Case Study
A financial services company freed-up labor for skilled work and savings by enhancing automations
THE CHALLENGE
Enhancing automations to augment developer capacity
A financial services company needed to automate its labor-intensive processes in agent and customer support services and order-to-cash processes. It aimed to expand its automation abilities beyond traditional robotic process automation (RPA) technologies as an outcome of the exercise.
In addition to a desire for cost and time savings, the company wanted to strengthen its pipeline of automations by introducing other technologies as solutions. While its internal developer team ramped up new hires, UST was tasked with building new automations to augment its developer capacity.
THE TRANSFORMATION
Imagining IT Differently
The multi-step strategy consisted of these phases:
- Discover—UST assessed processes across customer and transaction services with over 440 employees around the globe to identify RPA and intelligent automation (IA) opportunities.
- Design—Next, we developed a pipeline to implement optical character recognition (OCR) and attended virtual agents as new technologies. UST also created a roadmap expanding its center of excellence's reach into intelligent automation.
- Develop—UST fast-tracked eight processes for RPA. We worked to identify and develop all eight within the first quarter.
- Deliver—UST implemented cognitive virtual agent technologies across the IA landscape and provided 24x7 production support for all automations.
- Applications automated—Oracle; Mainframe; Salesforce; AS400; MS Office; LMS tools, customer relationship management (CRM) tools, and a project time tracking tool; online and network storage; and Kofax.
- Processes automated—Collections (order-to-cash), agent on-boarding services, Know Your Customer, and document validation.
- Automation Platform—Blue Prism
THE IMPACT
Future Made Possible
After conducting an automation assessment for the company, UST created and implemented eight unattended RPAs, creating over $1.5 million in savings. UST's diverse assessment team used our deep knowledge in various industries and automation technologies to perform the automation assessment. The new automations helped free-up valuable talent to be repurposed for customer-facing work, recommended best-fit technologies and defined a roadmap for translating the findings into real benefits. Other results included:
- Completed 120 assessments across 19 departments in six weeks
- Recommended 33 processes to the automation lifecycle queue for immediate implementation
- Introduced new technologies (NLP, OCR, attended automation) into the automation program
- Identified, built, and deployed $1.5 million in savings within the first quarter and identified over $2.1 million in total potential value identified in our assessment
- Identified over 85 employees in our assessment as potential capacity creation
RESOURCES
https://www.ust.com/en/what-we-do/digital-transformation/automation