Three years ago, Levi Strauss & Co. deployed its first proof-of-concept bot, developed by our very own Robotics Process Automation Center of Excellence (COE) team, which has since evolved into the Business Process Automation (BPA) COE. From the start, the mission was simple: automate labor-intensive and repetitive tasks that burden employees so those teams can spend time on analytical and judgment-based work.
To say the program has been a success is an understatement.
In 2022, the team aimed to automate at least 20,000 hours of tedious, manual work, and by the end of the year, it surpassed that goal by 5,000 hours. For 2023, they aimed to automate another 25,000 hours — again the team surpassed that goal by 5,000 hours. And for 2024, the goal was to reach a cumulative of 90,000 hours automated — and at just over halfway through the year, the RPA team reached 100,000 hours.
“Over the last three years, the team has created 85 bots across the organization, from marketing and merchandizing to compliance and finance, simplifying how we work and freeing up valuable resources to focus on growth initiatives,” said Harmit Singh, chief financial and growth officer at LS&Co. “The BPA COE is a prime example of how valuable our Center of Excellence model is to the organization and the impact they have supporting our global business. I’m eager to continue our progress and further transform our business for today’s digital-first workforce.”
RPA in Action
This automation has already proved valuable, enabling teams to simplify their work, allowing time to prioritize supporting strategic objectives. For example, the Levi’s® brand was looking to sell its products on a leading marketplace in Switzerland, but it required extensive compliance documentation for every product sold — work that would take daily, manual hours to perform and consume resources that could be best used elsewhere.
Enter the BPA team.
Using optical character recognition technology (technology that converts an image of text into a machine-readable text format), the RPA team automated a step-by-step workflow that could extract and read documents and archive the information. This process alleviated nearly 100% of the manual workload. And most importantly, it allowed the Levi’s® brand to list its products on the marketplace, reaching even more shoppers and delivering incremental revenue.
“When it comes to BPA, many don’t know the art of the possible. That is where we come in. Our role is to help figure out the solution and deploy the best tool to accomplish simple and efficient processes” said Stacie Clarkson, vice president, Customer Success and lead of the BPA COE. “I’m proud of what our team has been able to deliver in such a short period of time, and we feel like we’ve only scratched the surface.”
With that in mind, the team has expanded beyond bots to broader Business Process Automation. For the team, solutions are so much more than bots, but instead about being process efficiency plays. It’s about simplifying ways of working, creating connectivity throughout the organization and unifying our processes with our fundamental business systems like SAP, Google Cloud, FlexPLM and more. Even more, the team focuses on data quality improvement, data analytics and data visualization throughout their solution and implementation process.
As the team looks ahead, the mission is simple: more! The BPA COE team is on an internal blitz to spread the word on the type of work that could be automated and what the team can offer. And of the work completed, the team is looking into where and how those processes and solutions can be scaled globally.
The opportunities are endless, and the BPA COE team is eager to help our teams simplify their work and drive improved productivity and efficiency.
