Hyperautomation is a new phenomenon that is currently taking the business world by storm. Expleo looks at hyperautomation now and into the future in this series of three case studies.
Within the energy and utility sector, hyperautomation is a vehicle for large scale digital transformation across your organisation. Bringing together the strengths of multiple technologies brings us from single processes being automated to a fully connected organisation.
Expleo is working with energy and utility providers introducing new operating models, improving processes, and introducing technology solutions that are changing how our clients work and operate. Creating and implementing new ways of working for teams is key when the digital workforce continues to change how vital operations are completed. The introduction of RPA, machine learning and AI is driving innovation from the ground up.
The Expleo business agility, process optimisation and process automation teams are working with our clients to ensure that large scale technology solutions are deployed and managed in a robust and secure way.
The Challenge
Our client, a large utility provider within Europe, was an early adopter of Robotic Process Automation (RPA), gaining benefits and implementing new ways of working within core back-office functions – including finance, HR, and operations. Expleo provided a team of development experts who had full responsibility for the technical elements of the programme.
Our client had a highly manual, high-volume process within their finance team, which required the fixing of meter readings when the normal process of reading a meter had failed. When this happened, the reading had to be updated, and submitted as a market message, this was error prone and slow A new process was needed to record these meter readings which involved various calculations and validations.
Solutions
The Expleo process automation team worked with the client to map out the process related to meter readings. They then built a process which amended the meter readings and submitted them into the SAP system for downstream processing without human intervention.
This process proved vital amid the COVID-19 pandemic. There was a sudden drop in readings due to Meter Readers not being deemed essential workers and therefore not working. Due to fewer manual readings being taken by people going door to door, there was an increase in failed meter readings. Utilising RPA allowed this spike in capacity to be easily accommodated with automation. The process also created and sent out regular reports, providing the client with relevant data on the completion rates and other metrics.
Benefits
- Robot processing time per record reduced from two minutes to eight seconds
- There was FTE avoidance as no requirement to increase team size due to capacity spikes
- 24/7 overnight processing
With RPA embedded within the organisation, there has been a focus on deploying more automations across all areas of the business, not just finance and HR. This approach has led to more opportunities for hyperautomation to be explored.
Looking to the future
Hyperautomation is a new concept that many organisations are at the early stages of implementing. Expleo is working with our clientsto focus on business process optimisation, expanding the automation footprint they have with current technology platforms and running continuous innovation sessions to bring in new technology as it is required.
Expleo is working in partnership with our E&U clients to work across their organisations and automate everything we can and should. Below, you can see some of Expleo’s ongoing projects:
- Combining RPA & Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to extract information from invoices, action them and input to end finance system. This is enhanced further with machine learning as the robot works.
- Combining RPA and a chat bot to ensure structured information requests are being sent to your digital workforce.
- Utilising process mining to learn more about your processes and determine the best places to automate.
- Utilising all data being created and presenting it using Power BI to allow for real-time decision making.
From Hype to Reality: Navigating the AI & Hyperautomation Era
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