Optimizing and Automating the Order Handling Process at Rockwool Finland Oy

The objective of the thesis was to create a proposal and action plan for optimizing and automating the order handling process at the case company. Every year the company handles more sales orders, so to keep up with the increasing workload, the company needs to either streamline and optimize the order handling process or to hire more employees to handle the orders. The business challenge of this thesis was to help the company to reduce repetitive manual tasks by implementing business process automation tools rather than hiring more people to handle the increased number of orders manually. The study was conducted using the case study research approach and used qualitative research methods, such as interviews, discussions, observation, and workshops. The research method was selected with the aim of analyzing the current process and developing it further in cooperation and with the help of input from the internal stakeholders. The data was collected in three phases, first, the current state analysis, second, the review of existing knowledge and best practice, and third, the proposal building and validation of the proposal. The proposal was built by merging the results of the current state analysis and the conceptual framework. The proposal was co-created with the key stakeholders, who provided their input and suggestions during a workshop and interviews. The data gathered from the stakeholders played an important role for the proposal building stage, to ensure a balanced proposal with multiple perspectives. The proposal building stage was a pilot phase, where the assumptions were tested in a real business environment with customers, where possible. For example, seven customers were contacted to initiate an EDI connection, three of them agreed to go ahead with the project. In addition, three customers were contacted to test the e-commerce platform E-Shop and those customers placed 1% of total orders via the online shop during the pilot phase. However, RPA was not possible to test during the pilot phase, instead practical steps were identified to start the RPA project in the future. Based on the findings from the pilot phase, steps to further implement each technology was summarized in concrete suggestions as the initial proposal. The final proposal was validated and approved by the key stakeholders by the end of this study. The final proposal includes the steps listed in the initial proposal and target dates, when steps should be finalized, so it can be used as an action plan to optimize and automate the order handling process at the case company by utilizing three methods, RPA, EDI, and e-commerce