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

The context:

The client is one of the leaders in the automotive finance sector, operating in more than 30 countries worldwide and prides itself on offering a highly regarded bespoke personal service through a tailored and diverse approach. Being at the forefront of providing innovative services, the bank recognised the need to implement intelligent automation to improve efficiency and support its technological advances. Reducing repetitive manual tasks within customer service would ensure that resources focus on enhancing customer experience and the quality of services.  

The client was ambitious to implement Intelligent Automation IA considering the cost, complexity and impact on operational efficiency and customer satisfaction.  

Teamwill Group was engaged to identify the most appropriate processes for automation, implement intelligent automation IA and proving the added value against an aggressive timescale.

Challenges: 

The client aimed to continue to deliver an outstanding customer experience while at the same time maintaining core priorities such as increased productivity with lower costs and employee engagement with post-pandemic new hybrid working conditions, at a time of increased compliance and regulatory risk.  

An increase in demand for refunds of reschedules led to a backlog, which had an adverse knock-on effect on other customer-facing activities. As a result of late repayments, complaints increased, adding additional pressure on the Customer Service team. There was an opportunity to improve the efficiencies of processes within the team by removing the bottlenecks that effected the customer’s experience and risked compliance requirements.  

The Client faced the additional challenge of potentially having to recruit, onboard and train extra resources to support the team at the time of COVID restrictions. They had a particular requirement to redeploy resources from other areas of the business in a limited time and on a tight budget.  

In addition, the client had planned an Automation Centre of Excellence, which they wanted to build simultaneously to ensure maximum benefits and return on investment. This would need to be delivered entirely remotely as all stakeholders would be working away from the office for the project’s duration. 

Scoping:  

1- Analyse the client’s infrastructure and processes to determine which automation solution best satisfied their ambition and challenges. 
2- Analyse multiple business processes to determine which will most significantly impact resolving the problem. Considering the complexity, feasibility of automation, business priority, client resource and potential benefits. 
3- Deliver using agile methodologies to ensure swift deployment from discovery and analysis to development, test and go live to realise benefits quickly, enabling the client to redeploy resources to customer-facing activity. 
4- To improve and monitor specific metrics that reflect the efficiency of each automated process, giving the desired KPIs and SLAs that the client requires to overcome the challenges that 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 the client determined that Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is the best solution as UiPath infrastructure already existed within the group, and the processes within scope had a high potential to apply RPA. UiPath also had a proven track record of delivering RPA cost-efficiently using an agile approach and ensuring ambitious standards were meet to the client’s expectations. Teamwill needed to understand about RPA and UiPath with experience in the motor finance industry.  

The program deliverables comprise:  

• Agile plan to ensure the 8-week deadline was met. This meant that Analysis, Development, testing, and go live to production would be done in parallel. Development of the first process starts within two days of the project’s start.  
• Infrastructure analysed and prepared to provide a development and testing environment that was fully compatible with the production environment for a 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, and an opportunity to reuse code and deliver it into production in a manageable and scalable timeline.  
• To allow for remote working, processes are captured and prepared for development using video, screenshots and other methods in conjunction with the client’s process owners, SMEs and other stakeholders. The artefacts had to be simple and concise for stakeholders working remotely to understand quickly and easily what developers require. 
• Candidate processes in production in week 7, allowing one week for hyper care and client training to allow scheduling, dashboard analysis, and simple fault finding. 

 

Automated processes 

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

 

Outcome: 

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 brief period of 8 weeks. Our client continues to structure the intelligent automation Centre of Excellence within the organisation to put automation at the heart of their digitalisation resolution.  

This has been achieved through providing specific expertise by Teamwill’s RPA service centre and working closely with our client at all project stages. 

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

Who is Teamwill? 

Teamwill provides the best-of-breed knowledge, innovation and expertise in Asset Finance & Auto Finance to help leading providers transformation successfully. It has over 650 leading consultants and experts who support customers’ digitalization of the front and back office and help to integrate the most innovative software solutions in the market. The company is international, with offices in 10 countries and the head office in France with over 100+ clients.