Human-Robot Collaboration in Automated Procurement Flows

In our recent procurement webinar, we showed how we can automate various parts of a Procure-to-Pay flow using software robots. RPA can also enable controlling, auditing and efficient manual approval for the person(s) with authority to approve purchases, so that they don’t become a bottleneck in an otherwise fully automated process. In this article, we will explain how RPA can facilitate the interaction between human approvers and robotic processing agents.

Automated procurement flow with human approval

Let's say you have multiple teams sending out requisition forms, and you have different approval routes depending on an amount threshold (e.g., purchases over 50k need approval from the CFO). A software robot can:

1) Read out the information in the requisition form

2) Identify the correct department

3) Send the request to the right approver, corresponding to that department

4) Furthermore, based on the total amount extracted, the CFO can also be included in the approval chain, if the total amount exceeds the defined threshold

But how exactly does the approval step happen?

One option would be to simply send the requisition form via e-mail.

Example e-mail for e-mail based approval

The robot would send the e-mail with an ID in the subject line. Based on this code, it will read any reply in the thread and search for words such as "Yes"/"No", but also "ok" or "approved"/"rejected". E-mail based approval is fairly simple to implement, but it creates extra noise in the approver's mailbox, and can be overlooked easily if not processed immediately.

A more sophisticated solution that solves these issues is the UiPath platform’s native solution: Action Center.

UiPath Action Center

Users can leverage the web and mobile apps to see their robots’ pending tasks, assign them, sort by priority and by type of action, and finally process tickets individually.

More specifically, the robot will add approval tickets in a queue in the Action Center. Approvers can access that queue and can see their pending approval tasks, so they won't forget about tasks from previous days, while also getting notified via e-mail immediately when a new approval task is created. This also enables a convenient audit trail, and other features such as delegation and a history of completed actions.

Enhancements & customizations

Below you can see the UiPath Form Designer, a tool, integrated into the Action center, that helps you to customize how the relevant data is presented to the user, so she/he can take an informed decision.

UiPath Form Designer

For a requisition form approval, we recommend using this tool to show the amount, the supplier, requestor and list of items requested.

After the accountable people decide whether to approve or reject the requisition request, the robot will automatically continue the process and generate the PO, RFQ, send them to suppliers, read order confirmations, process invoices and so on. We talked more about these scenarios and even showcased some demos in our webinar on the procurement topic, which you can view here on-demand.