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How a Financial Firm Uses RPA to Process 1,800 Docs Per Day without Human Intervention

Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

At MetaSource we sell solutions not products. The products can be pretty impressive. But when we combine state-of-the-art technology and processes to create solutions tailor-made for the needs of a particular client, “impressive” doesn’t begin to cover it. Jaw-dropping is more like it.

And every once in a while, we accomplish something so transformative that our clients are left contemplating an entirely different set of business possibilities than they were when we started. It’s a transformation in the truest sense of the word.

This is that kind of story. With robots.

A Billion Dollar Business Shuffling a Million Pieces of Paper

It started with some relatively small-scale solutions for scanning and managing content. Our client was a nationwide provider of debt consolidation services whose processes started in a very busy mailroom, where thousands of credit card statements, debt settlement forms and other client documents arrived the old-fashioned way. We took over the process, sorting and scanning the documents, using software that could recognize and extract data and export it to the client records kept in Salesforce. The client had been manually keying information into the database – a process that required an eight-hour shift to process 100 statements.

We used optical character recognition (OCR) software to extract the data and transmit it to a digital workflow where employees could bring up the image and easily copy and paste information into Salesforce. Now they could process up to 300 documents a day. Most BPO organizations would have stopped there and called it a win.

But at MetaSource we saw a workflow that created a great fit for robotic process automation (RPA). It was time to bring out the robots.

Laying the Groundwork

Before you can apply RPA, you have to have the tools in place to capture, extract and deliver actionable data. You have to have processes for which there is an exact and repeatable series of standard operating procedures (SOPs). We did our homework, hung around a while, and documented their procedures step by step. We found a process that was perfectly aligned to the capabilities of RPA. Here is a slightly simplified version of what was required:

  • Open the workflow
  • Grab the extracted data
  • Do the search for the client record in Salesforce
  • Update the record
  • Repeat

The RPA was all done through the user interface, emulating exactly what the operator would do – only six times faster. Now our client is processing 600 documents in a shift. But the robot wasn’t finished. A robot works three shifts in 24 hours, processing 1,800 documents a day.

The ROI was beyond impressive: it was the equivalent of three full-time employees working at twice the maximum speed, and with fewer errors. And without the need of a software engineer.

It was an outcome that truly had our clients’ jaws dropping. Before they’d even installed the first robot, they were ready to order four more. Among the other benefits, the company now had a staff of people that could be put to more valuable work. And a capacity to grow beyond anything they had imagined.

It was more than a win; it was a solution with more solutions built in. Which is exactly what MetaSource was created to accomplish. Click on the link below to learn what you can accomplish with MetaSource on your team.

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