Process validation
Using RPA to increase productivity and enhance operational excellence
Saving time and achieving productivity gains through strategic automation
Robotic process automation (RPA) is a hot topic among technologically savvy organizations, with the market expected to grow to nearly $3B by 2023. For those with complex systems and multiple platforms, automating tasks across those systems not only simplifies processes and improves communications across the enterprise, but it can also eliminate the need for system integration to achieve those goals. This, in turn, can enable substantial productivity gains in a very short time frame with less overall effort.
So when a top-10 national bank found that the level of effort associated with manual document validation was increasingly overwhelming, costly, and subject to error, they sought out a solution. Having implemented RPA in other parts of the organization, they wanted to see if automation could provide a more efficient, cost-effective and compliant solution for their process validation initiative. They called Celerity to help.
Leveraging RPA for the bank’s process validation
Celerity began by performing an assessment of the bank’s online documentation and artifacts to identify potential candidates for automated validation. After working with SMEs to understand the requirements and regulations, Celerity consultants then developed a fully comprehensive validation approach covering:
Disclosure Validation (DV)
The DV bot now validates 120 different documents, reducing 60 days of manual effort down to one day and improving operational excellence.
- The bot runs on schedules and executes overnight with very little manual effort
- The results generated are near 100% accuracy
- The reduction in level of effort and cycle time enabled the validation frequency to increase from quarterly to monthly, further reducing the risks to customer experience and regulatory compliance
Web Validation (WV)
The WV bot now validates 15,000 web pages for obsolete criteria, saving time and delivering productivity gains.
- Manual inspection and logging of results was limited to about 50 URLs per person, per shift. The WV bot now validates about 250 URLs per 24 hours
- The WV bot approach is more accurate and exhaustive than the previous manual approach, and is able to find issues that cannot be feasibly and consistently identified by a human
Saving time and mitigating risks across multiple process validation areas
Prior to working with Celerity, the bank used a complex validation process that required considerable manpower to manually perform their validations. That high-degree of manual activity increased the risk of human error—human error that would affect customer experience, operational excellence and regulatory compliance. It also impacted costs. By reducing 60 days of effort to just one day, the bank saved more than $23,000 per DV process run (1FTE x $50/hr x 8 hours x 59 days of effort saved.)
Celerity’s RPA solution took the bank’s process execution to a whole new level: enhancing the quality of work, increasing the speed of execution, reducing the costs involved to maintain the process, minimizing the compliance risk, and improving the customer experience. Better yet, the bots never fatigue, can run 24/7, and don’t complain about the monotony of the work. The results of this initiative were so successful that the bank has applied modified versions of this process validation approach to other initiatives.
Before Celerity
Web and disclosure validation processes were done manually
Manual disclosure validations took about 60 days of effort
Manual web validation capacity was about 50 URLs per day
Manual processes are subject to human error, a big risk in a regulated industry
With Celerity
Full automation of process validation across multiple platforms
Automated disclosure validations can
now be completed in a single day
The web bot can validate 250 URLs per day, with greater accuracy and detail
Automated processes mitigate risk and enable greater regulatory compliance
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