Wood’s Amazing Woods Inc. (Wood’s), a small company in Idaho, sells wood products to customers. The founder, Jason Woodworth, has focused most of his attention on providing excellent service and products, but not on keeping his accounting system up to date. Wood’s currently uses a manual billing process to bill customers for the wood products sold. That work is performed by a billing specialist, Emily Young, a recent accounting graduate. Jason would like to completely automate his current manual billing process to drive productivity and cost savings. Jason also wants to provide Emily with the opportunity to do some data analytics on their financial information and reduce her overtime during month-end for a better work-life balance.
You will build a bot for each case part, starting with a simple billing scenario in Part I. The bot you will build in each subsequent case builds off the first bot and is more complex than the previous bot as more complexity will be added to the billing process. Recall that the basic function of a bot is to re-create the steps that a human would do in a process.
This case uses a simplified automation process that is modified in several ways from what would happen in an actual accounting firm or business. For example, companies typically would use more sophisticated software than the Excel files used in this case; however, the process of creating bots is the same for both simple and more sophisticated software. In addition, companies typically have solutions to provide automated billing. This case uses this simplified scenario to teach the introductory principles of building bots and does not necessarily demonstrate a typical process that would be automated in practice. Although the case simplifies the software and the process, the basic skills of building an RPA tool are applicable to all automation settings.
Before you begin
- Save all of the Excel files provided for the case (listed below) in the same folder on your hard drive. You should build the bot so that the first sequence uses an input dialogue box to ask the user to enter the file path of the folder where the files are located. Choose a file path that does not have too long of a name. Store this file path as a variable and then use this variable as a reference to load, save or move any files. This way, the bot can be moved to other computers and still function (i.e., be graded by your professor).
- Innovation_mindset_case_studies_RPA_Billing_MasterInvoice.xlsx
- Innovation_mindset_case_studies_RPA_Billing_InvoiceData3.xlsx
- It is a good practice to change the titles of activities to something descriptive so you, and others, can easily review your work and understand what the bot is doing.
- It is recommended that you organize your thinking in a flowchart before you begin programming your bot. This makes it more likely that you will not forget key parts of the process. It also allows you the ability to develop your bot in segments or sections. This can make troubleshooting much easier.
Objective
Your task is to build a bot using UiPath that automates the billing process. Ultimately, a billing specialist should be able to open UiPath and run the bot, which should do all of the steps that are described in the manual process (following) without any human interaction, with one exception. When the bot is run, it should require the user to enter the file folder location where the files are currently stored and will be saved when done. This allows the bot to be transferred to other computers and still run successfully.
Billing: current state
Wood’s Amazing Woods Inc. currently uses the following manual process to bill its customers.
- The billing specialist, Emily Young, opens the Excel file with the invoice data titled, Innovation_mindset_case_studies_RPA_Billing_InvoiceData3.xlsx. There are multiple records in this data.
- Then she reviews the data and opens the Excel invoice template titled, Innovation_mindset_case_studies_RPA_Billing_MasterInvoice.xlsx.
- Emily creates a unique invoice for each record in the invoice data if the customer has not already been billed.
- Customers who have been billed have dates in the column labeled “Billed.” If the field is empty, then the customer needs to be billed.
- If a customer has already been billed, Emily skips this customer and goes on to the next customer.
- Then she saves the updated invoice template file for each customer as Innovation_mindset_case_studies_RPA_Billing_MasterInvoice_InvoiceNumber.xlsx (where InvoiceNumber is replaced by the invoice number being billed).
- Once she is finished creating the invoices for each customer, she opens the invoice data Excel file titled, Innovation_mindset_case_studies_RPA_Billing_InvoiceData3.xlsx. and updates the Billed column with the current billing date.
- Finally, she saves the file as Innovation_mindset_case_studies_RPA_Billing_InvoiceData3_Complete.xlsx.
Required
- Your bot is required to create an invoice for each customer who has not been previously billed. The bot should be programmed so it can complete the task for any number of records included in the invoice data. In other words, you should not hard code in all of the values, but instead you should use programming to loop through all of the files and create invoices accordingly.
- Please submit the following for grading:
- The .xaml UiPath file with your name saved in the title (note Canvas appends your name)
Innovation mindset case studies – Robotic Process Automation – Billing
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SCORE No.05576-191US
