How Cargill Saved $19M Across 236 Automations with Automation Anywhere

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.