Customer Story:

Worthington Industries Optimizes Oracle EBS Supply Chain Using RPA

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Company

Worthington Industries is a leading industrial manufacturing company delivering innovative solutions to customers that span many industries including transportation, construction, industrial, agriculture, retail and energy. Worthington is North America's premier value-added steal processor and producer of laser welded products; and a leading global supplier of pressure cylinders and accessories for applications such as fuel storage, water systems, outdoor living, tools and celebrations. Worthington's WAVE joint venture with Armstrong is the North American leader in innovative ceiling solutions. Headquartered in Columbus, Ohio, Worthington operates 51 facilities in 15 states and 6 countries, sells into over 90 countries and employs approximately 7,500 employees.

"We estimate AuraPlayer saves us 100 Hours per new process development. The accuracy and speed of AuraPlayer dramatically extend the business value of our RPA solution"

Sudhakar PochirajuAPPLICATION DEVELOPMENT MANAGER

Business Need

UI Changes

Any UI change in the Oracle EBS system caused failures in the automation. As most RPA solutions rely solely on screen-scraping, this makes them highly dependent on the physical position of items on the screen, which often change during routine maintenance.

Dynamic Fields & Customization

The display of Forms’ fields often change based on user roles and permissions. Off-the-Shelf RPA solutions cannot accommodate this dynamic functionality. Tabbed canvas also brought complexity requiring custom code requirements. Due to inconsistencies and unhandled exceptions, much time was spent on trying to fix the automation process by adding custom programming, which led to complex, unstable and cumbersome bots

Challenge

Worthington began their automation journey to increase efficiency and reduce labor costs by eliminating manual and repetitive tasks. After thorough research, a top tier RPA solution was chosen. Worthington was able to implement automations successfully for many types of applications. However, when it came to creating an Oracle EBS automation process, Worthington faced many EBS application specific challenges. Although, major RPA solutions support Oracle EBS, they do not account for the many complexities of this enterprise solution.

One of the challenge was that the display of Forms’ fields often change based on user roles and permissions. Off-the-Shelf RPA solutions cannot accommodate this dynamic functionality. Tabbed canvas also brought complexity requiring custom code requirements. Due to inconsistencies and unhandled exceptions, much time was spent on trying to fix the automation process by adding custom programming, which led to complex, unstable and cumbersome bots

Solution

Worthington originally partnered with AuraPlayer, a tool to mobilize and automate Oracle EBS Applications, to create Oracle mobile applications that digitally transformed their warehouse ship confirmation process. Having seen AuraPlayer’s ability to automate Oracle EBS with ease, Worthington was able to further expand their partnership and leverage AuraPlayer as their Oracle focused RPA solution. Together with AuraPlayer, Worthington was able to find a solution that resolved these issues.

AuraPlayer worked closely with Worthington to seamlessly automate the EBS application and then integrate it into their existing RPA deployment tool. Providing complete EBS data integrity via Web Services.

Client Benefits

AuraPlayer’s Oracle EBS RPA solution checked all the boxes of the missing Oracle RPA functionality, so Worthington decided to leverage the strength of both tools. AuraPlayer's Oracle EBS RPA functionality plugged into their existing automation framework via a REST service that delivers a smooth, robust and performant Oracle EBS RPA solution. All AuraPlayer automations are easily exposed via web services while all in/out parameters and context are easily synchronized. Worthington received immediate business value from successfully automating Oracle EBS to their existing RPA deployment with AuraPlayer. Adding AuraPlayer resulted in a reduction in development hours, cost and inefficiencies. Worthington created several applications with this impressive collaboration, and were able to achieve an ROI from the first day the automation was launched. Here are some examples of AuraPlayer’s achieved success: Item Creation The new solution eliminates hundreds of hours by accurately and automatically creating and validating more than 300 new items every month. Item entry is done by simply emailing item details to the RPA bot, while AuraPlayer automates the item entry into the Oracle EBS back-end. Within seconds, AuraPlayer adds the new items to the system, saving more than 15 minutes of data entry per item. The AuraPlayer synergy has saved Worthington over 75 manual hours of data entry per month. Receipt Audits Every time a new receipt is created it must also be validated, and the client usually generates more than 50 receipts per day. The new RPA solution automatically checks the receipt against a database of known receipts, thus eliminating dozens of hours spent in manual validation. Sales Order Creation Worthington can now automatically log sales orders into the back-office system, speeding up data entry and reducing communication breakdowns. Their new sales orders are sent via email with a PDF, where the RPA bot takes the PDF, analyzes it and extracts the text using an OCR tool. Then, it activates the AuraPlayer bot which automatically adds the new sales order information into the Oracle EBS Sales application.

Want to try it for yourself?

AuraPlayer is a unique, patented technology that automatically generates mobile applications and automations from existing back-office desktop applications, allowing customers to begin their digital transformations while leveraging existing investments. AuraPlayer eliminates the need for system integrators or rigid packaged solutions. The technology brings a new level of agility to legacy systems, with their low-risk, flexible, affordable and automated solutions without redevelopment.