Zijin Mining: Empowering Employees with Digital Workforce to Support Business Growth

Zijin Mining is a large multinational mining group mainly engaged in the global exploration and development of copper, gold, zinc and lithium projects, as well as engineering technological research. The company is a leader in global mining industry and has significant mining investment projects in 16 countries.

As the company has grown in size, Zijin Mining established a Financial Shared Services Center in 2016. Initially, the center served approximately 12 enterprises. Currently more than 130 companies have been integrated into the services provided by the Financial Shared Services Center. The rapid expansion in revenue and business volume has put significant pressure on human resources. Increasing the number of employees or the workload of individuals is not conducive to reducing costs and improving efficiency. Repetitive tasks also hamper the improvement of employees' work efficiency and creativity.

Moreover, there is a growing demand to integrate various business systems with the central hub, including SAP, contract systems, and funds systems. The absence of integration among platforms leads to the creation of data silos, necessitating manual intervention. Simultaneously, the need for swift connections between evolving business systems through interfaces incurs substantial costs.

In response to these challenges, Zijin Mining collaborated with Laiye to optimize daily operations at the Financial Shared Services Center by implementing intelligent automation software robots. The impact was noteworthy, with phase one implementation of nine processes resulting in a monthly time savings exceeding 700 hours. In the subsequent phase two collaboration, incorporating an additional 8 processes, the center experienced enhancements in both work efficiency and quality.

Automating follow-up emails in the OA system

In cases where documents remain unprocessed for more than 5 days, the shared services team needs to promptly send email reminders to reviewers. The manual process involves navigating the "Financial Shared System" to locate the document, checking its start time, then accessing the document imaging system to verify the scan time. Subsequently, the time difference from the current moment is calculated, and the lesser value is considered as the document's pending time. If this duration exceeds 5 days, personnel must log into the OA system (collaborative office system) to dispatch an email reminder to the responsible person. Manually inputting data from multiple systems into Excel for calculations poses a risk of errors.

With the deployment of intelligent automation software robots, these steps are executed automatically with precision and speed. The system accurately determines the pending time and dispatches emails using a predefined template. This automation results in a time saving of 4 hours per day for each relevant personnel. Additionally, it intelligently consolidates multiple follow-up documents for the same responsible person into a single email, preventing information redundancy. In cases of responsible persons with the same name, the system further distinguishes the correct individual through employee numbers, ensuring the precise delivery of follow-up emails.

Invoice verification for improved efficiency and accuracy

Invoice verification is one of the daily tasks for financial staff. They need to log into the financial shared system and the imaging system to obtain information for all invoices from the previous day. After which, they access the National Tax Service website, input the invoice code, number, date of issue, and verification code for inspection, and finally send the verification results via email to business personnel. The process is monotonous and not only dampens the enthusiasm of financial staff but also poses a risk of human error.

However, after deploying intelligent automation software robots, staff only need to input the verification code, and the rest of the steps can be automated, saving each worker 8 hours per day. This also effectively avoids human risks and helps build a fair and transparent Financial Shared Services Center.

Workday SAP exchange rate maintenance

Maintaining exchange rates involves accessing and querying official websites of 4 different countries. The master data administrator needs to obtain the daily exchange rate information against the Renminbi and download it into an Excel spreadsheet. The method of querying varies by country's website. For example, the website of the Monetary Policy Department of the People's Bank of China requires staff to view the daily central parity announcement and extract numerical information from the text. The website of the National Bank of Kyrgyzstan requires inputting the currency and date, then clicking to query, etc. Additionally, frequent access may result in failures during the process, forcing staff to retry multiple times, which is both frustrating and time-consuming.

By introducing intelligent automation technology, robots can use AI-enabled text comprehension to extract exchange rate information from unstructured central parity announcements and read exchange rates presented in table format using table recognition capabilities. In case of access failures, they can automatically retry. Once data is successfully obtained, the intelligent automation software robot will log into the SAP system to input data and complete the exchange rate maintenance work.

"Zijin Mining committs to innovation, as its our core competitive strength. The introduction of Laiye's intelligent automation technology has improved the work efficiency and quality of the Financial Shared Services Center, invigorated our employees, and helped the company to further reduce costs and increase efficiency in the face of fierce competition."  said by Zhou Wei, Director of Operation and Optimization of Zijin Mining.

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