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:

• Identify stakeholders for the RPA project
• ROI calculation approach