Bangkok, Thailand – 8 September 2021: IBM (NYSE: IBM) announced today that IRPC Public Company Limited (IRPC), one of the leading integrated petroleum and petrochemical companies in the region, has successfully adopted and deployed IBM® Robotic Process Automation (RPA) with Automation Anywhere for its financial processes. This move has significantly increased efficiency, accuracy, speed, and cost savings in IRPC’s finance workflows and processes, as well as increased employee productivity amidst current challenges. 

The integration of cutting-edge technology into its business processes is part of the ongoing IRPC 4.0 journey, which aims to improve operations and make it Thailand’s leading digital innovative company. To achieve this goal, IRPC needs timely insights into costs, performance and profitability, analyzed using structured data. For this reason, IRPC has begun the first phase of implementing automation technology beginning with Corporate Accounting and Finance Department (CAF).  

With RPA, deployed by Metro Systems Corporation Plc, IRPC automates the production cost reporting from multiple systems 86% faster. The system can also monitor tasks, organize reports into folders, and then send alerts to the employees when reports are available. By using IBM technology, IRPC can easily and quickly automate the financial processes on a large scale. Software robots, also known as bots or IBOT (the name given by IRPC), can complete tasks without delay based on Artificial Intelligence (AI) insights to enable IRPC to transform digitally. 

The solution not only improves accuracy but also helps IRPC employees complete their tasks better and faster, even though employees work from home at times during the pandemic. The RPA allows IRPC employees to perform other value-added activities, while educating themselves to analyze data and make important decisions that require a higher level of expertise.  

“It is clear that enterprises with innovation and innovative workforces like IRPC are better equipped to respond to a changing landscape and capitalize on the key business opportunities of the future,” said Patama Chantaruck, VP for Indochina Expansion and MD for IBM Thailand. “IBM, ranked as a market leader by both Forrester and Everest Group, along with our ecosystem partner Metro Systems, is proud to provide IRPC with leading automation technology and our industry expertise to accelerate the company’s digital transformation and growth trajectory.” 

With the ability to work with multiple integrated systems both internally and externally, IBM’s automation or the bot can automatically access the banking system as IRPC’s finance staff does, downloading and categorizing data to ensure it is ready for the staff to analyze. With a reduction of 40 working hours and 86% faster processing of financial operational speed on a monthly basis, the automation has significantly transformed and improved IRPC’s workflow. 

“By further digitizing processes and operations, we can gain accurate and timely insights anytime, anywhere to truly understand the root causes of problems and make the right data-driven decisions – that’s critical especially in this time of challenges,” said Mr. Chawalit Tippawanich, President and Chief Executive Officer of IRPC Public Company Limited. “Deploying IBM’s automation technology from IBM and extending its use across the company today will help us build a more adaptive business and enhance our ability to manage a huge data volume, which is one of the next steps in our strategic IRPC 4.0 journey. This technology will definitely give us an edge in competitive markets.” 

“After the successful implementation of the first RPA in the CAF department, IRPC is now expanding the use of automation to 60 other projects covering many functional units across the company. IRPC is also exploring intelligent automation (IA), which is a combination of automation technologies namely AI, business process automation (BPA) and robotic process automation (RPA) in the future,” added Mr. Tippawanich.   

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Other information  

According to the study by IBM Institute for Business Value (IBV), in collaboration with Oxford Economics, the nature of machine work will change significantly by 2024. The percentage of tasks overall—administrative, departmental, and cross-enterprise and expert—will continue to grow substantially, with the largest percentage increase in cross-enterprise and expert work. Breaking that down further, one in five respondents report that machines will perform cross enterprise transactions across multiple departments, and five percent say machines will perform expert work—problem solving based on real-time information or multiple inputs.  

IBM recently acquired WDG Automation to advance AI-Infused automation capabilities for enterprises. IBM automation services today has helped many industries including pharmaceutical, automotive, insurance, banking, and more, to bring efficiency, cost saving and greater productivity to their operations. 

About IRPC Public Company Limited or IRPC 

IRPC is a leading integrated petroleum and petrochemical complex with fully managed infrastructure including ports, tanks and power plants. It is situated in IRPC Industrial Estate in Rayong, Thailand.  

Media contacts: 

Suphara Sanguanchokchai  

IRPC Public Company Limited  

Email: Suphara.s@irpc.co.th 

Paranee Reymondon 

IBM Thailand Co., Ltd. 

Email: paranee@th.ibm.com