The Challenge
The customer, a big Brazilian construction company that has been on the market for over 50 years, had to deal on a monthly basis with a process that, however theoretically simple, is actually costly: processing requests for the payment of Property Tax (IPTU) from their inventory of real estate and pieces of land. Depending on the expiration dates, the task could consume the time of two or three analysts throughout the month.
Several characteristics (repetition, possibility of scripting, absence of subjectivity, etc.) made this process an ideal candidate for implementing RPA.
The Solution
After analyzing all stages of the manual process (that began with a control spreadsheet, continued with the payment slips from the Municipality websites, and ended up with the storage of payment data), a RPA robot was scheduled to take over this routine.
The robot collects the copies of invoices, and registers them on the SAP to request the money. After approval by the managers in charge, the robot stores documentation regarding payment in a history repository and updates the initial control in Excel.
Since this is a process that involves payments and sensitive data, a confidential data safe software (passwords, etc.) was implemented to ensure maximum security. The robot only sees the data on execution time and no malicious user can access the information.
It is not common the Municipality to have an API to issue the Property Tax (IPTU) slips. That is why it was necessary to prepare the robot to examine the Municipality websites and overcome captcha barriers.
In addition, the robot is intelligent to resume processing in case of failures of any nature and users are notified in case of problems.
Hosted in the cloud, the robot does not depend on connected hardware to perform the tasks and runs on headless format (without displaying the interface during execution).
It should be noted that the RPA solution is fully based on open-source software (although it uses an API costing $7/month), making it even more advantageous in terms of cost. The “home” of the robot, so to say, is a VM Windows Server on AWS – infrastructure chosen by the customer.
The robot’s architecture has been modularized for easy decoupling in case of a changing stage and to facilitate corrective/evolutive maintenance.
The Result
In the human demonstration of the process, two hours were needed to process the Property Tax of 23 properties. The robot was able to process the Property Tax of 27 properties in about 8 minutes (including 5 minutes into the start of the process pending SAP approval, and less than 3 minutes to complete the remainder after approval).
In addition to the huge productivity gain, it was possible to release analysts to use their skills in higher value-added tasks for the business.
This is an excellent example of how a simple and repetitive task can consume many hours of your team’s work. Robotization can add value even for the company’s simplest routines. Through a scaled implementation any company can achieve high standards of efficiency.
Talk to our consultants and find out what a robot can do for your company.