For companies hoping to become more effective and agile, intelligent automation (IA) is often considered for its potential to improve efficiency by leveraging smarter, AI-assisted technologies that augment humans and human-based labor.

But is it delivering on its promise of greater productivity and operational efficiency?

To date, companies have had mixed results. One reason is that it’s not just about using intelligent tools. It’s also about using them intelligently: starting with a clear understanding of business goals and then developing human-centric applications collaboratively and iteratively (you can learn more about this in our webinar Re-examining Intelligent Automation).

To show you how you can set up your business process automation initiatives for success, in this blog post, I’ll share three ways Redington Gulf is successfully leveraging AI technologies for intelligent automation.

Intelligent Automation Case Study: Redington Gulf

Redington Gulf provides distribution solutions for 245 international brands in 37 markets with a network of more than 34,000 channel partners. Using intelligent automation technologies together with the OutSystems low-code platform, they’re able to improve productivity and end-to-end customer experiences by reducing repetitive tasks and enabling employees to focus on work that delivers greater value for the company.

Here’s how Redington is using these technologies intelligently to drive their process automation objectives.

A/R Payment Processing

As a regional distributor, Redington receives bank transfers from thousands of partners daily. Before intelligent automation, the company used manual workflows to process them, consuming a lot of time and resources. They desired faster transaction processing, easier collaboration, and better integration with its ERP systems to shorten turnaround times and free up resources.

To achieve that, Redington used the OutSystems platform to build an application with an easy-to-use UX that captures information and approvals en route to the company’s ERP system, speeding the process and eliminating duplicate data entry. This resulted in streamlined processes, reduced risk, and greater transactions and workflows transparency that reduced turnaround time by 10x.

Vendor Rebate Tracking

Redington’s vendor rebate program is key to the organization’s profitability, so the company needed faster and more accurate data capture, greater visibility into transactions, and integration into their ERP and document management systems.

Using OutSystems, Redington was able to create an end-to-end data tracker with an easy-to-use UX to capture information. An RPA data flow engaged OCR technology to accurately digitize information. That data was then passed along to the ERP system, while the digitized documents were archived in the document management system. The result was a 70% increase in productivity thanks to improved turnaround time, faster data retrieval, and greater transparency with end-to-end tracking.

Master Data Management

At Redington, multiple data capture points and complex data flows across the organization regularly compromised data accuracy and integrity. They needed a better master data management tool to centralize data and make it available to other systems. To enable those closest to and most familiar with the data to enter relevant sets of information, Redington developed an end-to-end data tracker with OutSystems.

Leveraging integrations with Redington’s transaction system and data warehouse, the application created a transaction-driven RPA workflow that moved data to a centrally-managed master data management tool. This created a single source of truth that led to higher quality data and greater transparency into its origins and uses.

Lessons Learned: Doing Intelligent Automation the Right Way

When we look at what Redington Gulf has achieved, a pattern becomes clear: automating products, services, and processes should first and foremost be about achieving transformative business results. It can only work when enterprises balance people, processes, and technologies. And it must also be done using adaptive methods to ensure that its usefulness extends well into the future, even as the business environment shifts rapidly.

With the OutSystems low-code application development platform, you can configure custom applications that provide superior user experiences while orchestrating processes and integrating data in the background, all with enterprise-level scale and security.

Watch the full story here to learn how you can leverage intelligent automation to optimize business processes holistically, for longer-term sustainable competitive advantage.