Describe the business value of Power Automate
You now have an overview of Power Automate and how it drives business value. Now let's explore how Komatsu is using Power Automate to drive operational efficiency.
Komatsu Australia is the Australian subsidiary of Komatsu, an industry-leading manufacturer of construction, forestry, and mining equipment. When the parts department at Komatsu Australia struggled to manually process nearly 52,000 invoices annually, it used Power Automate and AI Builder to automate its invoice processing workflow.
As part of its normal business operation, Komatsu Australia source their parts from over 250 global OEMs and local suppliers and receives hundreds of invoices per day. The invoices are usually sent as PDFs to a shared Microsoft Outlook inbox monitored by the parts department, which consists of three people. Receiving over 1,100 invoices from a single supplier alone left the small parts department scrambling to stay on top of the invoice influx, as well as perform the manual process of entering the invoices into its system.
The new invoicing process uses two types of automated “flows” within Power Automate: cloud flows and desktop flows. See the graphic for the new automated process:
The solution was developed in just three weeks, saving over 300 labor-intensive manual entry hours for a single supplier alone. Because of this success, Komatsu Australia also launched their own citizen developer program, to inspire and empower employees to build their own business solutions. The program, which has begun with its first cohort since the pilot, is helping divisions and departments across Komatsu to innovate quickly and to streamline processes and improve efficiency through automation and digitization.
To read more about the solution built by Komatsu and the impact its citizen developer program is having, see the full case study here.
Now you have an overview of Power Automate and how Komatsu uses this powerful service. The demo video shows a couple of types of flows and how to get started with Power Automate yourself.
Watch this video to see a demo of Power Automate.