The Client

A Danish engineering consultancy company with approximately 200 employees. Their goal when applying RPA solutions was to free time and resources from administrative processes and enable their employees to work on more value-adding tasks.

How to prepare for the RPA journey

Our first task was to consult the Client on what RPA is and what benefits it can bring to their business. However, since the Client already had a goal to automate some of their processes (but did not have a strategy on how to do it), this was a rather simple step.

The next steps were related to identifying the process(-es) to automate and the software to use for automation. We and our local partners in Denmark helped the Client with this as well. We have provided all information required to make the decision on the software vendor selection. And then, with the help from our partners in Denmark, we spent time with the employees of our Client to identify multiple potential processes, streamline and optimize them and prepare documentation required for our automation developers to prepare a solution.

With the experienced process improvement consultants at our disposal, we were able to optimize those processes even before we started developing RPA solutions, which in itself was already a benefit to the Client.

Change management was an important part of the process

The Client had a very clear understanding of the potential issues that come up when suggesting automation to employees. They set a goal to handle change management internally and communicated the potential benefits of RPA while we were preparing for deployment.

The message was very clear – the Client had no intention to reduce headcount. Instead, they wanted to have more time and resources on activities that would help them on their growth strategy. A message like that did not only make our job easier, but also had a significant positive impact on employee satisfaction.

RPA helped save many hours for crucial employees

Within the first month, we had identified two potential processes that could be automated. Both were to some extent related to handling customer orders and either migrating data from one system to another, or collecting data from various governmental web applications, aggregating it and using it to update customer orders. This was a crucial part of the business, as more and more customer orders were coming in and the time required to handle them was increasing to an extent where existing employees were becoming a bottleneck.

With one RPA developer deployed to the customer, we delivered a solution for the first process in a little more than a month. The next process took longer to document due to summer holidays in Denmark but was also delivered to the customer in less than 2 months after documentation was done.

The main benefit of using RPA, according to the Client is that they are able to save many hours of manual labor and do not have to worry about illness and holidays. The software robots are inexpensive to operate, work around the clock, are fast and accurate, and do not make mistakes.

By using software robots, the Client is now able to completely automate these two business processes, meaning they need little to none input from their employees. They have thus been able to move two qualified full-time employees onto doing other, more value-adding activities. With this in mind, the estimated payback time of the investment into these RPA solutions is 2-3 months. But with more projects coming up, our Client is bound to get much more benefit from their RPA journey.