Automating PestPac Invoicing with Blue Prism
In this Blueprint
Read about a real-world example of how a company automated their PestPac invoicing process using Blue Prism, reducing manual effort and increasing efficiency. This project resulted in significant cost savings, with over 1.7 FTEs saved in just six months.
- Products Used: Blue Prism Enterprise, Blue Prism Cloud, Digital Exchange
- Target Department: Billing Services
- Sector: Other
Note: This Blueprint is submitted by the SS&C Blue Prism Professional Services team, and documents a project they delivered as part of a paid service. For more information, contact your account team!
The Challenge
This process was built to load daily PestPac Invoices that are placed in a network shared folder via the business. As the business continued to acquire more Pest Control companies, the invoice volume started to increase at a rapid pace. The business was having troubles keeping up with the increase in volume. They wanted to focus on more value-add type of work and didn't want to hire more full-time employees to handle the increase in work.
The Solution
Discovery
The business case was already built in a previous automation project. My task was to primarily migrate this automation from the Blue Prism Cloud (BPC) UK team's environment onto the North America BPC instance.
The Design Phase
The Design contained the inclusion of OCR by ABBYY to read structured PDF documents in order to pull information that was required and further the reading of data from a legacy in-house web application called PestPac.
Building the automation
There were many phases in the project and lots of process improvement. We ended up removing the OCR portion of the process and downsizing the number of processes from 4 to 2. We also removed the need to launch the PestPac website and replaced it with an in-house built API by the customer. I realized that I could save the Base-64 string to a PDF file using the PDF management VBO, once I had the unique identifiers from the filename, that's all I needed for the POST request to the API for the Base-64 to PDF file save. That file was then attached to an email to the customer. The customer's email was a manually maintained Google Sheet retrieved from the Google API.
Testing and improving
The project was on hold for a few months due to API request returning incorrectly. Further, the Base 64 string would sometimes render corrupt PDFs because it was malformed. The customer had to change their Python based API code to handle these corruptions. Further, the PestPac API could not be created as a Web Service Definition. Needed to replace that with a Get Request from the HTTP VBO, this was with assistance from our GCS team.
Moving to production
The project was delivered after 8 months of challenges and process improvements.
Lessons Learned
One major problem was the corruption of Base64 strings, which caused errors and disruptions. Additionally, the legacy application's latency is resulting in a high number of System Exceptions, further complicating the situation. The automation process was also being slowed down by the need for manual verification of OCR files in the ABBYY portion, which led to confusion and inefficiencies.
Furthermore, the Blue Prism API Web Services didn't function as expected at the time, causing more problems and frustrations. As a result, many change orders were implemented, aiming to resolve the existing problems and enhance the overall system's efficiency and reliability. By tackling these challenges, we created a more streamlined and effective automation process that minimizes errors and maximizes productivity.
The Outcome
The automation has now saved over 1.7 FTEs in 6 months. Volume is increasing in PestPac invoices and it is estimated that the automation will have saved around 4 FTEs for the year. The business is extremely happy and the business has continued to buy into this companie's Automation program. Their COE is now thriving.
What next?
Sometimes creative thinking and process improvement is needed to get the automation to a point of stability and consistency. Be patient with the process. If the answer doesn't come to you right away, look at it from a different angle. Think outside of the box.
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