Annals of the University of Craiova: Economic Sciences Series (Aug 2021)
AUDITING SPECIAL ORDERS IN THE AUTOMOTIVE PRODUCTION AREA - THE IMPACT OF AI AND RPA ON THIS ACTIVITY. A CASE STUDY.
Abstract
This case study was conducted in a company that produces car subassemblies for a number of road cars, the company's headquarters being in Germany. A series of steps were audited and verified, drawing a parallel between the implementation of AI - Artificial Intelligence (for certain steps in the economic process), and whether RPA solutions - Robotic Process Automation, can help in this context. What we wanted to achieve through this article is the fact that these newly created applications can help in carrying out an activity in the production area, the elimination of errors being currently a priority. Errors for this process were initially around 46%, a fairly high percentage. After a series of process improvements were tested by adopting AI and RPA, the error rate decreased by ~ 12%. A number of other improvements could be made, their proposal being shown in the content of this scientific article. The company uses an integrated ERP system - Enterprise Resource Planning - SAP - Systems Applications and Products in Data Processing. The system is hosted in Germany, the Romanian factory being an independent customer - but with implications in the parent company. The use of the integrated system, for the area in Romania, involves the use of several modules, from financial-accounting (FI), sales and distribution (SD), material management (MM), to production planning (PP). The adoption of other solutions was imperative with the last two years in which the pandemic situation in the world required a deep involvement of what meant the automation of economic processes. A series of other economic processes will be analyzed in the future, wishing through this series of scientific articles to be able to bring a feasible point of view and the resulting data to be used by future researchers.