RPA for Faster
More Efficient Working

An early RPA project was to automate the administration of applications for permissions for temporary events. This process used to take around 45 minutes per application of data entry.

Now it’s fully automated, freeing staff from manual keying work. The automation of data transfer and administration significantly speeds up processing times for applicants, as response times are improved. Highly qualified specialists are able to dedicate more time to critical, high-level tasks, enhancing their productivity and job satisfaction.

Another challenge was updating accounts for ‘Revs & Bens’, specifically when debts had been transferred to bailiffs. This process required manual checking of daily reports, which was both time-consuming and open to mistakes.

Daily reports were placed in a folder with hundreds of similarly named reports, and staff had to manually open and check each one, often showing no action was required. With upwards of 50 reports to check each day, peaking after weekends or holidays, this manual process was tedious, inefficient and easy to get wrong.

Liberty RPA was deployed to automate the parsing of the reports. The bot searches for specific keywords, such as “account” and transfers the data into relevant systems. It flags reports that need action. Each morning, the bot analyses the reports and sends a summary email to staff, highlighting only the files that need their attention.

Automating this process saved up to an hour each day, by eliminating manual report checking. As staff receive a ready-to-act-on report directly in their inbox before they start work, their day is now more focussed on progressing cases and critical tasks. The bot also vastly reduces the chance of errors being made in data checking and transfer from reports to other systems.

South Hams process private water supply test results, relying on accurate data entry to ensure reliable test results. This is critical for public health and safety, as incorrect entries could lead to serious consequences.

Staff needed to manually enter multiple data points detailed to 3 or 4 decimal places, from spreadsheets into a South Hams system. Each spreadsheet took 10-20 minutes to process. It was slow and needed constant attention, as it’s very easy to miss out an extra zero or skip an entry by mistake. But, because it was boring, time-consuming and frustrating, it was wide open to inefficiencies and potential inaccuracies.

Now, a Liberty RPA bot extracts the relevant test results and enters the data into the system accurately. It flags any discrepancies or missing data, alerting staff to potential issues.

This has significantly decreased the likelihood of errors, ensuring accurate data throughout the system. And it’s so much faster, the hours that staff save in the morning processing data, is now spent focussed on more valuable tasks. When any issues are flagged, notifications are so clear that staff can address the issue promptly.

Further work has taken place to use RPA to automate the sending of certificates if the results show a pass for water quality.

The council uses Liberty RPA to work on a report, checking for similarities or duplicates in all the contact records in the system. Using a number of rules, it establishes whether this a duplicate record for the same person, or two separate people with the same name.

It produces a report of likely duplicates and doppelgangers. A staff member can then assess and decide whether to merge records, which is not always straightforward.

There is scope for training the bot to merge accounts, after a human has made the decision, in a second phase.

For now, it provides a simple example of how bots and humans can share the workload effectively. The bot identifying the problems in the data, and the human making the decisions.