Blueprint Software Systems

The enterprise client, a leading global telecommunications provider, was facing a significant challenge in their process improvement and automation initiatives. In 2021, they decided to switch from their current RPA tool, Automation Anywhere, to Microsoft's Power Automate solution, aiming to produce better quality bots at a lower cost. However, this transition presented a daunting task of manually re-coding 15,000 bots or outsourcing the re-platforming, which was proving to be time-consuming, costly, and prone to errors. Furthermore, the lack of data and understanding of their current process estate made it difficult for them to make informed decisions about the value of any automated process and whether it was worth the time, effort, and money to re-platform. They were facing years in process platform limbo, poor quality processes, and the potential of an 8-figure bill to recreate their existing processes.

The Bank, a top 5 global bank, was struggling to achieve compliance in an environment of ever-changing and complex regulations. This was proving to be a challenge as teams were spending too much time doing manual work. Business units were relying on a highly manual, labor intensive, spreadsheet-driven process that was prone to errors and oversights, cumbersome, expensive and static. It also made it impossible to generate reporting to provide an executive view of compliance progress. Because the process was essentially manual, it was dependent on the availability of key stakeholder participants to provide input. This made it extremely difficult to collaborate and reliably incorporate interpretive feedback. Regulations were changed frequently. The lack of a tool to enable detailed mapping and analysis of anticipated regulatory changes left the Bank exposed to material risk.

This financial services company that offers a variety of products and services, has leveraged robotic process automation (RPA) within certain aspects of their business. However, their claims processing was labor-intensive and inefficient. In the wake of COVID-19, the team responsible for processing claims became overwhelmed as they could not keep up with the sudden and significant increase in the volume of submissions, leading to a 2x increase in errors during processing and frustrated customers that was increasing the risk of churn. The company considered hiring more claims processors or outsourcing to help meet the demand, but this would lead to a significant increase in costs for full time employees (FTEs). They also looked at how they could take tedious, mechanical processes that are excellent candidates for RPA and automate them. They considered targeting their most labor-intensive processes to reduce the current strain on their employees. In the end, they decided to focus on increasing their use of robotic process automation.

The insurance provider was mandated to move from their current process of using BRD/FSD documents to PDD documents to define automated processes, which is only available as a word document. On average, it took a full working day to finalize a PDD and even then, they struggled to get process screenshots in line with steps. The screenshots, which were critical for improving developer understanding of what was required, would show up as attachments at the end which was not useful because the developers still would have to flip back and forth through the documents. They quickly realized that their current documentation processes were flawed and prone to error, necessitating a more scalable way to translate business process requirements into technical requirements for their RPA development teams.

This Fortune 100 company is one of America’s top 10 largest banks based on assets, and as a result, they process an average of 5 million payments per day and deal with consumer data. The method for processing these payments has historically been painstakingly manual, slow, and prone to error which means money lost—one error can be calculated at $1,000 lost due to the fees and labor associate with investigating and rectifying the error. Beyond that, customers wanted their payments processed faster and with greater accuracy. The bank understood that in order to maintain a sustainable competitive advantage in the marketplace, they must cut costs, eliminate errors that pose serious regulatory risk, and enable employees to focus on work that is driving more value to the business.

The bank was looking for an effective solution to make its mortgage approval process more streamlined and efficient for customers. There were a number of international teams involved in the mortgage approval process, spanning from the United States all the way to India. The global team could not efficiently manage the changing requirements related to mortgage processing. Mortgages are federally regulated and the impact of these changes is significant, especially when teams are separated globally. Accounting for new and changing regulations is normally 10-15% of a bank’s operating costs. The bank needed to make this percentage smaller by automating its mortgage approval process with a more efficient governance model and removing non-compliance risks from the manual, time-consuming procedures it was using.

The HIT provider is responsible for setting up electronic medical records for health care providers. To do this, teams would have to manually parse through a number of different applications and spreadsheets that are set up in different formats, and can even be on paper, making it error-prone, which leads to costly rework. Getting clients online was also inefficient, taking an average of 20 business days to get one client online. As a result, they began their automation journey. They understood that in order to effectively scale their automation initiative, they needed a tool that could easily extract data from legacy software and documents from Excel, decompose that data into easy-to-understand models, and be optimized for automation.

The insurance organization had acquired over 15 companies over the last 20 years and was using over 350 platforms to perform their day-to-day activities. This resulted in over 15,000 workflows, which required staff to spend countless hours performing repetitive, manual, and error-prone tasks. The organization realized that this method was not sustainable in the long run, especially if they wanted to keep up with the constant changes happening in the marketplace. They set a two-year transformation goal that would eventually relieve them of their reliance on outdated legacy systems and improve the security and satisfaction of both customers and employees.

The insurance provider was looking for an effective solution to make the reconciliation process more streamlined and efficient. This process previously has been a source of significant stress for employees because it was manual, repetitive, and prone to costly errors. The organization tried to hand off the manual work to more junior members, in hopes that senior employees can focus on more value add tasks. However, this was not the case - supervisors ended up spending countless hours performing rework to fix errors. It became absolutely critical for the organization to look at other work management methods to effectively support teams and reduce costly errors.

The customer, a large telecommunications provider in the United States, had implemented Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to automate many business tasks and drive their digital transformation. However, they were dissatisfied with the RPA vendor they initially chose due to underwhelming ROI, the high degree of technical skill needed to navigate the platform, and the sub-optimal quality of automations that kept experiencing break-fix cycles. They considered Microsoft Power Automate as an ideal alternative that could address all their challenges. However, switching to Microsoft Power Automate meant that they had to rebuild each of their thousands of bots from scratch, a prospect so time-consuming and expensive that it was difficult to justify.

Avanade, a global professional services company, was facing challenges in managing and executing their clients' business processes. They were struggling with restrained scale and speed in managing their customers’ automations. The core business processes were changing frequently and it was difficult to keep automations optimized, innovative, and aligned with the changing business at the rate needed. Many of their digital workers were built on legacy technology, which were implemented on first-generation platforms at the time of implementation. This resulted in a real opportunity to convert existing automations to a newer generation RPA platform like Microsoft Power Automate, and convert micro-tactical automations to broader end-to-end process automations. Another challenge was poor customer experiences due to legacy automation deficiencies. The automations were challenging to optimize and update, leading to a deficiency in delivery excellence.