Work

Corn

Robot Process Automation

Digital employee
reads data

Our corn seed production (MA-P) uses process automation to handle production data. Werner Kloiber explains how their "digital employees" proceed.

One member of our European Corn Seed Production Team participated in the International Development Program (IDP) of KWS in 2019/20. The topic of his group within the IDP was Robot Process Automation (RPA). This technology seemed interesting for us. We got in touch with Lucy, Xuan Lu, GTC-PET, who is coordinating the bot programming activities at KWS.

“We” – that’s the Production- and Quality Assurance Team in the Corn Seed Production Department (MA-P). Our department coordinates the seed production activities in 15 countries to supply all European corn seed markets. This generates huge amounts of data – quality results, certificates, etc. – transmitted via Excel, pdf, scan files, e-mails and even paper. One of our tasks is to set up processes to supply these figures and documents to SAP, databases and various reports. Without its data, results and certificates, seed cannot be used in the end.

The development of the bots intended to automate these processes started during the Coronavirus Lockdown in late spring 2020. We defined two use cases.

Use Case 1:
Fully automated from e-mail via Excel file to SAP

Producer organizations frequently send quality results as an Excel file attached to an e-mail.

One of us quickly checks the figures visually.

If all looks normal, the e-mail is moved by drag-and-drop to a shared mailbox.

The bot finds this mail and opens the attached Excel file.

Each row represents one seed lot with its lot number and its quality results.

The bot searches lot by lot in SAP.

He inputs the quality parameters with the option to lock or unlock the respective SAP seed lot.

Reporting is done inside MS Teams with an option to get an e-mail in case of error.

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Use Case 2:
Fully automated from e-mail via pdf file to Excel

A Certification Authority sends thousands of e-mails with one attached certificate in pdf format.

The bot opens each e-mail, loads the attached pdf file, extracts the relevant information into a big consolidated Excel file and saves each pdf file under a systematic filename.

The resulting file and working reports are stored inside MS Teams.

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Advantages of bots

“Digital Employee” is a frequently used synonym for a bot. And it is true: These bots can do these repetitive and often quite boring tasks like one of us, and even faster and better, if we can just define clear rules for each step involved. And they can do it across platforms like Outlook, Excel, Access, SAP, etc. With their help we can ease working peaks and save time for other activities and for further growth.

Like a human employee, the digital one must also be developed further. Currently Use Case 1 is going to be rolled-out to more producer organizations. We are curious whether this bot is also useful for other crops.

A new bot, Use Case 3, which is a synthesis of the other use cases, will be ready to start in October. RPA Technology is a powerful enrichment of our toolbox.

Contact:
Werner Kloiber
werner.kloiber@kws.com

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