Streamlining Financial Reporting with Intelligent Automation
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!
In this Blueprint...
This blueprint outlines a real-world example of how the SS&C Blue Prism Professional Services team helped a financial services organization leveraged intelligent automation to streamline their trust accounting processes, reducing manual processing time by 67%.
- Products Used: SS&C Blue Prism Next Gen, Digital Exchange
- Target Department: Accounting
- Sector: Financial Services
The Challenge
One of our customers wanted to reduce the amount of time needed for manual consolidation/formatting of several files from different sources into a single template file. There was a template file for all 30 of their clients and each file had different requirements.
The Solution
Discovery
The project was scope by our pre-sales team and brought forward by their Trust Accounting team. We had an Intelligent Automation consultant do a PDD for one of their major clients that touched upon all the requirements necessary to populate the template Excel file.
The Design Phase
One of the requirements was to have the automation take snippets of PDFs and web screens from MS Edge. I created a custom code stage that did so and would snip the screen based on XY coordinates deduced by Surface Automation Region mode. We decided to create a mapping file for the Collector process, and each client was their own work queue item with their requirements saved in the Item Data.
Building the automation
The estimated build took 200 hours longer than anticipated. The process was quite complex and this was going to be their flagship automation. I had to create 8-10 custom code stages to replace Macros, parse semi-structured data and enhance the Excel VBO from the DX. I also needed to incorporate a deferral mechanism due to certain files not being ready at a specific time but processing still needed to be done before the SLA.
Testing and improving
Test plan created alongside the business. We had a bunch of positive and negative test cases. UAT took longer than anticipated.
Moving to production
The automation was built on Blue Prism Next Gen platform so we created the Automation Flow Tasks across 4 production DWs and published all the assets needed.
Lessons Learned
The process wasn't mapped out fully. We needed to cover all clients and not just one general one in the PDD. The template files were not standardized (Excel). Using the Excel VBO and not the GUI proved challenging in certain stages not pasting correctly or cells/sheets not being activated.
The Outcome
We delivered the automation to the customer manual processing went from 12 minutes a file to on average 4 minutes a client. We also drove buy in from the customers Human Resources department and they are now in process discovery for automation opportunities in that department.
In addition, this project was also mentorship for our Americas PS team where I mentored their automation team in Blue Prism Next Gen. I shared best practices over 6 months and their developers/COE were quickly brought up to speed. They now have 3 automations in production, and their future looks bright!
What next?
Where there's a will, there's a way.
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