Eva Dinneen and Britney Dunn

April 2023

Operations Specialist, San Jose, CA
Customer Service Representative Houston, TX

Valin started on the Robotic Process Automation (RPA) journey in late 2021. It is changing the way Valin does business. Two employees at opposite ends of their Valin journey have embraced the RPA process with open arms. Eva Dinneen (right), Operations Specialist in San Jose has been with the company for 24 years and held many different positions. Britney Dunn (below), Customer Service Representative in Houston joined straight out of college and has been with the company for three years.

The first big RPA project was automating the order entry process for one of Valin’s largest semiconductor customers. The RPA team approached Britney with an idea to automate the order entry process. She could have resisted for fear that “the Robot was going to take her job.” The complete opposite happened. Britney was excited about the project and saw how the opportunity would provide her more time to focus on tasks that could not be automated. The process was bumpy with several changes, challenges, failures, and successes along the way. Through the chaos, Britney kept a positive attitude and provided suggestions on how the automation could be improved. This resulted in the creation of an order entry automation template with two major benefits. It takes less time to automate the order entry process for customers and provides a standardized process. Proof that the automation is working is in the numbers. In January 2022, only 5% of all the lines entered from sales orders were keyed in using the order entry template and by December of the same year, the number exploded to 37%, from 353 lines to 2,032 lines. Automating order entry also benefited the Accounts Receivable department by streamlining the cash application process.

Eva embraces the benefits of automation and is not afraid to approach the RPA team to discuss issues regarding current processes. She does this to make Valin a better more efficient company. She may not always have the answer to improving a process, but she understands there is a better way. For example, in P21 the Commit Date Field captures the day Valin promises the customer they will receive the product. However, a field that showed when the customer wanted the product was missing. Thus, the Need Date field was added to capture the data. Eva was unsatisfied and wanted a way to easily review and react to the data as well. Based on her recommendation, the Need Date Tool was designed. The Need Date Tool allows Customer Service Representatives (CSR) to quickly locate and ship products that a customer “needs” now but are not scheduled to be shipped. The tool also allows the CSR to reallocate inventory from orders that have Need Dates far in the future to orders with immediate Need Dates. This helps satisfy the customer and allows Valin to better utilize our inventory investment.

A primary semiconductor customer sends hundreds of emails to customer service each week, with 95% or more of the emails do not require a response or action. The remaining 5% contain new purchase orders. It is difficult to tell the difference without opening each message. Going through each email message took eight or more hours a week. This is another example that, Eva brought to the RPA team, and now there is an automated process that reviews every email, locates the new purchase orders, and enters them into P21 using the template that Britney helped design.

Britney and Eva are both comfortable in allowing the automation process (aka the BOT) to do the work the BOT can do, which allows time to do the work the BOT cannot do.