Industry voice: From robotic automation to process orchestration, John Fawcett from IEG4 writes about the latest stepping stone in the digital transformation journey.
In the summer of 2014, a groundbreaking event occurred. The UK’s first robotic process benefit assessor started processing claims at North Tyneside Council.
It was groundbreaking because revenues and benefits administration is widely seen as the most complex aspect of local government. If you can leverage robotic process automation here, then you can use it to do any process.
Fast forward to 2016 and both council tax and benefit processes were being automated across multiple councils. IEG4 had become the first organisation to enable councils to do this.
It was about this time that messages designed to stifle innovation started to emanate from legacy software suppliers. It got us thinking about how to rebut these and continue the momentum for innovation.
API questions
We asked how we could automate things to the same level as robotics but solely using the APIs (the elements of software code that allow us to read/write data directly from/to a back office). If we used APIs what would be needed? What advantages and disadvantages would be exposed?
In the summer of 2018, while reviewing the robotic process in place for functions such as a change of address or single person discount, we could see that there could be upward of 15 distinct stages of activity. It would be a significant technical challenge to achieve more than 15 separate back office updates, with each having a relationship with one another. It would be difficult in terms of understanding the APIs inside out, and building a workflow to orchestrate and manage the many nuances drawn from different circumstances - in a user friendly way.
Luckily, at IEG4 we love to do tricky stuff and already had a digital workflow and EDMS system in OpenProcess to do the orchestration.
So in August 2019, when reviewing the lovely API schematics, we realised that we could achieve the levels of automation that robotics provide.
We could also do three things not previously possible. We could use back office data retrieved in real time to:
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remove the chance of exceptions;
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improve the customer experience by reducing page/question counts;
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prevent updates happening where they were not wanted by a council.
An example or two will help to explain these. By checking a person’s details in real time in a council's back office system, we could:
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remove the need to search for/type an address;
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remove the need to search for/type the name of a person moving out;
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check the current recovery status to prevent a direct debit being set up if the account was with the bailiff or where there had been multiple ‘bounced’ direct debits for that financial year;
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ask additional questions where they were in receipt of council tax support to enable the automation of changes.
By knowing the party references, property references and recovery status off the bat, we could make the forms shorter and reduce, if not remove, the chances of exceptions.
Wolverhampton test
Incredibly, given the aforementioned complexity, these forms were tested and put into live operations by the City of Wolverhampton Council in November 2018, just months after the initial research.
We call it revenues process orchestration and it is achieving more than 90% automation. Moreover, as the service has been live since November of last year, we’ve been iteratively eating away at the scenarios where total automation was not occurring.
Two great examples have emerged.
One applies when a person moves from one address to another. They move their furniture out on a different date from when they moved out, and into their new address on a different date as a sole adult. Now all relevant periods of empty/empty unfurnished/single person discounts are applied automatically on both accounts.
The other is intelligent void prevention. If a tenant says they have moved out and do not know who their landlord is, instead of creating a void account, we can now search the responsible parties associated with the property. We can find the one relevant to the current time and automatically set them as liable with an appropriate discount.
This is automating updates the customer did not even tell you about in the form.
IEG4’s genesis was in the delivery of smart revenues and benefits digital services. Revenues process orchestration is the latest stepping stone in the evolution of digital transformation.
To discover how IEG4 can help to improve and deliver your digital transformation click here
