To maintain its leading position in a fast-changing, sales-driven industry, Borusan Cat has embarked on a Digital Transformation. As a first step on this journey, the company engaged business partner, NovaCore, to deploy Kofax RPA — improving efficiencies, uncovering new opportunities and sharpening Borusan Cat’s competitive edge. Tayfun Özçay, CIO at Borusan Cat, tells us more.
Challenge
Emerging technologies such as Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and automation are set to disrupt practically every industry. To turn disruption from a threat into an opportunity, future-facing enterprises like Borusan Cat are targeting Digital Transformation.
Tayfun Özçay, CIO at Borusan Cat, said: “We see that our industry will change fundamentally in the years to come. To ensure that we can compete effectively in tomorrow’s automated economy, it’s vital for us to start laying the foundations for more efficient business processes today.”
After a thorough evaluation of its current operating model, Borusan Cat identified a key challenge standing in the way of its Digital Transformation objectives.
“Like many leading enterprises in our space, we rely on SAP solutions to manage our operations from end-to-end,” said Özçay. “We knew that fast access to accurate data would be a key enabler of our target operating model, which led us to enhance our environment with the SAP HANA in-memory data platform. Although the new solution helped us cut our SAP application response times substantially, many of our processes still depended heavily on time-consuming manual work.”
As a dealer of Caterpillar products, Borusan Cat’s sales organisation must always be alert to potential opportunities, particularly equipment tenders from construction, mining and shipping companies. Each morning, the company’s sales team spent the first hour of their day researching opportunities online and adding leads to the customer relationship management (CRM) system. In addition to consuming valuable time that could otherwise be spent meeting with prospects, this manual approach increased the risk of valuable opportunities going unnoticed.
Repetitive, human-driven processes were also a significant drain on productivity in the company’s finance function. At the end of every month, Borusan Cat’s finance team had to spend days manually reconciling client payments with invoices — reducing employee satisfaction and increasing the risk of attrition.
“We knew that replacing our manual processes with automated workflows would be vital to achieve our Digital Transformation goals. We targeted an enterprise-class automation platform to help us take the first step on that journey,” said Özçay.
Solution
To empower its people to spend less time on tedious, repetitive work and more time on value-added activities, Borusan Cat selected Kofax RPA — an industry-leading Robotic Process Automation platform.
“We were already using Kofax document capture solutions to scan, transform and load data from paper invoices into our ERP system automatically, so we were confident that Kofax could deliver the capabilities we were looking for around Robotic Process Automation,” said Özçay.
As a first step, Borusan Cat engaged NovaCore to deliver a proof-of-concept (POC) for the Kofax RPA solution. The initial goal was to demonstrate the value of automation to the board and secure funding to extend automation across the business.
“Working together with NovaCore, we created two software robots to help us fully automate the lead-gathering process for our sales team,” said Özçay. “Each morning, one of the robots searches the web for potential opportunities, such as tenders and requests for proposals. The second robot then populates this data into our CRM system and creates an individual lead for each prospect for our sales team to review.
“When we showed the business what we’d achieved in the POC, they were blown away. For the first time, all 20 members of our sales team could start engaging with prospects as soon as the working day began. In fact, the Kofax RPA robots were so efficient at identifying sales leads that the solution delivered a return on investment before the POC had even finished.
“Our consultants also had experience with some RPA solutions from other well-known vendors. They unanimously agreed that without Kofax RPA, it would have been practically impossible to achieve the results we did in such a short period of time.”
Building on the success of its robots for the sales team, Borusan Cat formed a dedicated Robotic Process Automation team to identify and deploy additional automation use cases across the enterprise.
“Software robots are now supporting many different areas of our business, including our invoice reconciliation process,” said Özçay. “We are also using the solution to help us automatically reorder spare parts and equipment in our maintenance division, which helps us ensure that we always have the materials on hand to deliver responsive aftersales support to our clients across the region. We have 17 robots specifically used for our operations in Georgia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Kyrgyzstan and Russia.”
Result
By augmenting its business systems with Kofax RPA, Borusan Cat is successfully driving ahead with its Digital Transformation strategy.
“Software robots are already delivering significant value to the business,” said Özçay. “When we first deployed Kofax RPA to automate our invoice reconciliation process, we found that we could claim tax back from the government far faster — improving our cash flow.
“What’s more, by cutting the process from days of tedious work to just minutes, we saw a 10-point increase in employee engagement in our finance team within a year. By empowering our people to spend more of their time on rewarding, creative work, we’re helping to add value to the business and retain our talent. The positive results aren’t limited to our finance team; today we have 120 robots in total automating 60 processes and saving 3,050 man-days for every year. Invoice reconciliation robots are saving 21 man-days in total per month in all companies.”
Borusan Cat continues to enhance its digital workflows and the company is using AI technology to deliver even higher levels of accuracy and efficiency.
“The Kofax RPA robots that drive our reconciliation process primarily use the customer’s tax number to match payments to invoices, but sometimes this key piece of information is missing,” said Özçay. “To maintain a high level of straight-through processing, we’ve developed an AI solution that can help the Kofax robots match a payment with an invoice using other information, such as the customer’s address.
“AI and automation are also now playing an important role in our equipment maintenance and servicing business. Using an AI-powered solution that we developed in-house, we can now predict when components on our clients’ equipment are approaching end of life — enabling us to perform proactive maintenance before the parts fail. Our Kofax solution is helping us to automatically create these maintenance activities in our CRM platform, which plays a key role in scheduling the work in a timely manner.”
By working with NovaCore to shape automated business processes, Borusan Cat has shifted employee perceptions of automation. Rather than fearing the disruptive potential of software robots, employees are embracing the benefits of automation — and there are now more than 30 active requests for new Kofax RPA robots from the business.
“As software robots become ever more tightly woven into our business processes, we see that governance will become an increasingly important consideration,” said Özçay. “Going forward, we plan to develop a group-wide governance framework to help ensure robots that drive mission-critical processes are maintained and developed according to strict controls and industry best practices.
“Digitising and automating a process are both prerequisites to optimising a process — and thanks to our work with NovaCore and Kofax RPA, we are now well on the way to realising our Digital Transformation goals.”
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