Nesto is a multinational company that operates a chain of hypermarkets and supermarkets. Since its establishment in 2004, the company has developed a network of more than 100 retail outlets across the GCC and India. The group attributes its rapid growth to its unwavering focus on providing its customers access to top-quality products from world-renowned brands at competitive prices.
With the advent of digital technologies and e-commerce disruptors, supermarkets and hypermarkets have been forced to reinvent their operating models. Nesto Group has invested heavily in its digital transformation and continues to do so, keeping its customers in mind at all times. They have partnered with Finesse, the leading digital transformation enabler in the GCC to support them in automating key processes within the business, using Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
The Challenge
A top customer need for Nesto Group is the ability to access deals and promotions. The Marketing department manually creates midweek and weekend promotions and uploads the respective flyers into their in-house application for 40 + stores, which are mundane and repetitive.
Before approaching Finesse, employees at the group spent a significant amount of time creating, uploading and correcting promotional activities into their in-house tool for 40+ stores.
This process of creating or updating a promotional activity is a repetitive, cumbersome and error-prone process. An incorrect entry would lead to confusion at the many stores where the promotion was present and also result in customer churn.
The Solution
As a use-case for automating this process, Nesto Group and Finesse agreed to use automation anywhere’s RPA bot solution. The digital bot, once deployed, would mimic the human task by creating and uploading the weekday or weekend promotions into the in-house application every week.
The Result
With the RPA solution provided by Finesse and Automation Anywhere, 100 per cent of the promotion entry process into the in-house tool has now been automated. The implementation has saved approximately 12 hours of manual effort each week, thus increasing the productivity of the employees involved in this effort by over 80 per cent.
While this RPA implementation has undoubtedly directly reduced the manual effort for the marketing team at Nesto Group, it has also improved operational efficiencies and provided its customers with a better experience at all times.
Eljo J P, CBO and director of Finesse, said: “We are grateful to Nesto Group for trusting us and partnering with us to automate their processes using Automation Anywhere’s RPA bots. It has been proven that automation marks the next stage of digital transformation and has generated success for customers. There is an almost limitless number of benefits that customers can derive from RPA. Our team will continue to work closely with Nesto to ensure that the goals of the initiative are met.”
RPA in Nesto/WIG has helped to improve efficiency and reduce costs by automating repetitive tasks and freeing up employees to focus on more high-value activities. We should always keep in mind that RPA is never a replacement for human workers, but rather it is just a tool that can help to improve efficiency and productivity. It is also important to note that though robotic process automation is not entirely an artificial intelligence tool, it can be considered to be a strong workflow-based tool to help automate repetitive tasks. We just completed the automation of a few processes in one department, and we are planning to extend the same to all the other departments in Nesto/WIG which are having repetitive tasks. Thank you to Finesse for the smooth implementation. Also, I would like to express my gratitude to the management and IT department for implementing this technology, which has smoothened our job process, said Lenish K, group IT head, Western International Group.
