Intelligent Automation – Move Beyond Robotic Process Automation to Deliver Intelligent Automation.

Our client:

Our client is one of the leaders in the automotive finance sector operating in more than 30 countries worldwide.
Prides itself on offering a personal and bespoke service through a tailored and diverse approach, which is highly reputed and regarded amongst existing clientele and industry partners. Our client is at the forefront of the motor finance industry to provide innovative finance services to enable consumers and businesses to fulfil their needs.
The bank recognises the necessity to implement intelligent automation to improve efficiencies and support their technology advances. To reduc e repetitive manual tasks within customer service is key to ensure that resources are focused to improve customer experience and quality of services.
The client is ambitious to implement robotic process automation for certain processes considering the cost, complexity and the impact on operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.
Teamwill Group was engaged to identify the most appropriate processes for automation, implement intelligent automation and prove the added value, against an aggressive timescale.

Teamwill supports your intelligent automation advances to improve customer experience and operational efficiency.

Challenges:

Our client aimed to continue to deliver an exemplary customer experience while at the same time maintain core priorities such as increased productivity with lower costs, employee engagement especially during pandemic working conditions and reduced compliance and regulation risk.
There was an opportunity to improve efficiencies of processes within customer service team that were creating bottleneck, risking customer experience and compliance. An increase in demand for refunds led to backlog having a knock-on effect to other customer facing activities, as a result of late refunds complaints increased putting additional pressure on the team.
Bank faced an additional challenge of potentially having to recruit, onboard and train resources to support the team, COVID restrictions made this even more challenging. They had a very specific ambition to redeploy resource from multiple key processes in a very short time period and within tight budget. The client had a limited automation centre of excellence and they wanted to build this at the same time as delivery to ensure maximum benefits and return on investment. An added challenge was that this would need to be delivered entirely remotely with all stakeholders working away from the office for the duration of the project. Teamwill was tasked with providing a solution that would satisfy the requirements and at the same time overcome the challenges faced by the client.

• Scoping:

1- Analysis of our client’s infrastructure and processes to determine which automation solution will be best to satisfy the ambition and challenges.

2- Analyse multiple business processes to determine which will have the greatest impact to resolve the problem.
Consider complexity, feasibility for automation, business priority, client resource and potential benefits.

3- Deliver using Agile methodologies to ensure very fast deployment from discovery and analysis to development, test and go live in order to realise benefits quickly to enable the client to redeploy of resources to customer facing activity.

4- To improve and monitor specific metrics that reflect the efficiency of each automated process, giving the desired KPI’s and SLA’s that the client requires to overcome the challenges they faced.

5- To build a Centre of Excellence to ensure the client is in a strong position to sustain and scale automation.

• Solution:

Teamwill and our client determined that Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is the best solution as UiPath infrastructure exists within group and that the processes within scope have a high potential to have RPA applied. It was critical that Teamwill had knowledge of RPA and UiPath and experience of the motor finance industry. Also, having a proven track record of delivering RPA at an efficient cost and with an Agile approach yet ensuring very high standards as expected by our client.

The program deliverables comprise:

• Agile plan to ensure 8-week deadline met, this meant that Analysis, Development, testing and go live to production would be done in parallel. Development of the first process start within 2 days of project start.
• Infrastructure analysed and prepared to provide development and testing environment that was fully compatible with the production for as seamless transition from test to go live.
• Process pipeline and sprints planned considering the time to analyse and prepare each process, the client’s priorities, opportunity to reuse code and deliver into production in a manageable and scalable timeline.
• To allow for remote working, processes captured and prepared for development using video, screenshots and other methods in conjunction with the client’s process owners, SME’s and other stakeholders. The artefacts had to be simple and concise for stakeholders working remotely to be able to understand quickly and easily what is required by developers.
• Candidate processes in production in week 7 allowing 1 week for hyper care and client training to allow scheduling, analysis of dashboard and simple fault finding.

“Since the work this year is seen as a significant success, the robots will soon be heading to many more departments of our organisation in 2021.“
Client – Chief Information officer

Automated processes

1. Refunds backlog eliminated and current payments verified and proposed within clients required timescale.
Reducing the resource processing backlog improved customer satisfaction and team moral.
2. Automating refunds approvals allowed senior team members to focus on other tasks to improve KPI’s.
3. By automating the transfer of customer complaints details from one system to another eliminated errors and ensured customer complaints were being addressed much more quickly.
4. Notes from calls and emails added to the customers account before office hours giving up to date information to customer service team to allow improved service when call handling.
5. Documents received from customers added to account, this ensured robust data protection and information always at hand for the team when it is required.
6. Use of OCR to extract information from PDF reports and input the relevant data into the operating system. This ensured that downstream invoicing process can be started earlier.
7. Bulk Invoices prepared for customers with credit lines with multiple accounts, data retrieved, verified and invoice created. Process carried out at peak periods,
automation reducing strain on teams.
8. Collection of information from various sources combined to allow finance department make faster payments to customers having all verifications required.
Mistakes eliminated and manual processing reduced.
9. Appointments arranged with customers logged to maintain up to date information for the team, this reduced mistakes and double booking.
10. Feed data from multiple sources to create prepare up to date master report allowing up to date information from vendors to be easily accessed, reducing time team takes referencing multiple documents.

Results:

The solution has delivered against several major strategic objectives for automation and operational efficiencies, all within cost, time, pandemic restrictions and resource challenges.
There has been a clear step change and acceleration in our client’s automation ambition realising benefits within a very short time span of 8 weeks. Our client
continues to structure the intelligent automation Centre of Excellence within the organisation to put the automation at the heart of their digitalization resolution.
This has been achieved through providing specific expertise by Teamwill’s RPA service centre and working closely with our client at all stages of the project.