Innovation at the heart of business

Officeworks is Australia’s leading retailer of office supplies, technology, furniture, art supplies, and education resources, and also provides helpful services such as print and copy, and on-site and remote tech support through Geeks2U. With 172 stores operating across Australia and a robust online platform selling over 40,000 products, Officeworks is known for empowering Australians to work, learn, create, and connect.

Over the last 10 years, Officeworks has implemented a broad range of ServiceNow solutions to support its strategy of operational excellence. With business growth and a strong culture of innovation, Officeworks wanted to leverage even more of the automation and integration capabilities in the ServiceNow AI Platform to further improve operational efficiency and increase employee productivity.

“We wanted to give time back to our team members so they can focus on more meaningful tasks, and access opportunities for upskilling,” says Steven Bucello, IT Manager, MarTech Automation and Planning, Officeworks.

“We looked at other Robotic Process Automation (RPA) vendors, and when we reviewed where our enterprise architecture is leading, ServiceNow Workflow Data Fabric was the solution for us.”

By deploying 21 RPA bot processes across seven business functions such as finance, merchandise, and sustainability with ServiceNow Workflow Data Fabric, Officeworks can seamlessly introduce new automation capabilities into its existing infrastructure without significant additional costs.

“Leveraging RPA Hub and Document Intelligence capabilities within Workflow Data Fabric, we have unlocked almost 3,500 productivity hours per year across seven business processes,” Steven adds. “Using one ServiceNow AI Platform, our employees can now do the work they enjoy instead of repetitive tasks.”

With support and best practices from ServiceNow RPA Enablement Program, Officeworks successfully rolled out the first bot process into production in just three months.

During the initial implementation, Officeworks had unattended bots running on dedicated on-premises servers. As the business developed more bot processes, Officeworks needed to increase its capacity so bots could run concurrent automations.

“Moving to a cloud infrastructure allows the business to scale and connect securely to internal resources,” Steven explains. “With that, we now have bots running 24/7.”

Automating remittance allocation with bot processes

Officeworks uses SAP for various finance processes, such as accounts receivable. But when customers make payments to Officeworks, some remittances may not be allocated to customer accounts in the system. Team members had to search emails manually for remittance information and then verify the amounts in SAP.

“This process was time consuming and prone to human error. It could take up to six hours a day to just match those remittance allocations,” Steven explains. “It was like a full-time job for our team members.”

With the introduction of ServiceNow Workflow Data Fabric, Officeworks can now automate and complete end-to-end finance remittance allocations using multiple RPA bot processes.

The process starts with the Dispatcher bot that collects and allocates remittances directly from SAP. It then runs SAP queries for unallocated remittances and ingests the information into a Work Queue before passing on to the Email Search bot to check new emails from customers and find any remittance attachments. When an email from a customer matches the details of an item in the Work Queue, RPA Hub saves the attachment as a PDF and sends it to Document Intelligence to extract key information, such as invoice number and payment amount.

If the data in Document Intelligence matches the remittance in SAP, RPA Hub automatically marks the account as paid in SAP directly and closes it off. Steven’s team then notifies the finance team of the total number of remittance allocations completed each day. If the data isn’t a perfect match—likely due to human errors or problems with the PDF—an exception report informs the finance team of further actions or investigations.

“In the past, we relied on an individual working during office hours to search customer emails, so we might not capture information that customers sent outside those hours,” Steven explains. “Running a 24/7 bot process that keeps on searching for new emails from customers, our finance team has seen a 64% straight-through processing of exception cases.

“Deploying Workflow Data Fabric on the ServiceNow AI Platform has saved 780 hours—or 20 weeks per year—on the remittance allocation process alone,” Steven adds. “This helps our teams to be more productive and provide better service to customers.”

Accelerating merchandise and sustainability processes

In addition to remittance allocation, Officeworks leverages ServiceNow Workflow Data Fabric to streamline merchandise and sustainability processes, and enhance compliance.

Previously, when a customer inquired about a product on Officeworks’ website, such as technology or office furniture, the Merchandise team would contact the category team or supplier partners to get the required answers. When the answer was received by the Merchandise team, they would log onto a third-party website to respond. This process of sharing the right information with customers could take up to three days.

Using RPA bots to automate responses to customer queries, the Merchandise team can now respond on the same day or the next morning. This helps to minimize potential human errors, and customers can also access answers directly from the Officeworks website.

“The automation in ServiceNow Workflow Data Fabric is fast and cost effective,” Steven says. “By leveraging RPA Hub to act on mundane tasks, we have freed up almost 360 hours—or nine weeks per year—for the Merchandise team to focus on serving customers.”

Through Officeworks’ broader People and Planet Positive goals, the company is focused on transitioning its private brand packaging to recyclable materials.

To facilitate this, the Sustainability team needed to consolidate such information from multiple agencies and internal teams into a spreadsheet. Team members had to determine which components in the packaging could be recycled, and split the information in the spreadsheets before entering the data into a third-party portal. This process was labor intensive and prone to errors.

“Once we gathered and analyzed the data on recyclable components, it took about 18 minutes to create a report,” Steven says. “Now, using ServiceNow Workflow Data Fabric to automate report generations, we’ve cut 240 hours—or six weeks per year—on data entry. Again, the Sustainability team can now spend time on meaningful priorities.”

The automation also helps to improve compliance for sustainability processes by avoiding data entry errors or using the wrong recycling labels in packaging.

Future plan for enhanced automation

With the successful implementation of bot processes, Steven and his team are now working with the People team to develop two new automations to streamline the onboarding process for new team members. This will involve integration with the Human Capital Management (HCM) system and automation to move new hire information from the onboarding system to the payroll system. Steven anticipates that the business will save six weeks of effort across the onboarding processes.

“RPA is something that should be embraced,” Steven adds. His approach is to start with basic automation and get the foundations right before moving on to more complex automations.

“ServiceNow’s AI platform is flexible and scalable,” Steven concludes. “That makes it an excellent choice for transformation—not just in technology, but across the entire business.”