Automation of the transportation orders process at Lindab

About Lindab

Lindab is an international group that develops, manufactures, and markets products and system solutions for ventilation, air conditioning, and construction. These include roofs and accessories, various gutter systems, the Lindab SolarRoofTM photovoltaic system, or solutions for steel construction.

The company distributes its offerings internationally, currently operating in 20 markets, and employs over 4,500 people.

The challenge

With the company's rapid growth, gradual expansion of offerings, and penetration into new markets, Lindab’s Logistics team has to process an increasing number of transportation orders sent by the sales team. So far, the sales team has been processing the growing number of orders manually via email.

As a result, an efficient organization of transportation became a major challenge. At the same time, relying exclusively on email to communicate transportation orders resulted in a lack of control and generated many errors that required clarification, both on the sides of Logistics and Sales.

Lindab invited the GGS IT Consulting team to analyze the possibilities of automating the transport order process and to propose a solution.

Our projects always consist of 5 basic steps:

1. Workshop, that lets us better understand the client's needs
2. Planning, when we design and write up all the tasks needed for the projet's completion
3. Development, where we actually work on the tasks and build the app
4. UAT, when together with the client we test the results
5. Support, where we offer our help in the post-production phase

We started with a workshop

We organized an onsite workshop at Lindab’s headquarters to understand the process fully, see how it currently works within the organization, and what dependencies and data are needed to carry it out.

We invited key department representatives to participate in our workshop, including:

• The management responsible for operations from a strategic perspective
• The Logistics team, which carries out transportation orders
• Sales representatives ordering transportation
• IT team responsible for technical aspects.

During the two-day workshop, we interviewed the teams, developed business assumptions, and formulated goals and expectations the application would meet. As a result, we created functional documentation that contained the business description, process maps and documentation, and technical architecture proposals with the data we would use for automation.

We also deemed the business need valid, confirming Lindab’s readiness to begin the project.

What technologies did we use?

We recommended the use of two technological solutions to automate the process:

• Oracle APEX - a low-code platform that delivers business applications quickly. This platform also allowed us to integrate data from the Lindab ERP system.
• UiPath - RPA solution that automates manual work and data entry.

The project’s scope included:

• Creating a web app so that the Sales Department members can create transportation orders easily.
• Creating a web app for the Logistics team, so that they can group the transports, visualize the routes, and accept the order.
• Creating automation that generates transportation order documents.
• Creating automation launching warehouse operations.

How was the project implemented?

It was important to us to have Lindab involved throughout the entire project. Based on our past experiences, we learned that working closely together helps us catch any errors immediately, deliver results faster, and react agilely to changes in the business environment.

We divided the project into 5 phases, each delivering visible business value that the client could check and test.

After the tests, we made minor functional changes and improvements suggested by the Lindab team.

Additionally, we regularly met for weekly summaries of activities and progress on Lindab’s and GGS’s sides.

After delivering the full solution, we moved on to the User Acceptance Test (UAT) phase.

In this phase, designated Lindab team members tested the app by using it to carry out transportation orders. Thanks to Lindab’s input, we identified ways to better the app’s usability and introduced those improvements in real time.

After a one-month acceptance test period, we launched the app for the entire team.

Results

Thanks to the outstanding partnership and cooperation with Lindab’s teams we’re proud to share the following results:

• 100% of transportation orders are ordered through the app, making all the information transparent and visible to both teams.
• Reduced time for entering orders. The salesperson does not have to complete the form manually anymore. All fields are automatically suggested based on data from the ERP system.
• The use of dynamic forms and apps practically eliminates the possibility of making a mistake, drastically reducing cases requiring manual and individual clarification.
• Automation monitors the process and business assumptions. Thanks to that, the entire team knows what to expect and how to act, which was difficult when they had to communicate solely through email.
• Reduced time for delivering transportation orders to the warehouse. Now, the bot generates transportation documents immediately and launches warehouse procedures right after the order is approved.
• Improved data quality - the implementation of standardization in the process and its automation enhanced data quality in Lindab’s systems, resulting in more precise reporting and action predicting.