Leveraging automation to reduce work from home frictions

Since the global spread of COVID-19, businesses are doing their best to ensure the safety of their employees and making work from home (WFH) not just possible, but actually the “new normal.” This new way of working brings with it new IT and logistics challenges that organizations are scrambling to face head on.

Capgemini recently helped a leading US bank to streamline computer equipment logistics for its global workforce, enabling them to work from home safely and efficiently within a week.

Slow processes and the potential for error

To enable its employees to work remotely, the bank had been shipping computer equipment to its employees across the organization. This process required the bank’s procurement team to manually key items into an internal website. Each day, hundreds of these transactions were needed to get their workers the equipment they needed. This was an incredibly time-consuming, manual process that had a number of bottlenecks. The bank had to deal with this time-consuming process during a business-critical crisis period.

The bank needed to place orders quickly and process them on the same day to avoid any slow down in business continuity. It was also imperative to avoid errors caused while manually keying in the various data points needed for this process.

The client turned to Capgemini to implement a solution that would deliver a shorter turnaround time and increased accuracy.

Automating the order posting process

To meet the client’s requirement, Capgemini first assessed the manual process and identified automation improvement areas to help decrease the overall handling time of requests. Our team also worked with procurement agents to identify an approach that was minimally invasive but would deliver maximum benefits, leveraging UiPath’s robotic process automation (RPA) tool for support.

It only took one week for Capgemini to implement attended and unattended RPA to collect hardware requirements for the bank’s employees, validate them, gather the respective approvals, and finally post and track the final order.

Enhanced cost savings and efficiency

Capgemini’s innovative solution has successfully automated 90% of the bank’s order posting, which enables its procurement team to process over 500 orders daily with zero errors. This has led to a 75% decrease in the time needed to process each order – from 12 minutes down to just 3 minutes, which enabled the client to redirect team members to help with other mission critical tasks.

From the cost savings of using fewer staff to perform tasks, to enhanced efficiency of doing the job in a quarter of the time and the added risk mitigation benefits of fewer errors and getting people to work quicker, the benefits of Capgemini’s RPA solution for the client were significant.

Above all, Capgemini’s solution has enabled the bank to respond to the COVID-19 crisis by providing business continuity and frictionless operations for its customers, while ensuring a safe work from home environment for its people.

Learn more about how our crisis care package offers provide pragmatic, turnkey solutions that help you to mitigate the disruption caused by COVID-19 and deliver tangible business outcomes to your organization.

Mark Fischer is based in New Jersey and leads Capgemini’s North American Intelligent Automation practice.

Mark Fischer

Expert in Intelligent Automation

Capgemini Intelligent Automation Global Practice lead for Work Fusion