Air Liquide APAC Global Services, a subsidiary of the world leader in gases, technologies, and services for Industry and Health, has won two awards at the Malaysia Technology Excellence Awards and the Malaysia International Business Awards. The awards were given in the Automation – Chemicals and Data Management – Chemicals categories, respectively, and one in the Chemicals category at the Malaysia International Business Awards.
Leveraging robotic process automation technology
AGS won the Automation – Chemicals category for its use of robotic process automation (RPA) technology in its Delivery Order Override Project. The technology improved quality, standardisation, efficiency, effectiveness, and stakeholder experiences by automating the manual verification and release of over 700 daily delivery orders. This freed up the team to focus on more value-adding tasks. The proposed solutions include defining standardised business rules, automating the download, verification, and release of delivery orders, and using the RPA bot to send email notifications and account statements to customers on hold. The automation resulted in significant cost reductions and improved work productivity, saving an estimated 4,500 hours of manpower and €70,000 in efficiency savings per year. The project has been successful, with eight RPA projects in place, twelve under development, and six in the assessment pipeline. AGS’s approach to RPA extends to other areas such as customer collection allocation, vendor invoice follow-up, vendor payment, and fixed asset capitalisation.
Real-time view of procurement activities
Meanwhile, AGS also received an award in the Data Management – Chemicals category, for the implementation of its ALTAiR (Air Liquide Tactical and Ai Report) system, which provides a real-time view of all procurement activities happening in the Asia-Pacific region.
The development of the monitoring system took 12 months, incorporating the latest technologies such as automation and artificial intelligence (AI). AILTAiR uses data generated by Air Liquide procurement systems. The APAC data is transferred every night to a server connected to ALTAiR, so the teams can access a refreshed dashboard as soon as they start working the following day.
The tool, combined with other transformations of the organisation, helped improve the key cycle times of the department by 60% and savings by 3.5%, despite high inflation in 2022. “The success of ALTAiR triggers new innovations for 2023. We are engaging in the development of robotics and AI to expand the amount of information and parameters delivered by ALTAiR,” the company stated.
Integrated HR operating model
