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Case Study

Arnott’s Recipe for Automation Success

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75

manual customer orders now processed digitally


99

sustained week-on-week robot success rate

10

average months to ROI

Overview

The Arnott’s Group is the custodian of some of Australia’s most recognized food brands. It employs over 4,000 people and has manufacturing operations across Asia Pacific.

Optimizing operations and unlocking growth

The Arnott’s Group embraced a structured approach to enterprise automation to optimize operations and unlock new capacity for growth. Their strategy includes focused planning and prioritization to ensure ROI.

Founded in 1865, Arnott’s is best known for its Tim Tam biscuits and now produces over 1,045 products across Australia, New Zealand, and Asia.

To support local and international growth, Arnott’s turned to automation to increase efficiency and free up time for high-value work. Their key takeaway from previous automation attempts: treat automation as a sustained business program—not just a tech solution.

Ashling Partnership: Bringing structure & scale

Jari Laurikainen, IT Director of Enterprise Applications at Arnott’s, led the initiative and partnered with Ashling Partners.

Ashling brought a mature, structured automation approach with built-in governance—leveraging UiPath, which was ideal for end-to-end automation across systems like SAP.

“What we were missing in the past was a structured way to build, deploy, and sustain automation—and that’s what Ashling Partners brought to the table.”
- Jari Laurikainen, IT Director, Arnott’s Group

Early Wins: Freeing Up 60 Hours Per Week

Led by Patrick Massad, IT Manager of Planning & Automation, the Enterprise Applications team quickly focused on high-impact use cases—starting with manual sales order processing.

Many customers still sent orders via email, not EDI. Ashling and UiPath’s Document Understanding automated this by extracting data from PDFs and inputting it into SAP.

Now: 

  • 75% of manual orders are automated

  • 60+ hours of weekly manual effort saved

  • Reduced afternoon stress of late orders

“We switched on UiPath and essentially automated 75% of our manual orders overnight.”

- Jari Laurikainen

Automating Invoice Processing

The team also automated invoice processing with UiPath Document Understanding, combining RPA and AI to handle:

  • Invoice reading

  • Three-way matching

  • Posting in SAP

This allowed Arnott’s to bring invoice processing in-house, with a small team managing exceptions while the robot handles data entry.

“UiPath delivers significant strategic value across our supply chain, finance, and commercial operations.”

- Sean McLintock, Chief Digital and Technology Officer

Scaling Across the Enterprise

  • Average ROI within 10 months

  • Centre of Excellence (CoE) and Modern Robotic Operating Center (mROC) established

  • mROC (managed by Ashling) provides ongoing support and monitoring via UiPath Insights

They’ve built a prioritized automation backlog with projected business benefits and technical feasibility assessments.

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