Effectively managing the finances within any organisation requires accurate information to be available to the right people at the right time. To make the daily process of downloading, combining and uploading transaction reports more efficient, our IT service used Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to automate this resource-intensive task.
Working collaboratively with the finance team, our RPA experts captured detailed process flows on which to develop the automation. The new process is now quicker, more efficient and more accurate. It has also freed up staff resources to focus on tasks that add greater value to the service.
The challenge
Effectively managing the finances within any organisation requires accurate information to be available to the right people at the right time. A healthcare finance team approached our IT service to see if Robotic Process Automation (RPA) could help to standardise and improve the many repetitive manual tasks being undertaken.
One area identified for investigation was the daily downloading, combining and uploading of reports covering financial transactions. In this resource-intensive process, a team member would start work early each morning to download all transactions from the previous day.
The downloaded report would then need to be filtered and combined with historical data. The employee would then check the report for any anomalies or inaccuracies before finally uploading it to a collaboration platform in advance of the rest of the team starting work. Any delays in completing this two to three hour daily process directly impacted productivity for the whole service.
Our approach
Arden & GEM’s in-house RPA experts worked with the finance team to document the current process and build a process flow for the transactions reporting task.
The process flow captured:
- the report source
- the appropriate fiscal period
- any necessary filters
- the need to combine with historical data
- the required outputs
- any look-up data and pivot tables that needed to be updated.
An appropriate RPA solution was then developed and tested with the team, before being deployed into business as usual.
The outcomes
Applying RPA to this daily financial reporting task has improved speed, efficiency and accuracy.
- The robot has reduced a process that used to take two to three hours each day to a matter of minutes.
- Team members can start work at any time, knowing that the reporting information they need will be ready and waiting for them to work from.
- By using a robot to check for reporting errors and anomalies, the risk of human error has been removed.
- The resource previously dedicated to this process has now been released to focus on more value-adding tasks.
"As a large NHS organisation with a significant number of clients and suppliers, our daily transactions activity is busy and complex. Being able to automate our pre-working day reporting not only ensures this is completed quickly and efficiently but we can also have complete confidence in the accuracy of the information.
An extra benefit has been the capacity released back into the team to support more sophisticated reporting and analysis."
Parin Patel, Senior Finance Business Partner at NHS Arden & GEM CSU
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