Automating the Order-to-Cash Process with RPA (Class 2/4)

Why is this important?

Excel remains a dominant platform for data entry, analysis, and reporting across organizations, workflows that require the extraction, transformation, and integration of data from several spreadsheets are often manually intensive and error-prone. Through the use of robotic process automation (RPA) tools such as UIPath, these repetitive tasks can be automated using structured loops that iterate through folders of workbooks, locate and extract relevant data, and consolidate information into a unified output. This class motivates the use of automation not simply as a time-saving device, but as a mechanism for ensuring consistency, accuracy, and scalability in spreadsheet-based processes. By automating the process of combining data across files, users reduce the likelihood of human error, improve auditability, and shift their focus from routine tasks to higher-value analysis.

What will we do?

We will extend our logic in today's class to consider how labor intensive a manual process can be when we have a single datasource (an order) that triggers the need to update many different datasets. For example, in our case an order from ETSY requires Skylar and Victoria to keep track of the order, the shipping status, the inventory they have on hand, and the accounting. In most cases, however, companies have even more systems to track data, for example, companies often keep a database of unique customers for future marketing and sales purposes, HR and audit log files as well as multiple inventory and purchasing related data tables. Even with a very detailed approach to maintaining these records, a manual system is both very time consuming and much more error prone that an automated approach. We will use excel as a substitute for the data storage/management functions of large ERP systems commonly employed by multinational companies such as SAP and Oracle, mid-market products like NetSuite.

Review and Extension:

This is our second class examining the potential to automate the order-to-cash cycle, and will also be our second class with practical UIPath experience.

We will focus heavily on how the tools work and what they are used for, rather than working directly on the process, to allow for independent learning on combining the activities into a process. Our goal will be to apply activities that move data around a system, and ways we could transform the data for different reasons (for example, changing an order's status from shipped to delivered). In the next classes we will consider how to make the automation robust, by adding controls and reporting (or auditing) logs.

Materials and Suggested Seating:

Case: Pure Reformed Oils (Swindler and Simpson: The path to redemption) Case, Continued
Case: Billing Bot (background) Case
Slides: will be available for download by the beginning of class in either powerpoint or pdf formats.
Data: A data update may be required for this class. To ensure your files are the most up-to-date, navigate to ACCTG528_Labs folder and run the command git pull.
Automation Tools: UIPath: Read Range, For Each Row, Write Range, Append Range, Excel Application Scope, Read CSV, Write CSV, Read Text File, Write Text File
Automated Tasks: Reading and writing structured data, including csv and Excel Files

Suggested Pre-Class Preparation:

1. Students should be familiar with the Pure Reformed Oils Case started in the prior class.
2. An optional way to prepare for this class is to watch the video solutions to the Billing Bot Case, it has some similarities to the Skylar Case that can help if you felt like you fell behind on the excel components of this class.

Class Plan:

1. After a brief review and PollEverywhere check in, we will continue working on the Redemption of Pure Reformed Oils Case.
2. We will compare FlowChart Activities and Sequences, and For Each with For Each Row and the Row() function
3. We will explore the core UIPath activities that we will use to generate an automated order-to-cash workflow.
4. Finally, we will also start to pay attention to the types of systems and data tables that will help the small company scale their business by mocking-up Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems in excel.