000 invoices Outstanding accounts payable 15.5 million Payment term 30 days Actual payment 65 days Payment accuracy 65% Payment dispute 10% Payment delay 85% Delay reason 1 data entry errors 60% Delay reason 2 backlog 30% Delay reason 3 vendor errors 10% Groceries Inc. leadership has taken this issue very seriously and committed to fixing it within six months. IT team is proposing an RPA application for the Invoice Processing process. Vendors will submit their invoices on Groceries inc.'s vendor portal (as they do today no change). RPA tool pick-up invoices from the document repository server. RPA tool will perform an Optical Characters Recognition (OCR). OCR will convert data into a structured format. Invoice data will then enter the SAP S4HANA application (ERP application). RPA tool will perform the 3-way match, i.e., receipt qty & amount, purchase order qty & amount, and invoice qty & amount are matching. In case of a 100% match, it will issue payment advice and process an electronic funds transfer. In case of any exceptions during the entire process, the RPA application will be sent the exceptions to an Account Payable team for further investigation and resolution. The anticipated exception rate could be up to 5%. IT team is very confident that it can develop and deploy this application in 4 months. The estimated cost is 450,000 CAD. The finance team would like to hire five more people in the accounts payable team; per hour per person costs 20 CAD. IT, legal, Purchasing prefers RPA application. The finance team is convinced that hiring more people will solve the issue. Working as a Lead Business Analyst, Digital Transformation Steering Committee has asked you to perform the following analysis and report back to the steering committee in two weeks. Steering Committee consists of senior leadership (VP and above) from IT and business. Steering Committee asks: Define the problem statement Identify stakeholders for the RPA project Pros and Cons of RPA vs. manual Invoice processing List the critical decisions points Potential IT and Business benefits "I need ROI calculation approach"