How we used RPA to solve simple, human-dependent tasks in a legal-tech product
Radhika Madhavan
Director of Marketing
Table of Contents
- What is RPA, exactly?
- Why RPA though?
- Sample Applications of RPA
- Who is our client?
- What problem was the client facing?
- What tasks did we automate?
- How and why did we arrive at an RPA to automate these processes?
- Implementation: what tool did we use to build the RPA?
- How does RPAing these processes benefit the client and us, in turn?
- Want to optimize your business process to save resources and costs?
When we sat down with our developers to understand how our HPS team implemented an RPA to automate menial tasks for our client, it immediately made me think about a funny anecdote.
Well, laziness is indeed the mother of inventions…and brilliant programming, evidently.
But we digress. Where were we? Ah, RPA. Let’s first get to know what it is:
What is RPA, exactly?
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a software technology that relieves humans of the repetitive activities within a business by observing and mimicking human digital actions and repeating them as many times as required.
RPA allows software developers to build “bots” that can automate rule-based business processes and work in integration with the IT infrastructure of the company much like humans.
Why RPA though?
Albert Einstein once said “insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.” But what about doing the same thing over and over and over, day in and day out to produce the exact same result?
The bottom line of all human endeavors is to make the best use of our faculties, create something new and solve problems to make life a tad bit better. This applies to businesses too.
RPA essentially takes away the tasks that require no creativity or cognitive stress and yet calls for accurate and repetitive action with reliability and consistency.
With a team dedicated to automate processes with RPA at High Peak Software, we aim to:
- Mitigate the load on manual workforce
- Facilitate undivided attention on core competence
- Cost control/ non-recurring investment with infinite productivity
- Time and effort optimization
- Improve productivity
Sample Applications of RPA
You are essentially surrounded by RPAs all around. Especially within businesses, everything from finance, accounting, human resource and payroll management, inventory and invoice management etc are areas that are exceedingly being delegated to RPAs.
For instance, multinational companies with thousands of employees need regular payroll management, along with attendance and the general employee database management of the company.
With a manual workflow, the process would not only consume time, energy and recurring expenses for the task management and execution, but will also remain prone to errors, misjudgement and inconsistencies.
With RPA however, these processes can be seamlessly automated at once and can handle tasks like data uploads, data entry, data extraction, automation of mailers, etc.
Now, onto how we developed the RPA to automate certain repeated tasks for our client:
Who is our client?
Scirevance, a technology firm in the U.S, delivers legal, risk and compliance solutions to law firms and legal service providers. By combining narrative intelligence, learning, and natural language capabilities, Scirevance matter analysis software instantly transforms the way matter-related information is interpreted, streamlines the document management process, and helps lawyers in constructing a winning storyline from day one.
This is what John Siniawski, CEO at Scirevance, says about us:
“One of the great things that the High Peak team has done with Scirevance’s system implementation is that the system is structured in such a way that it adapts to the way you work. It’s intuitive, easy-to-use, and takes a broad view of what our end-users do with all the data, turning it into useful information. Our clients now create a better narrative backed with data visuals and facts.”
But then, John likes us. He is our friend.
We digress again. Onto the article:
What problem was the client facing?
About 2000-5000 mailers and thousands of documents are uploaded into the Scirevance platform, a legal intelligence augmentation system, at the end of every working day.
This process alone takes 4-6 hours, given that it gets done without any hindrances in the way.
This required for someone to stay back and give this tedious task their complete attention every single day.
The developers at High Peak Software often say “When there is a problem to solve, call a human and where there is a task to get done, employ a bot.”
When Scirevance approached High Peak Software with a similar problem as most companies with manual workflows, we gathered that there is excessive wastage of human resources, time and money, all of which could be redirected to the company’s core competence.
What tasks did we automate?
Once the developers at High Peak dedicated a team to automate the Scirevance-knowledge process platform, it was essential to pick the right tasks to automate.
As mentioned earlier, the uploading takes around 4-6 hours for about 2000 mailers and related documents. This is 4-6 hours of non-productive work that the employee is being billed for.
To solve for this, the HPS team got to work and strategized a two-step automation process that included-
- Automating was the data uploading process.
- Enable the humans to select a time during which to run this RPA.
So, we geared in the direction of automating said processes for Scirevance. . Which takes us to the next question: how did we do this?
How and why did we arrive at an RPA to automate these processes?
When our developers sat down to automate the data uploading task, they figured that the traditional programming to automate would require hundreds of lines of code and up to a fortnight to complete.
Hmm…ironic. Aren’t we supposed to save time to…er…enable users to save time? That begged the question: what is the alternative to traditional automation?
When it comes to automating a business process, the ease in implementing and managing the automated process is just as integral as its efficiency in getting the job done.
The team at HighPeak quickly chose RPA because the traditional programming would have been complex, time consuming and rigidly written with few chances of making any amends to the process in future. It would have also called for complex coding and testing before its ready for deployment.
The RPA however was extremely easy to amend and deploy with a “record and play” solution model. It is also significantly easier for an RPA tool to work in integration with emails, calendars, CRM, ERP etc, providing a simpler and more elegant solution that can be automated in less than a couple of days, unlike its traditional coding alternatives which would have taken a fortnight to accomplish and maybe longer to test and deploy.
RPA turned out to be a simple and elegant solution, which basically let us automate the tasks in a day as opposed to two weeks.
Implementation: what tool did we use to build the RPA?
While multiple RPA tools like Automation Anywhere and BluePrism are available in the market, our developers chose to use UiPath.
Ui Path robots carry the reputation of being equally suitable for big and small enterprises with its task-focused automation that mitigates the need for human intervention and allows the company’s human resource to focus on the core competence and objectives of the company.
Quite simply, the Ui Path:
- Is the best cost-effective solution compared to its cohorts
- Is the fastest, most robust and agile solution available today
- Facilitates attended and unattended automation
- Minimizes cost and maximizes operational competence
How does RPAing these processes benefit the client and us, in turn?
The High Peak team did what they always do: come up with a win-win solution that works in the best interest of our clients as well as us.
Scirevance would instantly automate their data upload processes, save time, eradicate the need for an employee to spend 4-6 hours every day on document uploads and save costs on a work that offers no productive challenge for the company but requires redundant-for-a lifetime action every single day.
The High Peak team served us internally just as well. By choosing the most agile solutions and strategizing the automation with utmost efficiency, we saved hours and days from the front end and back end developers, minimized the turn-around time and got the job done with significantly lesser license cost.
To be more precise, we saved on front end and back end developers and a QA for good measure. Three resources and two weeks of time, cost, and efforts are what we escaped from when we chose the RPA path rather than coding in the automation.
At High Peak, we don’t call it a solution unless it solves something for everyone involved.
Want to optimize your business process to save resources and costs?
Do you have business processes or products in mind that can pick our developers’ brains? Anything that can become the next big anecdote on this page?
We’d love to work together with you to identify gaps in your business processes and automate repetitive tasks so you can focus on your core business.
Hit us up if you are ready to reinvent your business, save time, money and honestly a lot of boredom… we get it done really really quickly… like wait-what’s-happening quickly.
