Document automation can sometimes be confused with taking the jobs of a human being, when in reality it is a supplementary tool for employees to improve their efficiency in the workplace. Automation is best suited for the following jobs:

• Opening emails and attachments
• Basic data entry
• Transferring files and folders
• Copying and pasting information
• Making calculations
• Analysing information and inserting it into databases

These tasks are typically viewed as low-value tasks that relieve employees of their time without generating much revenue, making them fit to transfer over to a robot. This allows employees to focus on more revenue-based tasks like customer experience and service and the pursuit of new clients and contracts.

Automation in Debt Recovery

Automation can perform tasks that usually take time from employees, such as scanning and uploading images and documents like Notice of Trials. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) extracts the relevant and important information from the document such as the Case Claim, Court Location, Trial Date, Pay Dates and Claimant. This data can then be configured to the clients’ specifications and normalised to fit in the legal case management system, Proclaim. All of these tasks would usually be performed by a human with varying levels of speed and accuracy. In contrast, with a robot, the speed is expedited greatly with a much greater level of accuracy, leaving your employees to focus on people-oriented tasks like following up on the debt recovery or claim.

Claims Management Case Study

Robocloud conducted a case study on one of our clients that utilised automation in their operations, Winn Solicitors. Winn Solicitors are a UK claims management company that offer no win, no fee services to its customers. They were looking for a solution that would reduce the amount of manual processing that their employees had to do to reduce the time spent on each case and ultimately provide a quicker outcome, thus improving customer satisfaction and revenue.

Robocloud took part in a consultancy day with Winn Solicitors to better understand their business operations in order to provide the best service and curated a bespoke model to provide a solution to their needs. This is what Robocloud provided:

• • Physical incoming court documents were automatically scanned and uploaded by Winn to a shared server.
  • OCR analysed documents to make them easy to retrieve with a word-based search.
  • Documents were identified and stored by type on the server.
  • ‘Semi-intelligent processing’ would be completed. For example, text such as “Reply within 14 days of this communication” is recognised, interpreted and turned into a data point.
  • The client ID and corresponding case are identified.
  • The robot navigates to the correct client/case In Proclaim and drags and drops the files from the shared server onto the Proclaim interface.
  • This triggers actions, tasks and workflow within Proclaim for the case handlers to access and process the file.
  • Robocloud also works in partnership with Zeus. Put simply, Zeus is a system that validates that all of the data is correct by cross-checking it back to the original case files, allowing for an increased level of accuracy across the board.

Ultimately, Winn found that each case handler spent 3 minutes less per case, resulting in a saving of 62 hours per week across the board, which allowed more time to be spent on people-oriented tasks that drive more customer satisfaction and revenue. In addition, the accuracy of each task improved, and the processing speed increased, allowing them to process more cases.

For more information about how Robocloud’s services can help aid your debt recovery company, get in touch with a member of our expert team by calling us on 0800 046 8086.

[1] (http://www.ccrmagazine.com/half-of-all-back-office-processes-to-be-automated-within-a-decade/),

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In the current climate when every business is looking for cost-saving opportunities just to remain afloat and stay competitive, can you afford not to explore RPA Technology?

You may have already unknowingly been liaising with a robot in your day to day business activities.  For example, solutions such as live chat can often be run by digital workers to provide information to website visitors. The robots can use common questions or phrases to provide immediate information to your prospective clients or customers. So what else can RPA do?  Here are just a few examples…

Business Tasks RPA Can Perform

• Competitor Activity – RPA Technology can automatically monitor activity in your market, providing reports and information based on your rules or keywords.
• Data Entry and Validation – most businesses have staff performing data entry and data validation tasks on a daily basis, entering information into multiple systems or spreadsheets. Imagine if you could free up those employees to do more profitable activities, you’ll also see increased data accuracy using RPA technology.
• IT and System Integration – Digital workers can integrate data between IT systems, without major investment or programming. This can be an ideal option where you have new cloud-based systems and legacy systems which won’t speak to each other.
• Automated Workflow – If your business needs to perform a task at a set time, or based on another trigger or event, our digital workers can help.  RPA technology can be used to automate actions based on your rules.
• Email Monitoring and Action – RPA can be used to monitor incoming emails and perform actions based on business rules.  Digital workers can send emails and add attachments. They can also move a document from an incoming email and add it to another business system.  This can be utilised in many different departments e.g. HR, Sales, Operations or Finance.
• Finance Tasks – If your accounts payable team dreads the monthly accounts statement reconciliation process, this is an ideal solution!  Robots can be used to compare the financial statement against the ledger and identify errors such as duplicate invoices, exceptions or no PO (purchase order). The robots will provide your AP team with an exceptions list to action, based on your business rules and requirements.
• HR Tasks – The HR function can create a mountain of paperwork and associated tasks. Use RPA Technology to add data to multiple HR systems automatically, monitor incoming emails for recruitment or new starters, automate sending of new starter or induction information and even validate candidates for right to work compliance.
• Sales Invoices – Tired of charging customers the wrong prices? RPA Technology can be used to compare your sales invoices to your list product prices to ensure you’re charging correctly and making the right profit margins.

Cleardata offers Robocloud RPA as a Service to businesses throughout the UK.  This provides an accessible RPA solution to businesses of all sizes, enabling companies to hire robot workers for as little as 2 hours per week to perform the manual tasks in their business that nobody else wants to do.

If you’re interested in transforming your business call our RPA Technology Services team now on 0800 046 8086 or contact us.

