Cutting order processing time and improving accuracy for a pharma company

Challenge

The client provides medical equipment to a hospital chain in Europe. Orders are made to the client’s manufacturing unit through a portal. The buyer provides details such as product name, quantity, shipment destination, etc. The data comes to the client as a CSV file on a daily basis. A human resource verifies the orders and customer details in SAP. If all the order details match the records in SAP, an output is created with the total order amount and saved in three different locations. This information is used to create purchase orders by the client’s e-procurement system.

Each order assessment took 30 to 45 minutes of manual effort. Across orders, the process required thousands of rows of information to be managed; it was person dependent, time-consuming, error-prone, and could not be easily scaled. The client needed to automate this process to improve the time taken to process orders.

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Solution

The Marlabs team used automation (RPA) to process incoming orders. A bot now connects with SAP to match the client details provided in the CSV file. It then prepares an output file and saves it to three locations. The client’s e-procurement system uses these files to create a purchase order.

Results

By implementing workflow automation and integrating disparate systems, the pharmaceutical company achieved a 40% reduction in order processing time. This improvement not only accelerated fulfillment but also enhanced overall operational efficiency.

Additionally, the solution significantly improved data accuracy and visibility across teams, minimizing errors and enabling faster, more informed decision-making. These enhancements led to better customer service and positioned the company for continued growth and agility in a highly regulated market.

Impact

The automation effectively addressed several key areas to cut manual effort while improving process quality, consistency, and efficiency. The other benefits included:

• Improved data quality
• Lowered cost of external vendors by shortening the review process and increasing the quality of registration postings
• Improved security in handling protocol documents that have confidential clinical trial information through the elimination of human intervention
• 24/7 bot availability
• 100% reduction in manual effort
• 100% reduction in data entry errors
• 89% reduction in processing time