Leading Automobile Dealer in Kuwait. Development of Standard Operating
Redlands is a coed, K to 11, private school in Sydney, Australia, with a history of academic excellence dating back to 1884. Managing accounts, payroll, school uniforms and canteen services mired the Finance Department in high volume transactions. This hampered the Finance team’s ability to focus on strategic and value adding activities including investigations, problem-solving and partnering with the business units to support faculty, students and parents.
CLIENT : Redlands
REGION : AUSTRALIA
INDUSTRY : Finance
Industry Education
Location Sydney, Australia
Key Demographics 1700 Students, 200 Employees (180 Faculty)
The Challenge Free-up time for the team to deliver strategic services
Achievements
he team felt that there had to be a more efficient way to manage these repetitive, high-volume transactions to make time for high value activities.
Recognizing that there could be a more efficient way to do transactional, repeatable work, the team started to investigate the potential to build an in-house solution, basically, ‘excel on steroids’.
The discovery journey took 9 – 12 months with significant financial and human investments. In investigating options, team Valenta surfaced as a strong partner who could help Redlands Finance Department rethink small tasks, enhancing speed and efficiency through automation of repeatable rules-based processes.
As a managed service provider Valenta offered technology, capability and support infrastructure that was reliable, cost effective and provided a better return on investment
Finding Value Opportunities: Valenta’s on and off shore teams set out to better understand the pain points, opportunities and objectives. Processes across the organization were reviewed to understand what people did, how much data they were interacting with and how much time they spent on these activities
Process documentation were reviewed and pain points discussed to find those candidates that were rules-based and repeatable. High impact and efficient outcomes were identified.
Focusing first on small processes within the Finance Department, Valenta developed a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Bot that would mimic a series of human interactions (key strokes) across multiple applications to enter data, deliver reports and produce curated content.
Accounts Receivables
Receipting and updating payment profile
Accounts Payables
Posting account details, establishing supplier accounts and reporting
Budgeting
Completing annual data entry and monthly accruals
Fixed Assets
Income allocation and recognition
Billings
Extracting and collating reoccurring bills
Canteen Order Management
Extracting, collating and dispatching orders
Brad Weatherstone
Chief Financial Officer Redlands School
We have been able to automate over 30 processes, with an additional 10-15 processes in discovery phase.
The Bot processes data and executes 5 to 20 times more transactions per minute than the human team, running as scheduled and often 24/7 days, and without errors.
The Bot achieves a total daily time saving of 5 hours across all processes, without the additional need to audit and verify data or to correct errors or to do rework.
The starting small approach allowed Redlands to speed up many high volume, accuracy-dependent tasks. It embedded a level of process integrity and auditability not previously achievable.
Team morale improved as time was freed up to focus on business relationships and opportunities to support business growth.
We are committed to supporting Redlands tackle more sophisticated process challenges, particularly around supporting their 180 faculty to reduce administrative tasks, giving them more time for greater student and parent interactions or professional development.