Bridgestone Tatabanya Production Ltd. is the Hungarian subsidiary of Bridgestone Corporation, the world's largest tire and rubber product manufacturing group. With a workforce of over 1,100 employees, its annual production capacity was planned to reach 7.2 million units in 2020. As part of our long-term collaboration, we are automating back-office processes step by step using software robots and other software tools, thereby relieving the workload of employees and making internal operations more efficient.
A significant part of the test engineers' work consists of collecting and verifying data from tests performed on actual products, as well as preparing reports based on this data. All of these processes were previously carried out manually, which was extremely time-consuming and prone to numerous errors.
Since the test summary process can be well described by rules, requires working in multiple separate systems and processing various input materials, we decided to develop a software robot. The completed RPA solution is capable of collecting the required materials and organizing them in the appropriate folder structures. It can extract the necessary data from documents and perform various calculations to prepare reports and summaries. Upon process completion, the robot sends notifications (e.g., in case of missing documents or values) and summaries to the relevant stakeholders via email. The finished software robot uses Excel spreadsheets, PDF files, image files (with OCR), and connected databases to complete its tasks.
As a result of the development, we successfully reduced the process workload by 90%, cut throughput times to a quarter, and maintained a 0% error rate. In contrast to the previous weekly process execution, the robot now performs the required tasks twice daily, ensuring that up-to-date test data is always available to engineers, significantly improving their work efficiency as well.
For the software robot development, we used Power Automate Desktop, Python scripts, VBScripts, and an Oracle database.
