Manutan, a European supplier of products and services to businesses and communities and a specialist in BtoB e-commerce, is investing in Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for its finance department. The group wants to offer its employees automated solutions to avoid simple and repetitive tasks and thus allow them to focus on missions with higher added value.

In a company, some tasks are boring and require little intellectual skill, and employees who perform them lose precious time. To save money while using this time more productively, companies are increasingly turning to RPA. This technology, with its structured business logic and inputs, enables the automation of business processes. The company can then create software or bots that can capture and interpret applications to manipulate data, process a transaction, provide answers and communicate with other systems.

The Manutan Group, with the digital culture of its business model, has turned to RPA for its Finance department in the first instance.

Unlike other solutions, RPA is inexpensive and offers many advantages to the company: speed of execution, faster processing and constant availability. The robot performs the basic tasks while the employees handle the high value-added tasks. At Manutan’s Finance Department, many tasks can be performed by these virtual assistants: sending e-mails, periodic reporting or opening attachments to retrieve data and re-enter them in another application.

“We decided to integrate RPA into our Finance department to
to automate certain simple processes that are easy for a robot to perform,” says Evelyne
Evelyne Mercier, Finance Director – in charge of the Group’s financial
Group’s financial operations. “To do this, we have set up an enhanced support program for employees to enable them to
employees to enable them to become more competent in their new responsibilities.
responsibilities. We called on local managers to reassure the teams and reduce the stress associated with the changes.
We have called on local managers to reassure the teams and reduce the stress associated with change!

Manutan is concerned about the quality of life at work of its employees and believes that the RPA will help them to flourish in their daily lives. Their efficiency was also one of the goals: no longer having these tasks considered simple to accomplish, they are more mobilized on “front office” consulting. They will have to invest in new skills, particularly in handling customer requests for credit management. Digitisation of processes is a major strategic focus for Manutan, improving the quality of the customer and employee experience at various levels on an ongoing basis:

• processing of incoming customer data for credit management
• recovery of unpaid orders through the automation of reminder mailings.

The time saved thanks to RPA should therefore enable Manutan to reinvest in customer relations and thus optimise them.

Translated from Le groupe Manutan investit dans la Robotic Process Automatisation pour dynamiser son département Finances