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TMK automates financial processes

TMK and Russia’s NFP have piloted automation of financial document processing. The robotic process automation (RPA) solution helped achieve a ten-fold acceleration in the rates of financial document processing at TMK’s Sinarsky Pipe Plant (SinTZ).

The software automation tool specifically developed by NFP to automate accounting and treasury processes took over the technical task of counterparty reconciliations previously performed manually by company employees. During the setup, a number of scripts were developed for the robot to handle e-mails and attached reconciliation statements, recognize PDF and Microsoft Excel documents, and generate relevant statements for SinTZ and reconciliation statements in the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system. The solution is capable of choosing between five reconciliation scripts depending on the document type.

SinTZ’s financial documents are processed at the unified TMK-Sinara Business Service Center (TMK-Sinara BSC) in Yekaterinburg, collocating the administrative functions of TMK and Sinara Group. At the moment, TMK-Sinara BSC employees check the results of automated reconciliations, but going forward these controls are expected to be phased out.

“TMK is improving the performance of the entire range of its business processes through digital transformation. We already use software robots in certain areas to free employees from routine tasks and enable them to focus on key roles that require strong expertise. The robotic automation of financial processes has proved effective: now the automated reconciliation of receipts takes just about 3 minutes instead of up to 30 minutes in case of manual processing. We piloted the solution to handle SinTZ documents and are now looking to scale it to cover other enterprises as well,” said Dmitry Yakob, TMK’s IT Director.

“Before we started the implementation phase, the NFP team had helped us to set up the infrastructure for RPA by providing support to TMK’s Information Technology Department. This included preparing a description of server requirements – the infrastructure we subsequently used to deploy an integrated solution based on a multi-component platform for robotic automation. The new group-wide infrastructure can serve as the basis for planned automation at other operations within TMK Group,” said Victoria Babankina, NFP project manager responsible for the implementation of RPA solutions.