How Cargill Saved $19M Across 236 Automations with Automation Anywhere
Cargill, the global agribusiness operating across 70 countries, deployed Automation Anywhere’s intelligent automation platform over five years to standardize processes across Source-to-Pay, Order Entry, and vendor management. The program generated $19M in cumulative savings, captured 700 improvement opportunities, and delivered 236 automations by FY2023.
Impact
$19M
Cumulative savings from automation program
700
Improvement opportunities captured
236
Automations deployed by FY2023
50,000
Orders processed annually via automation
268,000+
Inactive vendor records deactivated
Challenge
Cargill’s global operations across 70 countries relied on inconsistent, manual processes for order entry, vendor management, and Source-to-Pay workflows, limiting standardization and creating significant labor costs at scale.
Solution
Cargill deployed Automation Anywhere’s RPA and intelligent automation platform through a central CoE, automating 236 processes including OCR-based order entry and vendor record management across global functions.
Tools & Technologies
What Leaders Say
“Automation can benefit the company beyond just FTE savings. It’s also Customer Satisfaction which is a huge opportunity for Cargill overall.”
“Our accumulated savings to date is $19M, and from idea to project conversion we’ve captured 700 opportunities.”
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Full Story
Cargill is one of the world’s largest privately held companies, operating across 70 countries and serving 125 markets in food, agribusiness, finance, and industrial sectors. At that scale, inconsistent processes across regions create compounding inefficiencies: manual order entry, fragmented vendor records, and paper-based workflows slow down operations and increase error risk across thousands of daily transactions.
Before automation, Cargill’s operations were characterized by high manual labor in repetitive cross-functional processes. Order entry required staff to manually process tens of thousands of orders per year. Vendor record management was sprawling and unsanitized. Source-to-Pay workflows varied by region without standardization. The company recognized that achieving operational consistency at global scale required replacing manual handling with intelligent, rules-based automation.
Cargill established a Center of Excellence (CoE) for intelligent automation and deployed Automation Anywhere across functions including Source-to-Pay, Order Entry, and vendor data management. The team used RPA combined with OCR to automate the processing of 50,000 orders annually, and built a workflow to deactivate over 268,000 inactive vendor records — a data hygiene initiative that had previously required significant manual effort. The CoE operated as the coordination layer, identifying opportunities, managing the automation pipeline, and tracking outcomes across the organization.
Over five years, Cargill deployed 236 automations and accumulated $19M in savings. The program captured 700 distinct improvement opportunities from idea through conversion. Beyond cost reduction, automation improved customer satisfaction by making key processes touchless and consistent — an outcome CoE lead Bonnie Dallum identified as equally important to the financial returns.
Cargill is evolving its automation program toward top-down executive collaboration and exploring task mining and citizen development to expand the pipeline beyond centrally identified use cases. The five-year journey illustrates how large, operationally complex organizations can systematically build automation maturity — starting with high-volume repetitive processes and expanding toward intelligence-augmented workflows.
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