Four real-world DPA success stories
Uncover how DPA has driven improved efficiencies and optimized processes in a range of global organizations
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Digital process automation (DPA), considered by some to be the successor to business process management (BPM), has an increased focus on digital technologies to optimize processes and automate them to improve user experiences.
There have been a number of successful applications of DPA in recent years from organizations across the globe. Here we look into some real-world stories of DPA success.
DPA helps BT optimize customer journeys
British multinational telecommunications company BT was experiencing operational efficiency issues due to soaring customer call volumes and low workforce levels as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
According to Christian Smart, senior manager, automation center of excellence at BT Digital, this prompted the decision to implement an additional channel of communication to allow customers to engage in self-service for certain tasks, freeing up operators to focus on the more challenging and demanding customer calls.
Smart noted: “The aim was to get away from brick-and-mortar branches and shops, while stopping people [from] calling the centers.”
The initiative allows customers to book an engineer through text messaging, without the assistance of a call center operator. The self-service process takes 10 minutes end-to-end and enables the automatic transfer of the input information to the customer center systems so that an engineer can be booked. Overall, the application of DPA to the engineer booking process reduced customer call center traffic by 32 per cent.
Related content: Globe Telecom automates business processes with no-code application
DHL leverages DPA for operations connectivity
Another example of successful implementation of DPA comes from the Deutsche Post DHL Group and its Global Business Services (GBS) team. It investigated the efficacy of a DPA tool to deploy for its 280,000 users across the world, including both employees and vendors, with the goal of driving end-to-end orchestration for automation initiatives.
The global logistics company applied DPA in attempts to optimize operations connectivity and enable end-to-end automation through tech stack orchestration. A total of 24 processes were automated to improve employee, user and stakeholder experiences.
One such process was the duty VAT billing process, which was almost entirely manual prior to this initiative. Through the application of DPA the process was automated from end-to-end and resulted in an almost 95 per cent automation ratio, enabling the processing of more than 50,000 invoices per day.
Speaking on the benefits of DPA implementation Timo Neff, team lead, digital service implementation, digitalization for the GBS program at Deutsche Post DHL, said: “An end-to-end system which is able to track one item from the beginning to the end of a process allows a new level of transparency in regard to the process flow and bottlenecks, and on the value-adding activities [to benefit the customers].”
How Nokia decided which processes to automate
Katherine Dillon, automation process analyst and automation developer at Nokia, spoke with PEX Network to discuss how the telecommunications giant went about automating end-to-end digital processes.
When Nokia began its automation journey a bottom-up approach was selected as department leads were keen to identify opportunities for digitalization and automation and wanted team members to be involved in this. This enabled the organization to focus on introspection, with team members analyzing their own processes and recognizing the areas where manual tasks could be automated and optimized.
Recognizing and identifying manual tasks that are prime for automation is far more difficult for individuals in high-level or executive roles than it is for those who carry out these manual tasks every day.
By involving the less senior employees Nokia was able to capture exactly where the automation opportunities were early on in the development journey enabling them to begin automation for processes that may have been missed under a top-down approach.
To hear more about how DPA is done at Nokia watch Dillon's session at PEX Live: Digital Process Automation 2021 on demand here.
Streamlining mortgage assurance
An example of DPA in the financial space comes from a leading mortgage services provider, employing more than 6,000 people globally. The goals of the business were to achieve full automation of the mortgage quality assurance system, automatically eliminate bad mortgages and identify mortgage statuses.
A customized and user-friendly application was developed through a DPA platform to provide a holistic view of customer data across the mortgage review process. Features such as real-time key performance indicator (KPI) capture, complex calculations and gap analysis were achieved through the application of business dashboards. Work allocation was fully automated providing end-to-end real-time visibility over people processes and data.
The business has integrated more than 10,000 automation criteria for identification of bad loans and has achieved an almost 90 per cent reduction in overall turnaround time, bringing the process from two months down to less than a week.
The business also achieved automation and streamlining for several disparate manual processes. This resulted in an increase in efficiency for the loan review process of 70 per cent for a system that now has the capacity to review 500 loans per day.
What are your thoughts on these success stories, have you had a similar experience with DPA? Let us know in the comments below.
