Cyclone robots unlock automation for Shanghai Thinkstart to bring an all-round efficiency boost in department management

Under the backdrop of New Infrastructure and Made in China 2025, building digital, interconnected, and intelligent manufacturing with information and manufacturing technologies deeply integrated has become mainstream. With opportunities in this new era, Shanghai Thinkstart Automation Technology Co., Ltd. (i.e. Thinkstart), with the new development philosophy in mind, has partnered with Cyclone Robotics to realize the all-around automation transformation across departments to build its own new infrastructure powered by technological innovation and interconnected information base.

Business pain points

Thinkstart mainly operates as the agent to the manufacturing enterprises. It has a heavy workload on procurement and financial businesses with limited hands. The company stays far away from the urban area, so it takes very long for employees to commute, which may compromise their enthusiasm for work.

Invoicing: Invoicing work is heavy and tedious. Employees must repeat certain operations for a long time, which is likely to cause human errors and overall delay. Though simple, such work cannot provide more opportunities for employees to learn more business knowledge. With a lower salary, this position often sees a higher turnover in the company.

PO entry: Employees may take quite a lot of time and energy for entering the massive amount of data, so are more likely to make this or that mistake. When customers send the POs to sales, the sales assistant needs to enter the data into the system and create the orders. Being repetitive, cumbersome, and less valuable, this work usually sees a high turnover in the company.

Introducing Cyclone RPA

Cyclone RPA intelligent automation platform can help the finance and procurement personnel with simple and easy-to-use development and operation processes, and reliable robots and cross-platform services, to plan and handle the two kinds of repetitive tasks, thus realizing the business process automation, solving the pain points in the daily work, and improving the business efficiency and quality in the departments.

Taking invoicing as an example, Cyclone RPA has created robots exclusively for every branch in 7 cities, which can run independently to issue 400 invoices on average each month without the need for a central robot.

Generally, to print a voice, the information should be first entered; and now, the staff can issue the invoice at a fixed time every day simply with one click. Modules like pop-up reminders and invoicing exceptions are available in UI to help diagnose business problems in real-time, monitor and raise alerts, in order to reduce business risks. With the simple process, the financial staff can learn and work on it at a lower cost without coding, and the operation and maintenance costs are also reduced.

As for the order entry workflow, Cyclone RPA can work around the clock every day all year round by simply connecting to Thinkstart 's native PDF and Excel orders, extracting fields for generating order details, then entering them into the ERP system.. Such a process is designed to ensure the data accuracy in orders and enable the procurement personnel to shift their focus from low-value repetitive work to high-value decision analysis around procurement management, thus improving cost efficiency, and creating more value to the businesses.

Cyclone RPA can read and write data across systems, helping Thinkstart quickly and accurately handle the requests for voicing and PO entry, and visualize the whole process. What matters most is to enable the financial staff to focus on data analysis, business forecasting, decision making, instead of the basic accounting work, thus enhancing employees' personal value.