Robotic process automation at Aquafin

The Customer

Aquafin collects wastewater from the Flemish municipalities and treats it before it is returned to nature.  As a result, the quality of our watercourses has improved enormously. Aquafin was established by the Flemish Region in 1990, for the purpose of expanding, operating and pre-financing the wastewater treatment infrastructure in Flanders.

The Challenge

Aquafin is faced with various repetitive administrative processes. One process in particular is related to the creation of a pdf bundle of vendor invoices for works performed on the territory of Flemish municipalities. This used to be a manual process, whereby once a month the documents were to be retrieved from a database, bundled into a single pdf file and sent towards the corresponding municipality.

The Solution

Robonext first created a Proof-of-Concept (PoC) making use of UiPath RPA technology to automate the creation of the bundled pdf file per municipality, containing all the relevant invoices that are retrieved by the RPA robot from a database. After creating the file, the archiving is performed in a document management system and the pdf file is sent by email to the municipality.

After the succesful PoC, this process was industrialized and is now running at regular intervals on an unattended robot.

The Results

The automation of this case leads to a significant reduction of administrative workload.

Jan Van de Velde, Business Process Analist at Aquafin: “If we want to guarantee our quality in a fast evolving digital world, we have to move forward and use innovative technology such as RPA. We partnered up with Robonext to introduce RPA at Aquafin. Our first project was a success and it reduced the workload with 90 %. A number that will be music to the ears of our board of directors.”