OVOL Singapore Pte. Ltd. was established in July 2019 as a result of merger of JPP Far East Pte Ltd, the existing base for developing the paper wholesale business in Singapore, and Spicers Singapore Pte Ltd, a competitor in the same industry acquired in December 2018, with the aim that Japan Pulp and Paper Trading Co., Ltd. (OVOL Group), a trading company specializing in pulp and paper wholesaling, strengthen its sales base, expand its line of business, and improve customer service in Southeast Asia. OVOL Singapore owns warehouses and processing machines, and it is the largest paper and paperboard supplier in Singapore, capable of importing and selling paper and pulp, selling stickers and advertising materials, as well as cutting and processing papers. In 2020, OVOL Singapore introduced the AI-OCR "AIRead" and the RPA tool "WinActor" to improve the efficiency of data entry work for shipping documents. Since then, the company has been utilizing WinActor to further automate its business processes. We interviewed Mr. Shota Arai, CSO & CBO of OVOL Singapore, and Mr. Phang Sian Chin, CIO of OVOL Singapore, about the details and effects of the automation that the company is implementing on its business processes.
Building where the office of OVOL Singapore is located
OVOL Singapore performs various office tasks on a daily basis, such as receiving orders, purchasing, and billing. One of the most burdensome tasks is the input of shipping documents into the ERP system, for which AIRead and WinActor were introduced. For the implementation, Arise Innovation provided training remotely from Japan while NTT Advanced Technology's Singapore office provided on-site support. Mr. Phang said that after the training, he had some initial ideas that WinActor could be used for other tasks as well. For a start, Mr. Phang tried to create a scenario for his simple task, using a scenario of automatically inputting a CSV file of read shipping documents into ERP and English manuals as a reference. "I am able to automate the taskI have been doing with relative ease," said Mr. Phang. "Since WinActor itself is user-friendly with its GUI interfaces, I have no problem in creating a simple scenario."
Mr. Chin Phang Sian, CIO, OVOL Singapore
Mr. Phang has created WinActor scenarios for 22 main and sub-tasks so far (as of May 2022). For example, the company issues about 40 to 50 invoices every day.In past days, the customer service staff had to search the ERP for the relevant customer data one by one, output the invoice in PDF format, and send it as an e-mail attachment. The company has now succeeded in automating this invoicing process by simply preparing a CSV file containing the order numbers for which invoices are generated based on the order numbers. This has saved more than 20 hours of work per month and has also made it possible for a single person to check invoices. Since its implementation, more than 3,500 invoices have been processed automatically by WinActor. The company has also automated and improved the preparations for daily and monthly sales reports to managers. Previously, data was extracted manually from the ERP and processed in Excel, and printed reports were left on the desks of the respective managers. However, due to remote work arrangements caused by COVID-19 pandemic, it became difficult to use paper reports and the system was changed so that the processed data and digitized pdf reports could be sent by e-mail. The company has automated this pdf report preparation process using WinActor. As a result of converting reports from paper to digital, it is now easier to carry them around and has better access to the data from mobile devices. Since paper reports had been the norm in the past, the improvement might not have been possible without this opportunity.
WinActor window running a scenario
The company has also seen significant benefits on its annual inventory count. The inventory count is the process of checking whether the number of inventory items in the system matches the number of actual items in the warehouse. At OVOL Singapore, it takes about two days with all company employees participated. In this process, employees will count the actual items in the warehouse, reconciled the balances and a few re-counts to re-confirm the variances in the balances. WinActor has been used to automate the process of generating the re-count sheets to reconfirm the product balance from the system. The finance staff just need specify the product numbers they want to check into an Excel csv template and WinActor automatically generate the re-count sheets from the system based on the list. "The system has been very well received," said Mr. Arai. "Prior to this automation. the staff had to wait for a long time for finance staff to generate the re-count sheets from the system, but now time taken has been shortened, and the burden on employees has been reduced."
Mr. Shota Arai, CSO&CBO, OVOL Singapore
Since the introduction of WinActor was done while working remotely due to COVID-19 pandemic, Mr. Phang said that there were many difficulties because it was not possible to talk directly with employees. In order to introduce WinActor, Mr. Phang first explained the concept of RPA to the employees assigned to each task and then asked them if there were any tasks that could be automated. However, it was difficult to share his perspective on RPA to them only through web conferencing, and it was also difficult for Mr. Phang to understand the tasks that the employees wanted to automate only through web conferencing. Despite these circumstances, he was able to gradually expand the range of RPA use by selecting and implementing the simplest tasks possible.
Mr. Phang said that in addition to the provided English manuals for WinActor, he has looked at the sample WinActor scenarios and coding from the English website of NTT Advanced Technology Corporation to create scenarios. He has created a number of scenarios for Excel operations, and for the operation functions that were not included in the standard libraries in WinActor, he has added and developed his own libraries. "In the future, it would be great if the English version of its website will have the same translated information on sample scenarios and supplemental libraries as the Japanese version," said Mr. Phang.
Doll at the reception of OVOL Singapore All made of cardboard
Mr. Arai said that this implementation is currently the case in Singapore, and since the same ERP is also used in Malaysia, the company hopes to expand the range of its use in the future. "For other OVOL groups overseas (US, UK, Australia, New Zealand, India, and Hong Kong), although they have different systems, we believe that they will benefit from using WinActor since their business types are the same. We would like OVOL Singapore to be in a position to lead the overseas OVOL Group in DX and business efficiency," said Mr. Arai.
