JFE Shoji Trade Business Support, a group company of JFE Shoji Trade Corporation, held a presentation meeting of "Business Improvement Activities" in the company on October 13. The event was held online so that as many people as possible could participate, with about 60 people watching the presentations made by the First Office Support Office and the Accounting Support Office.

In the presentation on the theme of "RPA* for Inventory Sales Booking," the First Office Support Office introduced the automation of the manual bookkeeping process using RPA based on paper forms. As a result, we succeeded in drastically reducing the work time, which used to take 10 hours per month. From approximately 30 issues identified in the room, the Accounting Support Office took up a total of three tasks, two related to "reduction of document distribution" and "payment reconciliation. By digitizing documents and sharing them within the server, the distribution of documents was eliminated, preventing loss of documents and enabling verification at home. In addition, the use of Excel's macro function to automatically create e-mails has improved efficiency. The company presented measures to improve operations, such as reducing the number of times e-mails are sent out.

In the critique, the judges commented, "This is an excellent tactic for obtaining data and converting it to RPA, so I hope you will expand it to other operations as well. If we can make the data easier to use, we can move on to the next stage of development.

*An abbreviation for "Robotic Process Automation. A software robot technology that can automate clerical work done on a PC.