Key Takeaways

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is rapidly growing in the enterprise automation market, projected to increase from $2.4 billion in 2020 to $12.8 billion by 2027, highlighting its significance in improving business efficiency.
The implementation of RPA in the utility sector has led to reduced operational costs, improved efficiency, and increased accuracy by automating repetitive and error-prone tasks, making it beneficial for business processes.
Successful RPA projects require a strong technical team to manage expectations and continuously improve processes, alongside ensuring proper post-production support to monitor the bots and maintain seamless operations.

A Fortune 500 energy company that provides electric and natural gas services to over 7 million customers in Arkansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Texas, has been a long-standing client partner of Resolve Tech Solutions and chose RTS to embark on their RPA journey together. The results on setting up an RPA program have achieved over $16M in cost savings and over 100k manual work hours.

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Building a Team of Busy Bots: Robotic Process Automation

Client: Leading US-Based Utility

Project Overview

RPA is now a significant force in the enterprise automation market. In 2020, the global RPA market was valued at $2.4 billion and is expected to grow to $12.8 billion by 2027. A Fortune 500 energy company that provides electric and natural gas services to over 7 million customers in Arkansas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Mississippi, Oklahoma, and Texas, has been a long-standing client partner of Resolve Tech Solutions and chose RTS to embark on their RPA journey together.

The Challenge

As the business continued to evolve, mature, and modernize technology and processes, the client wanted to find a way to become more efficient in pulling reports and automating day-to-day tasks.

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RTS’ Solution

The project started with a roadshow of RPA tools to help the business units understand what they could automate. After introducing RTS-enabled ‘busy bots,’ mini-sessions were conducted to better understand each unit’s processes that were conducted hourly, daily, and monthly. Any repeatable processes considered tedious and time-consuming were entered into the RPA program.

RTS started with implementing one bot, and over the years, the RPA project has grown to include over ten bots running 45+ business processes for various business units, pulling from an array of data resources.

Benefits for RPA

✔ Reduced costs: RPA helps to reduce costs by automating repetitive tasks that humans currently perform. This frees human workers to focus on more strategic and value-added tasks.

✔ Improved efficiency: RPA helped improve efficiency by automating tasks manually. This led to faster processing times and fewer errors.

✔ Increased accuracy: RPA helped increase accuracy by automating tasks prone to human error. This improved data quality and reduced the risk of financial losses.

✔ Improved compliance: RPA helped improve compliance by automating tasks required by regulations.

Technologies Used

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RPA Implementation Challenges

Expectations must be managed with any project and new technology, and challenges must be overcome. Having a highly technical team that could solve by looking at the current processes and working on creating an RPA that would be better than expected was needed to ensure that each business unit became a champion of RPA through the project roll-out. When working with bots, the challenge isn’t just getting the process automated but achieving continuous process improvement.

Leveraging SAP Expertise for Seamless Integration

This utility utilizes SAP as its ERP system. With deep expertise in SAP and having successfully worked with over 40 SAP clients, the RTS team understood the business processes and how the technology works.

RPA processes were implemented in SAP to:

Automate financial reports for past-due balances.
Automate billing reconciliation.
Automate, create, and send exception reports for multiple SAP business units.
Automated rate cases help the team avoid regulatory fines and improve their audit scores.
Create efficiencies by automating the sending of SAP reports to distribution lists.
Automate testing for the S4/HANA Migration by taking different scenarios and cases and making comparisons with an auto send of exception reporting.

Efficient Postproduction Support for the RPA Program

The RPA program was developed using a Center of Excellence. Included in this model is post-production support. Currently, a dedicated team of 1-2 team members per shift, monitor the bots to ensure they work seamlessly.

In the case of error, SLAs were developed to minimize business impact. RTS is happy to report that there have been no significant post-production issues besides system refreshes and patching.

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