Alpine's Hungarian subsidiary has been continuously manufacturing complete infotainment and navigation systems for European car manufacturers for nearly 20 years. It is a direct supplier to Audi, BMW, Volkswagen, and Ford, among others. The company employs over 1,000 people and its revenue reaches HUF 150 billion. We began our collaboration in 2020, and since then multiple software robots have been deployed. A key aspect of the project is building internal competencies within the company, which includes training operators and developers.
During the manufacturing process, orders are created in SAP for certain products, which are transferred to the production system for manufacturing. After this, a feedback loop occurs at the completion reporting point. Here, finished and semi-finished products that are not taken into stock must be individually reverse-posted across multiple (8) SAP transactions based on a complex set of rules. Managing this process on a daily basis consumed the majority of the working time of several accounting staff members.
The production system generates an automatic completion report every hour, which the software robot processes and continuously performs the postings in the appropriate SAP transactions based on more than 20 decision points. During execution, the robot verifies that the given operations were performed correctly and that the result of each run is appropriate. It selects component quantities using an optimization model to achieve the most suitable execution and accounting result.
With the introduction of RPA, the software robot can replace the daily work of 3 accountants, who only need to deal with problematic cases (5-10%), thus freeing up significant resources for higher value-added accounting tasks.
For the software robot development, we used Power Automate Desktop (WinAutomation), Python scripts, VBScripts, and an MSSQL database.
