AAFCPAs developed a custom bot that ran daily, saving the organization more than 800 hours, or approximately 100 workdays, annually of manual data entry into ADP while reducing the risk of errors and improving accuracy.
Summary
One branch of a global nonprofit relied on a highly manual payroll maintenance process when capturing employee status changes in ADP, such as promotions, raises, manager changes, and terminations. Each status update required 5 to 10 minutes or more of manual data entry.
AAFCPAs’ Business Process & IT Consulting Practice developed a customized bot to automate the end-to-end process. This bot successfully processed all updates, sending an email with a brief overview of the actions taken with the logfile attached. By automating this process, the organization was able to save more than 800 hours, or approximately 100 workdays, per year of manual data entry while reducing the risk of errors, boosting the customer experience, enhancing job satisfaction, and freeing staff to focus on more human-centered activities.
Obstacles & Opportunities
One branch of a global nonprofit organization focused on youth development and social responsibility required that managers within their organization complete an online form when an employee under their supervision had a change in status, such as a promotion, raise, manager change, or termination. This form then triggered a series of actions/processes.
The online form recorded changes in a Microsoft SharePoint list as part of its daily payroll maintenance process. Once changes were approved by corresponding managers, another employee would manually enter necessary data for each affected employee into the online ADP system. There were anywhere from a few to more than 100 changes depending on the time of year and other factors, with each status change requiring 5 to 10 minutes or more of manual data entry in ADP. For example, if there were 10 ADP updates that required on an average seven minutes per change, this absorbed 70 minutes to complete. Obviously, this was a time-consuming and error-prone process.
The organization needed to find an automated solution that could cut personnel time, boost efficiency, and mitigate human error. Staff also needed to free their time to focus on more strategic and meaningful activities, thus enhancing job satisfaction, morale, motivation, and productivity.
What is Robotic Process Automation?
With constant pressure to increase efficiencies and speed to insight, reduce costs, and improve process quality, many organizations are turning to robotic process automation (RPA) as a solution.
RPA is a software application (a.k.a. “Bot”) that works alongside your current systems to perform automated tasks based on human instructions. RPA eliminates tedious, repetitive tasks and frees up knowledge workers to spend time on higher value work like strategic planning.
Solution
Once AAFCPAs’ Business Process & IT Consulting Practice had an understanding of the current process and end goals, the team used Robotic Process Automation software to build a customized bot. The bot then logs into ADP and cycles through the data changes record by record to update the corresponding employee record within ADP.
For each row, the bot searches for the employee using their employee ID and navigates through various ADP menus to make changes as appropriate according to the type and reason along with associated specific rule-based instructions. Once the bot completes a row, it then updates an automatically generated log file with a record of actions taken in ADP. If a change is not processed for any reason, the bot makes a note of this in a log file for manual review post-processing. As soon as all changes are successfully processed, the bot then sends an email that includes a brief overview of the actions taken with the logfile attached.
The Payoff
AAFCPAs developed a custom bot that ran daily, saving the organization more than 800 hours, or approximately 100 workdays, annually of manual data entry into ADP while reducing the risk of errors and improving accuracy. This process also provided the organization with a reliable record of all changes made in the system.
Thanks to automation, the organization was able to realign resources, free staff to focus on more human-centered activities, enhance job satisfaction, and empower staff to accomplish more in less time and with less effort, such as electronic payment reconciliation. The success of this automation provided the organization an opportunity to look at other areas of the business where they can benefit by automating a process.
AAFCPAs works with clients across all industries to design custom automation processes that eliminate repetitive tasks and help organizations shift focus onto more strategic, analytic, and human-centered activities. Automation notably shrinks the time involved in repetitive, rules-based tasks that require no human judgement, such as data entry, paper forms processing or digital transfer, invoice verification and processing, inventory management, and claims administration. So teams can get back to higher valued tasks while reducing the risk of errors.
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Optimize Your Business Processes for Measurable Success
Integrating the transformative power of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Data Analytics, AAFCPAs provides a unique competitive advantage to our clients by embedding the strategic insights and financial acumen of experienced consulting CFOs directly into our practice. This approach ensures that our solutions not only leverage the latest in technology but are also finely tuned to the nuanced needs of finance functions and strategic financial leadership.
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