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Unieuro: Redefining Retail Operations with AI-Powered Automation

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Unieuro, Italy’s leading omnichannel retailer of consumer electronics and appliances, connects millions of B2C customers each year through over 500 stores and the e-commerce platform. With more than 5,000 employees, Unieuro combines innovation, proximity, and service excellence.

The Challenge

Can AI make retail operations faster, smarter, and more human?

Across over 500 stores and advanced e-commerce platform, Unieuro manages millions of customer interactions annually. Behind this scale lies a complex web of processes – from purchase orders to invoice processing – that can be time-consuming and prone to error. As customer expectations rise and operational complexity grows, the company recognized the need to evolve its automation journey, moving from process optimization to intelligent orchestration.
Beyond retail operations, critical areas such as procurement, finance, logistics, and IT faced growing complexity. Managing purchase orders, registering domestic and foreign invoices, handling customs duties, and tracking investment projects all relied on repetitive, time-consuming tasks.

The goal was clear: move from rule-based automation (RPA) to context-aware, agentic systems capable of decision-making.

electronics store

The Approach

To tackle these challenges, Avvale guided Unieuro through a wave-based transformation powered by AI and automation. Firstly, we focused on procurement and supply chain, automating purchase order acquisition, loading reminders, cash discrepancies, and store requests. Finance followed, allowing the company to handle investment projects end-to-end. From initial approval to automatic capitalization and amortization. Domestic and international invoices, utility bills, and customs duties were also brought into the automated workflow. Commercial Back-office operations are under transformation, with automated sell-out management, supplier follow-ups, duplicate negotiations, and account reconciliation. Price verification for purchase orders became fully automated, using historical data comparisons and rapid alerts to ensure accuracy, while AI classification tools streamlined the handling of thousands of store requests.

Building on this foundation, Unieuro has evolved an automation originally developed by Avvale in 2021 with classic RPA technology for Purchase Order Management, transforming it into an advanced agentic process that empowers buyers in negotiations and supplier decision-making. The new intelligent layer automates validation, detects price deviations for human review, and effortlessly adapts to evolving procurement strategies through Context Grounding, with every step of the workflow – RPA, Agent, and Human – seamlessly orchestrated by UiPath Maestro.

Every step followed a structured methodology: a discovery of existing processes, a detailed cost-benefit evaluation, careful implementation, and change management sessions with business users to ensure adoption. Unieuro leveraged semantic interpretation algorithms to classify requests, Document Understanding for invoice extraction, and RPA to verify SAP orders, creating a seamless blend of human oversight and machine efficiency. Moreover, in 2024 a joint central governance team (CoE) has been created in Unieuro, focused on digital workforce management.

electronics store

The Impact

Today, Unieuro’s digital workforce operates seamlessly across its business ecosystem. Tasks that once required thousands of manual hours are now managed autonomously by intelligent agents that understand, act, and learn.

The results are tangible: Unieuro’s digital workforce now manages thousands of tasks autonomously, dramatically reducing manual effort and increasing operational agility. Procurement and supply chain tasks dropped from 20 days per month to just 10 hours. Over 100 capital projects were automated annually, producing 10,000 digital assets with real-time tracking dashboards. Finance operations – including foreign invoice and customs fee processing – were reduced from 20 days per month to 11 hours. Price verification and SAP order management became faster and more accurate through automated data comparisons and rapid alerts.

Unieuro’s journey shows that AI doesn’t just automate processes, it elevates them. By transforming complex workflows into seamless, intelligent operations, Unieuro is building a smarter, faster, and more empowered retail organization.

 

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