Case Study: Blueprinting Workshop & Hyperautomation

Business Process Mapping Business Strategy Alignment

Posted on 04/24/24 by Jodi Reimer

An American building materials manufacturer is currently focused on three key strategic drivers: increasing margin, boosting revenue, and enhancing operational excellence. The team has seen past success with automating and is now trying to grow in the area. They are actively pursuing innovation and automation in their business processes as they prepare for an SAP S/4HANA implementation in 2026 or 2027. The team aims to ensure that any investments made align with their business strategy and continue to provide value both during and after the S/4 implementation. Finally, prioritizing automations with immediate ROI and avoiding investments in hyperautomation initiatives that may become obsolete post go-live are high focus points.

Key Challenges

The American manufacturer team currently manages logistics updates, route adjustments, and carrier pricing changes manually in SAP. This process continually leads to inefficiencies and potential errors. Sales orders encounter delays caused by missing ship-to addresses and multiple order blocks, necessitating manual intervention for resolution. Additionally, the customer experience team spends time daily pulling individualized reports, indicating a need for automated report delivery to streamline operations.

Discussions around RPA, workflows, and Precisely scripts indicate a desire to automate these processes effectively. Furthermore, mass material creation, vendor data discrepancies, and rebate program adjustments are areas where automation could significantly improve efficiency and accuracy. By continuing to focus on hyperautomation initiatives, the goal is to have a more streamlined and effective operational model. Some additional challenges key stakeholders encounter are:

Pulling daily reports manually slows down the team’s ability to make critical decisions quickly

Order fulfillment delays not only reduce customer satisfaction but also impede efforts to capture more market share

Monitoring and tracking data manually in Excel spreadsheets leads to increased workload and potential inaccuracies

Results

Clear Process Solutions collaborated with the American manufacturer to conduct a 2-day blueprinting workshop. During the workshop, the CPS team strategized with stakeholders and subject matter experts across various business groups to understand their challenges. This effort to identify and prioritize each department’s key strategic hyperautomation initiatives and challenges will guide the shared services IT department to best serve the organization. This crucial relationship between IT and business partners is what will make the blueprint come to life and be impactful.

The workshop resulted in identifying automation opportunities and next steps towards implementation based on impact to the business, effort necessary and alignment to strategic drivers. This included joint alignment between CPS and the client on categorizing each initiative into 4 segments: do now, do next, do later, and revisit. Here is an example:

The first group of recommended critical automations the organization will be focusing on are:

Developing a bot to automatically modify routes and update carrier pricing in SAP.
Implementing a solution that proactively identifies and resolves missing ship-to addresses during sales order booking.
Creating an automated process to monitor and release sales order blocks streamlining the order fulfillment process.
Automating the generation and delivery of individualized reports to the customer experience team’s emails.
Designing a workflow or bot to automate the execution of standalone scripts for mass material creation, reducing manual effort.

Additionally, the discussions highlighted the need for data gathering and enhanced visibility for quicker decision-making across sales and logistics activities. A future workshop is on the horizon and will explore AI/ML options, delve into processes and data intricacies, and uncover potential improvements and data insights.

Metrics

25+

automation initiatives identified and prioritized

10+

cross-functional business groups included in the roadmap

hyperautomation blueprint created

Are you interested in learning more about blueprinting workshops? Schedule a complimentary 90-minute consultation with us. During this session, we’ll discuss where you are in your hyperautomation journey and collaboratively design a framework for the workshop, outlining the expected deliverables.