Focus on more important tasks by training robotic process automation software bots to perform tedious, repetitive and manual functions.
Robotic process automation (RPA) is a software technology that makes it easy to build, deploy and manage software robots that emulate human interactions with digital systems and software. These bots can be programed to automate repeatable, mundane or even skilled jobs to free up human resources for more meaningful work while reducing errors.
Celero is offering two RPA solutions that can be utilized in every department at your credit union. The first RPA solution showcases bots developed by Fiserv using Blue Prism RPA and how it allows credit unions to improve the efficiency of their processes, further embed digitization into their organization and enable employees to focus on higher-value, member-focused activities. The second RPA solution displays Microsoft’s RPA solution with our implementation partner, Fidelity Factory, and demonstrates how the solution will enable credit union employees to improve their personal productivity through automation – such as aggregating a member’s data from multiple sources into a single spreadsheet, or automatically posting the latest interest rates on the public website. Keep on reading to discover how you can use RPA to increase efficiencies within human resources, core banking, IT, finance, back office and client facing departments.
Human Resources: Employee Onboarding
Human resource departments and new employees can benefit from the implementation of RPA in the hiring process. Rather than have skilled humans do these processes in a labor-intensive way, RPA allows software and systems to do these processes more efficiently and effectively.
Just because the tasks are routine and repetitive, does not mean that they lack importance. They may be part of a critical path in the onboarding process for new employees that ensures regulatory compliance and the enforcement of a company’s policies. RPA helps with improving onboarding process results in terms of overall compliance in welcoming new employees.
An example of using RPA in an HR context could be when a new employee is going to be offered a job. The offer letter can be automatically generated and sent out by the RPA system. The offer letter has a pre-approved format. Its contents are specifically approved by a designated company official who has the hiring authority for that job. Once a new employee account is established, this triggers a predetermined workflow.
Additionally, your credit union can establish rules that the RPA system uses to make decisions according to the new employee’s profile. This onboarding workflow allows access to company data systems that are needed for the new employees to do their work. This access is granted according to a specific position’s job description. When using a system of robotic process automation for employee onboarding, this frees up the time of the human resources staff to do other things.
Core Banking: Batch Automation
Never write another batch file or custom script again. Using RPA for batch automation in core banking is a classic repetitive and data-intensive task that can be done by a bot instead of an employee.
Since batch processing involves scheduling non-interactive jobs to optimize the usage of computing resources, it can be very time consuming. This process can be long and tedious, taking up the precious hours that can be better spent on more value-added tasks.
With RPA, you can upload batch files through SFG since bots can operate around the clock, nonstop, much faster and with 100% reliability and precision.
IT: Legacy System Integration
In the information era, there is no exaggeration in saying that legacy systems make a business go around. The problem is legacy system often lack flexibility and frequently lag behind ever-changing member needs and preferences.
Not to mention, legacy systems can get more and more complex and difficult to manage as you add new systems and workarounds to integrate with them. RPA for legacy systems helps to scale down the routine, repetitive tasks, and can be viewed as a way to connect businesses’ core software solutions together.
Software robots mimic human interactions with apps. The ease of deployment allows businesses to promptly react to new opportunities. RPA’s scalability makes it highly adaptable to various operational needs without supplementary infrastructures.
Automation allows companies to strictly control access authorization to sensitive information. With the help of bots, the migration process for legacy applications becomes automated and repeatable. Every bit of data goes exactly where it is needed, thereby streamlining system integration.
Finance: Cash Flow Statement Processing
Choosing manual, repetitive, data-intensive tasks that follow strict rules and don’t require human judgment to complete are the easiest processes to automate. These processes should be relatively mature—that is, not likely to change frequently.
By deploying RPA, businesses can automate manual and Excel-based finance processes and streamline financial operations across manual and/or fragmented legacy system environment, reducing errors and compliance risks.
Cash flow statement processing is a perfect task for RPA as it can allow finance teams to focus on more strategic tasks while reducing operational costs and increasing compliance by reducing human error. RPA bots produce dependable data because they follow standard procedure and do not miss steps by accident.
Backoffice: Stop Payment Processing
If you’ve ever seen an Excel macro in action, you can understand and appreciate what a “robot” is. It’s just a little piece of software that can “sit at a computer” and do everything a person does, across lots of different systems. It can click, type, copy, paste and more. RPA bots can do all of this in a fraction of the time.
RPA brings up a spread sheet from a shared drive, navigates to the web-based platform where it logs in with its own user ID and password, just like a person. Then it flies through all the other steps we’ve described above, clicking, copying and pasting with inhuman speed.
The bot does everything a person can do, even taking a screen shot, naming it, and filing it in the right place as proof of the transaction. A human takes about 13 minutes to process a single stop payment at a ten-percent average error rate, according to The Lab. The robot, on the other hand, does the same work in just two minutes with zero errors.
Client Facing: Loan Payoff Quote Creation
Between manually entering data into your systems, sharing data between them and just keeping things updated and accurate, navigating between your systems can seem like more work than the task at hand.
Take advantage of RPA to do all the things your loan officer needs to do to review applications like checking credit scores, initial disclosures, loan payoff quote creation and loan exposure reports.
Using RPA for loan payoff quote creation is easier than you make think! The manual process of collecting information is tedious, complicated and prone to error. RPA extracts inputs from paper documents, emails, fax or other online portals, followed by a 360-degree screening for completeness, background review and credit check of the applicant. Using all of the information, RPA can enable your credit union to provide instant loan payoff quotes to your members.
Want to learn about how RPA can enable credit union employees to improve their personal productivity through automation? Please contact us or talk to your Celero Account Executive to learn more or to request a demo.