How Mediq Scaled Automation Across Europe with a UiPath Center of Excellence

Mediq supplies hospitals, care institutions, clinics, and patients across 14 European countries with essential medical products and services. Operating at this scale — in a regulated environment where accuracy in order fulfillment directly affects patient care — creates substantial operational complexity. Supply chains, order processing, HR, finance, and customer service workflows must all run reliably and consistently across different markets, languages, and system environments.

Automation experiments at Mediq date to 2018, when early RPA initiatives demonstrated that robotic process automation could reduce manual effort in pockets of the business. But those successes stayed local. Knowledge lived with individual contributors in specific countries, and automations built for one market couldn’t easily transfer to another. A solution that worked well in the Netherlands offered no leverage in Germany or the Nordics. This fragmentation limited the organization’s ability to scale automation’s proven value systematically.

In 2024, Mediq established a group-wide Center of Excellence for automation, working closely with UiPath and implementation partner Tacstone Technology to set development standards, documentation requirements, and governance structures. The CoE shifted from local ownership to shared capability. A parallel cloud migration moved Mediq’s automation platform off-premises, creating a more consistent foundation for development and testing. One of the first major deployments through the CoE was a Document Understanding solution for sales order processing: Mediq receives large volumes of PDF purchase orders from institutional clients in different formats and languages, which had historically required manual data entry into SAP. The deployed solution extracts key fields, validates them against Mediq’s master data, and applies human-in-the-loop controls before posting orders — ensuring accuracy in a context where errors carry real healthcare consequences.

The results confirmed the value of the structured approach: by end of 2024 the CoE oversaw 55 automations saving 55,000 hours of manual work in a single year. The Document Understanding solution processes more than 50,000 documents annually at 98% accuracy, with 35% flowing through without any manual intervention. Beyond efficiency, the process also surfaced data quality issues that had previously gone undetected, improving downstream operations in supply chain and finance.

Mediq is now piloting agentic automation using UiPath Agent Builder and Maestro for internal HR workflows — testing how AI agents can handle unstructured employee queries that require both knowledge access and follow-up actions. The approach is deliberately measured, reflecting the regulated environment in which Mediq operates. Jasper Severs, Process Excellence Director, frames the trajectory clearly: the foundation built now — standards, governance, shared ownership — is what makes responsible scaling possible in the years ahead.