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Robotic Process Automation, or RPA for short, is where a piece of specialist of software (referred to as a ‘robot’) is taught to carry out a specific task such as data entry or processing. The robots are used to automate mundane yet necessary business tasks. Multiple robots can be used to create a virtual workforce, carrying out monotonous processes so that your team can focus on the important tasks that bring in revenue.

How Does RPA Work?

RPA takes any rules-based, repetitive business process that is normally carried out by people and automates it. This means that tasks can be carried out much faster and with fewer errors.

This is done by teaching the robots a process across one or more business systems.  We combine this with your business rulesets and other pre-built modules (e.g. security and audit) which then allows the robot to repeat this task again and again, working through large amounts of data much faster than a human user could.

The workforce of robots carry out their tasks in a cloud-based environment, making RPA space-saving and scalable as well with minimal set-up costs and easy deployment.

What Tasks Can RPA Be Used For?

As the robots are taught specific tasks, there are a wide range of potential applications. However, RPA lends itself particularly well to repetitive, monotonous processes. Some examples of where RPA is used are:

• Data validation in CRM or ERP systems
• Migration and cleansing of data
• Accounts and statement reconciliation
• Employee, client and supplier onboarding
• Credit checks
• Sales order processing
• Legal conveyancing
• Approvals processes

RPA essentially automates all of the background processes that keep your business ticking over. Keeping all your records up-to-date and accurate is essential to running a business, but can be time-consuming or even become neglected. Robotic process automation allows these tasks to be carried out quickly, efficiently and cost-effectively in the background while your business focuses on its core activities.

The Benefits of RPA

Using RPA to automate processes in your business brings a multitude of different benefits, both to your balance books and your workplace atmosphere. Here are just a few:

Save Money

Using robotic process automation leads to considerable savings for your company. For starters, you reduce the labour costs for time-consuming, repetitive tasks. This also means that your staff have more time to devote to the activities that make your business money. It’s a win-win situation. Using RPA helps you to improve your productivity and gain a competitive advantage.

Boost Employee Morale

In any business, there are always mundane admin tasks that need carrying out. They’re usually the tasks that no-one really wants to do. With RPA, none of your employees have to do them. They can spend more time pursuing their individual career goals, focussing on customer satisfaction and adding value.

Reduce Errors

Unlike people, robots don’t get tired. This means that business processes can be carried out with much more efficiency. Errors are far less likely to occur, meaning your records are more reliable. You set your own rules for tasks, ensuring consistency and accuracy. Work can also be closely monitored, with tasks being pinpointed to a particular robot at a particular time and date.

Available Around The Clock

RPA bots work 24/7. This is another advantage of using RPA instead of employees to carry out business tasks – work gets completed much quicker, as robots don’t need to take breaks, time off or sleep. If you need some data ready for the next day, an RPA bot can work on it overnight so it’s ready in time.

Enjoy Flexibility And Scalability

At certain times, such as when migrating data or when your business is going through a big change, you may need additional data processing capabilities for a limited amount of time. RPA is a great solution here, as you can deploy just the amount of robots you need at that time. It’s a flexible and scalable solution that can help you optimise and grow your business.

Here at Robocloud, we offer RPA as a service. This provides even more convenience to businesses who want to take advantage of the benefits of RPA – there’s no need for a big upfront investment in servers, licensing or professional services, and you can hire out our robots for as little as two hours per week. Read more here.

To get started have a chat with our RPA Ninja’s call 0800 046 8086 or contact our team.

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Machine Learning and AI

Machine Learning is a field of computer programming, where you give the computer data and it figures out the answer based on statistics.  For example, machine learning techniques are used to identify what type of dog is in a picture.  Every time it successfully gets an outcome, the computer learns and over time gets better with its answers. Self-driving cars also work on machine-based learning. According to our RPA Ninjas when you do those spam capture exercises where you identify all images with a street sign, or shop front etc. you’re actually helping to train a robot somewhere!

Another example is Microsoft’s Project Oxford.  This allows developers to tap into its resources using API (a programming interface) to build more intelligent applications. This project works on machine-based learning and can provide face recognition, speech processing, visual tools and language understanding intelligence.

Tip – Machine learning is only as good as the data you’ve trained the system on.  If you haven’t got enough varied data in the training the results will not be effective. It calculates probabilities and can give more weight to certain indicators.

AI (Artificial Intelligence) is a high-level concept for intelligent automation.  It’s the development of systems with the ability to do tasks which require human intelligence. True AI can think for itself in context, make decisions and have visual perception. You can train it to do many things, but there’s no way it tells you why it made that decision. It just makes it.

What is Process Automation

Robocloud provides its cloud-based software robots using Process Automation. It’s a logical, programmatic element which is process driven and based on binary decisions.  Processes are generated in programmatic steps and interact with software in the same way a human would.  We are able to see a full audit trail of why the robot has made a decision, as the software shows the decision trail all the way along, demonstrating what the robot has done and why.

Robocloud’s digital workforce can perform any manual task using process automation to save time and be more productive, for example:-

• Process Incoming orders
• Employee onboarding
• Timesheet Automation
• Supplier onboarding
• Client onboarding
• Statement Reconciliation
• Account Reconciliation
• System Integration

Process automation can also combine with the AI and Machine Learning techniques outlined above to provide a really compelling proposition – in our experience though most organisations will get the most benefit from automating the simple processes first to drive efficiency and data integrity benefits, which could then provide a platform to move on to more intelligent solutions.

For more information about the difference between AI and machine learning or Robocloud’s Process Automation Services call our team on 0800 046 8086 or contact us.

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