Onboarding & offboarding new patients / employees faster, and with improved communications

[harish.mogulluri]

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Faster and clearer onboarding & offboarding, with Tableau reporting

Which industry did you deploy this use case in?

• Healthcare & life sciences
• Hospitality

Which functional area / department within the organization benefitted most from this automation?

• Human Resources

Which SS&C Blue Prism tools did you use?

• SS&C Blue Prism Enterprise
• Digital Exchange

Describe the problem your automation aimed to solve

Our HR team has large number of documents they need to manage for both onboarding and offboarding of an employee / a patient. They need to check data from different sources such as pdf, excel, email and also interact with multiple internal applications. Onboarding and offboarding is tiresome process, has lot of applications and different data formats.

Provide a brief, step-by-step outline of how you set up your automation

Step 1: Discovery

In order to understand the current process, we had multiple sessions with HR team, where they explained different scenarios present.  

In one of these sessions, our Subject Matter Expert (SME) implemented onboarding and offboarding of an employee / patient in test environment. 

We recorded these sessions to aid our design phase and re-evaluate the existing process before automating it.

Step 2: Design

We used our recorded discover sessions to create an "AS-IS" diagram which illustrates the current process, which then helped us to create a "TO-BE" diagram which shows the automated process. This forward thinking resulted in optimizing the process, not only to fill the gaps of an existing process but also to have better tracking, communication and value to the team.

To meet SLA, We designed the automation which runs the process 24*7 and also notifies the team for any exceptional scenarios.

Step 3: Build

This automation was divided in to 2 parts:

• Onboarding and off boarding of an employee
• Onboarding and offboarding of patients

The automation is built by utilizing Blue Prism best practices, dividing the process into:

• Queue Loading
• Main Process
• Reporting Process (for both daily and monthly reporting).

Due to the nature of the automation and applications involved, we have divided the Main Process in to 3 sub processes to interact with different applications.

We improved on the current process by implementing communication and tracking of onboarding / offboarding requests, keeping everyone involved in the process well informed.

We utilized environment variables in Blue Prism, and also enabled SME's or other stakeholders to update any potential changes related to the automation by creating an excel file and added different variables which are potential to change for every 3 to 6 months.

Finally, we moved all the data which is generated by the Reporting Process in to SQL and connected the SQL data to Tableau for data visualization.

Step 4: QA

We tested each component / process and also performed integration testing for correcting any unexpected outcomes. We then moved to validation testing, which seeks approval of the automation from the SME / business owner.

Step 5: Delivery & ongoing management

Production deployment involved requesting different application access for the BOT account to use. We also performed a pre-run to validate the access for all the applications and verified settings for virtual machine.

What were the main challenges you faced during this project, and how did you overcome them?

The main challenge for this automation project was to make sure that business owner and SME gain confidence, as well as making sure that the business users understand the process.

To increase the confidence on the automation project, we turned off completion of onboarding /offboarding process for initial week of implementation instead provided the result in excel file for the team to validate.

To help business users understand the process, we created user documentation and tutorial sessions to walk through the process.

What was the impact of your project?

The automation improved communication among the different stakeholders involved in onboarding and offboarding, whilst also completing the process 10* faster than the previous manual process.

Additional information

Its always good to think through 4 principles while designing or building any automation and make sure those are achieved:

• Is our automation reliable?
• Can this automation scale with business need?
• How much effort is required to maintain this automation?
• How much value are we delivering to the stakeholders? (for this automation, we thought in terms of dollars saving, communication and fast processing resulting in time saved)

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Harish Mogulluri
Lead developer
America/New_York TX
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