With over 70 years’ experience, REHAU is a leading systems and service provider of polymer-based solutions for industries such as construction, automotive, and more. Headquartered in Germany, REHAU employs over 20,000 people across 170 locations in 54 countries (rehau.com).
In June, REHAU went live on their third wave of SAP Intelligent RPA adoption! It was a combination of intelligent technologies (RPA and Machine Learning) with OCR against the backdrop of SAP S/4HANA Cloud.
Simplifying Supplier Invoice Processes
The business need was supplier invoice identification and processing automation. Typically tedious, this ordeal requires business users to identify and extract supplier account details sent via e-mail to create supplier invoices in SAP S/4HANA. However, combined technologies simplify the process immensely:
- OCR recognizes and extracts all information from vendor invoices received from e-mails
- ML identifies and predicts the supplier G/L account details, such as company code, cost center, supplier, tax code, etc. based on the extracted information
- Intelligent RPA automates creation of supplier invoice documents in SAP S/4HANA
Fast Time-to-Value and the Road Ahead
REHAU Greater China first adopted SAP Intelligent RPA in December 2019. Two standard Best Practices bots – one in Finance and another in Manufacturing – were delivered in two weeks. By automating upload and processing of thousands of finance and manufacturing documents per month in SAP S/4HANA, SAP Intelligent RPA enabled business users to reduce days of manual work into minutes, thereby freeing up their time for more strategic tasks.
Not stopping there, REHAU’s second and third waves of adoption involved co-innovation – one sales report upload custom bot and the mentioned supplier invoice management use case to seamlessly integrate SAP intelligent technologies to automate business processes end-to-end.
Due to extenuating and changing circumstances of COVID-19, the co-innovation collaboration proved not to be deterred; SAP RPA Remote Delivery Center worked with REHAU to ensure that the go-live went smoothly in March.
There is still more to come, as REHAU continues the adoption journey on SAP Intelligent RPA and SAP S/4HANA!
