JFE Shoji Group company JFE Shoji Business Support held internal presentations on October 13 about operational improvement activities. The event was held online so that as many people as possible could participate. About sixty participants watched presentations by the No. 1 Administrative Support Office and the Accounting Support Office .

The theme of the No. 1 Administrative Support Office’s presentation was “Automating Inventory Sales Records with RPA*.” They showcased how they used RPA to automate the manual process, which had originally been done with paper forms. They first worked with JFE Shoji’s sales divisions to obtain the original data used to create the paper forms. As a result, they drastically reduced the time spent on a task that used to take ten hours a month.

The Accounting Support Office’s presentation focused on reducing the distribution of documents, as well as two tasks related to payment reconciliation, for a total of three issues. The tasks were selected from approximately thirty issues the Accounting Support Office team had identified.

By digitizing documents and sharing them via a server, they were able to eliminate physically distributing them. This prevented the loss of documents and made it possible for employees to check documents from home. In addition, the office used Excel’s macro function to automate the generation of emails, increasing efficiency. This operational improvement activity also had the benefit of reducing how often the team needs to send emails.

In reviewing the presentations, management expressed their expectations for the future, saying: “Obtaining data and automating it with RPA is an excellent strategy that I hope can be expanded to other business processes. Digitalization can also make things easier to use, so we can take it to the next step of development.”

*RPA or robotic process automation is a software technology for automating administrative tasks that are performed on computers.