Lenovo embarked on an enterprise-wide digital transformation with their 3S strategy—Smart IoT, Smart Infrastructure, and Smart Verticals—for industries. The successful digital transformation by Lenovo Group IT was attributed to the strong integration and application of enterprise automation, AI, and machine learning, as well as other integration technologies.
As a global technology powerhouse, Lenovo provides millions of intelligent devices to users all around the world. As the organization expands into new areas of infrastructure, mobile, solutions and services, enterprise-wide automation has become an important goal. To support this, Lenovo’s Global IT team has identified and implemented new digital transformation initiatives across the departments of finance, human resources (HR), and internal audit.
Given the evolving needs of the workforce as the organization grows, Lenovo’s Global IT team realized the potential for enterprise automation to streamline workflows, improve accuracy, and allow employees to focus on more value-added tasks.
To support the implementation of enterprise-wide automation, Lenovo’s Global IT team has successfully built automation processes across multiple workflows, enabling the global HR team to support and maximize business resources.
Business efficiency and process optimization through RPA
Managing a large workforce has led to high workloads for the Global HR team, which has to grapple with multiple tedious, repetitive, and time-consuming processes every month. As such, Lenovo’s Global IT team identified personal income tax declaration, expenses reimbursement, and payroll calculation as critical areas where automation would have a transformative effect by deploying software robots.
As a start, Lenovo built a Tax Declaration Robot that can automatically downloads data, generates individual income tax files, performs income tax declarations and data verification, and automatically reruns when an exception occurs.
Robots have also been built to enable highly visualized, structured, and digitalized payroll calculation processes, which facilitates the tracking of employee attendance in an efficient and convenient manner.
The robots also can also identify invoices through optical character recognition (OCR) software, and automatically generate, upload, and submit files in reimbursement processes, which has brought significant productivity gains. As a result, Lenovo has achieved time savings of more than 90%, increased recognition accuracy rate by nearly 99%, and substantially improved verification quality and timeliness on processes.
Maximized data utilization
Enterprise automation technology has helped Lenovo to significantly improve its data accuracy, and reduce the propensity for erroneous data input. Since implementing the robots, Lenovo has not encountered any business errors in such areas, and efficiency has increased by five to eight times, ensuring the timeliness of tax declaration and payroll payment. This helped the HR team to save at least 6,000 hours per year, freeing them to do more value-added work.
