UFP Technologies automated training management process with bot

Background

Based in Newburyport, Massachusetts and founded in 1963, UFP Technologies, Inc. (Nasdaq: UFPT) is an innovative designer and custom manufacturer of components, subassemblies, products and packaging primarily for the medical market. UFP’s solutions are used in a variety of medical devices, wearables, and packaging.

Throughout its decades-long history, innovation has always had a prominent place in UFP Technologies’ mission and vision.

Challenges

Prior to the implementation of RPA, UFP Technologies’ training team had been performing numerous manual activities in Epicor ERP within their training course management process.

These included:

• Logging in to Epicor ERP.
• Scheduling classes.
• Adding employees to classes.
• Entering course results.
• Attaching the rosters to the courses
  

Bots In Action

The training management process was automated and now all the actions above are performed automatically by a bot. Now, the only task that is executed with human intervention is creating (or printing) the roster, scanning it after signatures and emailing it to a bot.

BENEFITS OF AUTOMATION:

• Time savings of 20 minutes per course.
• Enhanced training experience.
• Simplified administration.
  

Results

The ROI on the training management workflow is an approximate time savings of 20 minutes per course. As the company has hundreds of courses per year conducted throughout the enterprise, this impact is significant.

Plans

The UFP Technologies IT team now considers RPA as a critical member of the company’s IT stack.

Apart from training management automation, UFP Technologies uses bots to perform some existing and new labor tasks, from payroll systems to the ERP system. They also have a prototype workflow for accounts payable invoices and plan to dedicate more resources to maximizing the benefits of RPA in the near future.