Saving Time and Money by Establishing an RPA Center of Excellence
The client was a classic candidate for RPA, with staff performing a large volume of manual activities across their legacy application ecosystem: a resource intensive, error prone scenario. Our client partnered with Zelusit to create a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Center of Excellence (CoE).
hours saved weekly
errors reduction
employee satisfaction
Background and Challenge Story
Our client, a large securities regulator, was performing a large number of operational activities manually, which was resource intensive and susceptible to manual error. They needed a solution that would offer immediate benefits and alleviate some of the burden of manual activities, while making progress on the organization’s overall digital transformation journey. The solution also needed to work across a spectrum of different legacy technology and in a variety of use cases.
Solution Story
Establishing a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Center of Excellence (CoE)
In 2021, the client, in partnership with Zelusit, a Microsoft Solution Partner, established a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Center of Excellence (CoE) to support its digital transformation strategy and its goal to improve internal efficiency and regulatory responsiveness.
The team consisted of a client platform manager and two developers from Zelusit. Working closely with the client’s regulatory branches, the team is committed to the launch of automation solutions and the establishment of RPA best practices and standards within the organization. Currently, all RPA automations within the organization must go through the CoE.
Building an RPA Bot with Microsoft’s Power Automate and AI Builder
After securing organizational buy-in, the team began with a pilot project, tailored to four specific use cases. This strategy minimized delivery risk and allowed for early lessons learnt to be applied to subsequent releases. The client selected Microsoft’s Power Automate for the project, as its capabilities cater to their needs, the platform is cost-effective, and they could implement it leveraging their existing infrastructure.
The project resulted in a custom-branded bot which functions essentially as a virtual employee that can extract information, using Microsoft’s AI Builder, from legacy systems and portals and assign processes or tasks automatically. Our client is the first of its kind for a Canadian organization to adopt Microsoft Power Automate for RPA.
One of the most complex use cases the CoE delivered so far was helping a branch to validate the market-exempt filings by verifying activity fees and late fees and reviewing a form. The bot sits atop existing legacy applications and flags the filings in case any of the mandatory conditions are not met and sends an email to the business team.
Reporting with Microsoft’s Power BI
The team also set up a reporting structure connected to each use case, using Microsoft’s Power BI, allowing the client to extract insights and make improvements for future use cases. This process aligns with the client’s goal to become fully data-driven organization, a core pillar of its digital transformation strategy.
Benefits Story
As a leader in adopting Microsoft Power Automate, our client completed its 6-month pilot during the early second quarter of 2022 and rolled out the first four use cases. The bot has been transcribing dozens of PDFs into a digital portal, sorting firm filings in the correct folder, reformatting filing submission errors, and more daily.
Today, RPA is recognized as a key component of the digital transformation strategy and managed as a product. A product roadmap has been articulated supporting continuous delivery of RPA use cases; the experience and reusability of the initial design and code have become an asset, helping the CoE deliver solutions faster as they progress.
The client realized:
• Time and money saved by automating daily tasks: ~80 hours saved weekly
• Manual error reduction
• Analytics to improve future processes
• Higher employee satisfaction
A key benefit of Microsoft’s RPA technology is the significantly shorter time frame required to deliver solutions that traditionally take months, allowing our client to rapidly scale automation delivery.
“The solution saves an incredible number of hours, and the teams’ ability to focus on innovation and teamwork are outstanding improvements’’ says one of the client’s business analysts.
Since integrating RPA to assist employees in the day-to-day operations, our client has saved an average of around 80 hours weekly, previously consumed by repetitive and manual tasks.
“This clearly shows the potential for automation, allowing our staff to work on higher value-add activities,” says one of our client’s C-Level Managers and adds: “We are all excited to see what else the bot will bring to us.”
The bot is scheduled to run every Monday to Saturday. A bot transaction is considered successful when there are no system exceptions—exceptions due to the unanticipated behaviour of the systems and applications, and the high success rate and low business exception rate of Zelusit’s solution mean that only a few tasks require human intervention.
The automated solutions have already made the client’s processes more efficient. Having a bot to do the waiting when dealing with legacy software allows staff more time to be productive and experience fewer irritants at work caused by snail-pace software, improving employee satisfaction.
