RPA Digital Worker - Process Automation - Case Study

The accounts payable business unit had greatly reduced staff numbers. The remaining team were struggling to maintain SLAs for processes that they were responsible for. An assessment was done, and it was determined digital workers would be able to assist with manual workloads to relieve the business unit of the amount of work.  

The Business Unit 

The Finance division had recently gone through a restructuring, significantly reducing the amount of FTE. There were considerable backlogs of requests for multiple processes and were not meeting defined SLA's.  

The Challenges

As FTE had already been released or was in the process of being released there was a lot of pressure to implement digital workers to do the manual workloads. A lack of understanding of process automation also meant that not appropriate processes had been bookmarked for automation. 

• The team decided to proceed with automating the download invoices process for Accounts Payable. This was flagged as a low effort / risk process with high benefits. This process was used ad-hoc various times a month where staff would have to download all attachments manually from the Oracle financial system. Sometimes there could be hundreds and up to thousands of invoices required to be downloaded for auditing purposes.  
• It was decided to build a digital worker pick up requests for downloads and save the files to a SharePoint site that had restricted access.  

The Results 

The project successfully delivered a digital worker that received requests from e-mail and downloaded invoices based on data provided in the request. This digital worker saved the Accounts Payable area over 100 manual hours a month which enabled the team to focus on other work that had increased due to the reduction of team members.  

Summary

In conclusion this digital worker delivered a great time saving for an ad-hoc process for the accounts payable area that was difficult to schedule and plan with the human workforce. The delivery of this digital worker also increased awareness of process automation for Finance and was the start of a big backlog of automation ideas for the Finance division.