Ball Corporation has figured out how to save more than 64,000 hours of manual labor without resorting to layoffs.

Welcome to the Smarthis automation universe.

From the aluminum can to the latest telescope that sails through space this multinational combined with Smarthis’ RPA technology expertise stands out ahead of its competitors.

Ball Corporation, headquartered in Westminster, Colorado, is the world’s largest producer of sustainable aluminum packaging, for example, for beverages, personal care, cleaning materials, and more.

In addition, the company has a stake in the space business, providing instruments, aircraft, data intelligence, and advanced technology to commercial and government customers, primarily the United States.

Due to its global performance and the quantity of repetitive internal processes, the leaderships identified the opportunity to optimize the performance of their employees, redirecting efforts to the demands that require greater expertise, resulting in a better use of the intellectual capital.

In this way, identifying and automating repetitive and manually performed activities became fundamental for Ball to continue achieving better results. The goal was to save thousands of hours of human labor, reallocating this time to strategic activities, adding more value to the company.

This is how in the year 2018 Smarthis became an ally to Ball, as a response to the technological demands it owned. In December 2021, after three years of partnership, the company already had 170 automated processes in activity and more than 80 major projects concluded.

For these results to be achieved, maintaining the standard of delivery and quality, the entire journey of development and implementation of the APR projects at Ball followed the steps below:

	Mapping: before starting the project, Smarthis surveys and identifies the processes that may be candidates for undergoing automation. In other words, those that have well-defined parameters, high recurrence and high return potential.
	Design: this is where the planning of the project model takes place, from the optimization of the current activity flow to the analysis of the user interaction screens and the creation of the automation schema.
	Validation: the technical capability of automation is verified in relation to the volume of activities to be performed.
	Development: the process automation system is built by the development team, once the activities and data from the previous phase have been analyzed.
	Assisted operation: the moment when automation starts to operate in a controlled way, in consecutive and uninterrupted cycles, testing all the scenarios that may occur during the processes.
	Production: after the test flow, the improvements are made and their results ensure that the automation will handle all the existing variables and execute the solutions successfully

Benefits of automations developed by Smarthis

+64.000 hours returned	Error reduction in activities	Increased data accuracy	More time  for strategic activities

As a result of all this process, in the year 2021 alone, the automations developed by Smarthis returned more than 64 thousand hours of work to Ball’s business. Some of the benefits most mentioned by users are reduction of errors in activities, more accurate data and more free time for activities with higher benefit to the business, such as problem analysis and decision-making.

Our automations are present today in Ball’s units all over the world, in the Beverage, Aerosol and Corporate fronts, in several areas such as Commercial, Information Technology, Logistics, Production, Supplies, Marketing, among others.

Having more than 230 automated processes accelerating decision making and creating competitive advantages for Ball against its competitors, the company was faced with a new challenge: to standardize, integrate and optimize service centers that would meet the automation demands of all Ball units around the globe.

With the support of Smarthis, Ball developed a customized system of integrated and automated management. Thus, Ball was able to implement 3 global SSCs (Shared Service Centers) also called GBS (Global Business Services): one in Brazil, one in Mexico and one in the capital of Serbia (Belgrade).

The operationalization of these SSCs was developed in a way linked to the use of automations, because an intense and complex management was required, with a high flow of data and information.

The success was such, that Ball created the COE – Center of Excellence, a global center of excellence for RPA, to serve all the company’s units. This center is managed with the support of the Smarthis team, a responsibility we are honored to carry forward, each and every day with more engagement and innovation.