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How is Maersk transforming Procurement and Supply Chain roles with Robotics?

Our robotics initiative is part of a Programme to automate operational procurement tasks. Our long term vision is to completely remove manual involvement when the business calls off our procurement contracts. In 2017 our target is to move all of the Maersk companies to above 60%/70% PO automation.

With Holger we are transforming the way we manage operational procurement tasks. The operational teams will have robot colleagues that can work 24 hours a day and execute rule based tasks with very high speed. This enables us to do more and increase our impact in the business.

With Holger we can as a procurement function take on more work, move up the value chain by shifting towards more advanced tasks, while reducing the running cost of our teams.

Who is Holger the Robot, and what does he do?

Holger is a virtual process automation robot who executes supply chain and data management tasks the same way a human does. Holger logs on to any system like a normal user and executes rule based tasks.

So far Holger is trained on 8 procurement tasks, from releasing purchase orders and creating transport bookings as well as following up on overdue orders. Holger also helps keeping our 8.5 million catalogue prices up-to-date by checking and validating big data sets.

We are teaching Holger new tasks every month and this year we aim to move 35,000 hours of work to the automation robots.

What are the benefits of identifying Robotics in the functional area of P2P?

With Holger we can re-think the way we structure our procurement work. With a robot as a colleague, operational procurement teams can hand over manual and time consuming operational tasks to the robot and move up the value chain.

In addition, robots like Holger can outperform humans in some of the data heavy tasks and improve the speed and quality of our delivery. We have a catalogue data validation tasks that previously took 3 hours to manage and because of the manual nature of the task it was prone for errors. Holger now manages the same task in only 9 minutes and executes it to perfection every time.

What would you like to achieve by attending the 11th Edition P2P and Robotic Process Automation Strategy Workshop?

I would like to understand how leading companies in Europe are finding their feet in the digital transformation and learn more about how they leverage robotics automation.

I hope to be inspired and hopefully also find some interesting procurement colleagues who have worked on some of the transitions we are going through, particularly related to addressing purchase order and invoice automation.