We're a high-tenure organization. The average tenure is 15 years, so we want to avoid growing our headcount. We're continuously growing by 10 to 15 percent annually, so we've had to add enough staff to process the documents. Our primary concern was to stop the increase in staff. Even after we added staff, we were falling behind because they were much slower at processing those documents.
We get documents from our suppliers and, as a distributor, send them to our customers. If the supplier hasn't sent them, we need to hound them. We were falling behind on our backlog of 250,000 documents. UiPath enabled us to avoid adding more employees. Automation was the way to go. We haven't added any more headcount, and the backlog is going down, but it isn't as much as we had hoped.
The automation has allowed us to provide customers with better-quality documents faster. It has also given employees more time to locate the documents we don't have, freeing them from mundane tasks. It's freed them from the work of typing data on a form into an ERP system.
We are talking about using it for our environmental and social governance initiatives. We're considering bringing together some of those pieces through automation to track our energy usage or what we've spent on some of the other bits and pieces and have a better ESG profile.