The Automation Committee advises on all process automation.
Programmable solutions
Save time, free up capacities
Process automation eliminates manual activities in certain work steps. That lets our employees focus on the essentials and helps KWS become more and more digitized.
What might at first sound a little cumbersome is actually a great boon in everyday working life: Instead of manually transferring hundreds of items of data from an Excel list to SAP, a bot can lend a helping hand, for example. The programmed digital aid automatically loads the data into another platform and only reports back if it is missing certain details.
Anyone considering whether automation would make sense in their day-to-day work can get in touch with the Automation Committee for advice and assessments. “Our objective with this committee is to offer assistance in evaluating whether automation is expedient and how it might be implemented,” explains René Westphal, Lead of Process Excellence and Digital Solutions. “I always give the following advice: Standardize, digitize and then automate processes – if there are 10 different variants for how a process is handled, automating it will be pretty difficult.”
„We offer assistance.“
René Westphal
Preliminary discussion and final assessment
If an employee or department would like support from the team, they can open a ticket. After a preliminary discussion, René Westphal, Matthias Helmke and developers will then meet with the applicant. “We want to keep the process quick and transparent,” states René Westphal. “At the end, we submit an assessment and then the department itself decides whether or how to go ahead with implementation. But we can help in this way with problems right from the outset, answer questions and provide support with our expertise.”
The advantage? The automated processes save a lot of time and thus free up employees’ capacities. They are also less prone to errors – because minor mistakes that occur because staff are tired or distracted while doing repetitive tasks are ruled out.
“A recurrent challenge for the Global Transaction Center’s Finance Department was the processing of missing account statements. The problems were usually discovered as part of work on the monthly and quarterly financial statements, which resulted in a lot of time-consuming manual work, rectification and a high risk of false negatives due to the large number of accounts,” says Sabine Brüggemann, Lead of Financial Management at the Global Transaction Center. “Thanks to a bot that notifies us when an account statement is missing, our team can proactively tackle problems and minimize manual work.” |
If you have any more questions, please contact:
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Hackathon
Our colleagues from the Process Excellence Team and Global IT are organizing their next hackathon in April – a coding event that brings together computer programmers and other interested parties to develop a new software program or optimize a process in a short space of time. At the hackathon in September, the teams were able to automate four processes from the world of KWS in just two days! |
© KWS SAAT SE & Co. KGaA 2025
