Alpine's Hungarian subsidiary has been continuously manufacturing complete infotainment and navigation systems for European car manufacturers for nearly 20 years. It is a direct supplier to Audi, BMW, Volkswagen, and Ford, among others. The company employs over 1,000 people and its revenue reaches HUF 150 billion. We began our collaboration in 2020, and since then multiple software robots have been deployed. A key aspect of the project is building internal competencies within the company, which includes training operators and developers.
Travel cost management is part of the payroll process and must be calculated based on criteria tracked in various systems. Several hundred employees at the company are entitled to travel cost reimbursement in different forms (fuel costs, public transport, etc.), and each of these had to be calculated individually for every monthly settlement, resulting in a massive amount of manual work that entailed a large number of manual errors.
The deployed software robot is capable of collecting data from the web-based HR software interface, Excel spreadsheets, and databases in a structured format, downloading current fuel prices and other data from online sources (e.g., the official website of the National Tax and Customs Administration), and calculating travel costs for each employee taking all factors into account. Upon completion, the robot exports the results to the payroll system.
The monthly summary runs on the first day of each month, allowing the software robot to complete several days' worth of human work error-free in just a few hours. By eliminating human errors, not only is the time spent on calculations saved, but also the significant work involved in correcting erroneous payroll entries. The project's calculated return on investment was within six months.
For the software robot development, we used WinAutomation, Python scripts, VBScripts, and an MSSQL database.
