Hindalco Industries Limited is the metals flagship company of the Aditya Birla Group. With a consolidated turnover of US$18.7 billion, Hindalco is an industry leader in aluminium and copper. In India, the company’s aluminium units across the country encompass the gamut of operations from bauxite mining, alumina refining, coal mining, captive power plants, and aluminium smelting to downstream rolling, extrusions, and foils. Today, Hindalco ranks among the global aluminium majors as an integrated producer, with a footprint in 9 countries outside India. Hindalco customers include key industry sectors like Building & Construction, Automotive, Packaging, Electrical, Consumer durables, Refractories, and Ceramics who purchase copper and aluminium items. Headquartered at Mumbai, Maharashtra, India. The company has annual sales of US$15 billion and employs around 20,000 people. It is listed in the Forbes Global 2000 at 895th rank.

Avaali Solutions (www.avaali.com) is a company that enables Enterprises to drive and deliver business results by leveraging digital technologies. Avaali has strengths in providing Enterprise Information Management (EIM), Enterprise Mobility and Internet of Things (IoT) solutions. Avaali’s advisory, consulting and implementation services has enabled enterprises to transform their business processes and engage better with their stakeholders including customers, employees, partners, vendors and shareholders.

Process Overview: Bank Reconcililation

The manual bank reconciliation process was time consuming and prone to human errors at Hindalco.

• Varied and inconsistent format of bank statements, not meant to be accommodated directly to the book of accounts in Oracle
• All the payments made, and payments received were recorded in the Bank Statement.
• Book of accounts maintained in Oracle by Hindalco to match the transactions recorded in the Bank Statement.
• The transactions recorded in the bank statement were categorized as Block Payment, Individual Payment, Sweep-In, Sweep-Out transactions among others.
• Basis this segmentation the reconciliation rules between the Bank statement and Book of accounts maintained in Oracle, varies.
• In each event, the process team reconciles the Bank Statement with the transactions recorded in Book of accounts maintained in Oracle, and the NEFT report as a supporting document
• Consolidated transactions of a particular type, in the bank statement were to be reconciled against the records in the Book of accounts & NEFT report

Manual reconciliation not only resulted in delay but also influencedless visibility on fund flow and financial control. There was a need timely accounting process for all recordings and transactions adhering to regulations.

Process Overview: Performa Invoice Creation

• With 300+ customers, sending high number of PO’s daily for which invoice creation was time consuming, involved a lot of manual activity for approvals and validation
• Customers are categorized under export and domestic segments
• Hindalco customers raised a formal PDF-based purchase order or non-PO based material order via email
• For the received purchase order/material order (Export/Domestic), a Performa Invoice is created based on the PAR value validation for the requested material(s).
• Once the PI is created, it is mailed to the customer to take the material requisition process further to the next succeeding steps

Process Overview: Shipping Invoice Creation

There was need to automatically process the sales orders created, validating allocation for shipment, Lot allocation, delivery, shipment confirmation and generate invoice for shipping

• Multiple purchase orders were created and processed daily.
• Purchase order creation initiated the dedicated sales and distribution process within Hindalco beginning from Sales Order creation, followed by Lot allocation and release.
• Shipping Confirmation/Invoicing is confirmed by Hindalco for the concerned purchase order raised by the customer.

• Implementation of UiPath Attended bots for automation
• Timely notification to business users to monitor activities, exceptions, and triggers
• Automation of processes between disparate business systems, which were continuous and consistent
• Faster execution, error handling mechanisms with multiple systems defining a seamless approach for processing
• Automation of Voluminous transactions
• Reconciling up to 35k line items in bank reconciliation,
• Automated Performa invoice creation for every customer query
• Automated Shipment Invoice creation, Lot allocation & Delivery order creation in a proper sequence, enabling seamless integration

• For a 35000+ line-item reconciliation at one bank, the bot completed the action significantly faster than the existing manual operations.
• RPA helped in curtailing costs by reducing the errors in the reconciliation. Additionally, it also saved processing and audit costs.
• Performa invoice creation process is now immediate and concludes with generating a PDF document, ready to be shared with the customer
• Complete end to end automation of shipment process, with error handling and exception notification, right from allocation to shipment invoicing
• This automation resulted in effort savings of multiple full-time employees, error free and reduced dependency on human intervention.
• Improved process accuracy as the software bot performed all actions based on designated business rules without resulting in any processing errors.
• The solution also records activity logs, which can be audited to evaluate all transactions being performed by the bot. This helped them adhere to internal as well as external audits.

Partnering with Avaali to Implement a Solution Efficiently and well within the time.

Hindalco chose to partner with Avaali for the implementation of the UiPath RPA solution. Avaali conducted detailed workshops with key stakeholders from Hindalco to understand the current system and business processes, their pain points, requirements, and created a roadmap for implementation, transition and change management. The workshops also covered all the aspects of the proposed solution in detail to help Hindalco understand how they could leverage RPA to automate their multiple business processes. The Avaali team created a detailed blueprint document outlining the implementation scope.