Nexia SAB&T drives RPA-led improvement project at beauty and personal care group
When a leading South African beauty and personal care company set out to streamline and enhance how it resolves billing and delivery discrepancies, it launched a performance improvement project with Nexia SAB&T as its consulting partner.
The company has a portfolio of more than 50 brands and over 5,000 products across categories including face care, bath & body, fragrance, haircare, make-up, suncare, and homecare. Its multimillion-dollar sales are driven by direct channels, availability in major retail outlets, and the e-commerce channel.
While the vast majority of sales proceed smoothly and according to plan, the company occasionally faces customer issues related to pricing and returns. Prior to the performance improvement project, the process for managing overcharge (pricing) and returns (shortage) claims was suboptimal – highly manual, time-consuming, and prone to error.
Processing claims typically took between three and four weeks, with each claim requiring approximately 30 minutes of manual effort. This created operational inefficiencies, delayed recoveries, and increased exposure to human error.
Driving efficiency and accuracy with RPA
Working with Nexia SAB&T, the joint project team designed and implemented an automated robotic process automation (RPA) solution to streamline the end-to-end overcharge and returns claims process.
The solution has now been successfully rolled out across the client’s largest retail partners. It supports high-volume claim processing across multiple regions and customer groups.
The automation has removed a significant portion of manual work, accelerating processing times and improving accuracy, while also enabling employees to focus on higher-value activities such as controls and data-driven analysis. Automated steps include secure login to supplier portals, downloading relevant claim documents, intelligent classification of claims (overcharge versus returns), and data extraction and conversion.
The RPA bot also handles product ID mapping and reconciliation between client and supplier systems, while automatically inputting claims data into the company’s ERP system (SAP).
Reaping the benefits
Fast forward to today, and the implementation has delivered significant gains in efficiency, accuracy, and scalability. Key results include reducing end-to-end processing time from 3 to 4 weeks to under 7 minutes, and cutting per-claim processing time from around 30 minutes to approximately 2 minutes.
These benefits have a direct impact on the customer experience, who are now supported more quickly and efficiently. They also deliver meaningful value to the beauty and personal care company and its retail partners, including a significant reduction in manual effort and human error.
In parallel, the project has laid the foundation for further operational improvements, with insights that can be used to extend RPA capabilities into other areas of the business where similar efficiencies can be achieved.
Reflecting on the project, Nexia SAB&T said it is proud to have contributed to this strategic initiative. “By automating the overcharge and returns claims process, we helped our client transform a slow, manual workflow into a highly efficient, accurate, and scalable operation. The project demonstrates the power of intelligent automation in driving operational excellence and delivering measurable business value.”
