FEATURE INSIGHT
also reduced significantly. Across all the circa 1,100 payrolls, 180,655 minutes or 3,010 hours have been saved on payroll processing. This means the payroll team can now offer added value to clients, such as advice on national minimum wage, processing of benefits in kind via the payroll thus improving customer service and compliance. It also means these additional benefits can be provided without charge as the administrator is already employed but has additional time. It also provides capacity of three FTEs to allow the service to grow further without the need for recruitment, equating to an additional 450 payrolls of potential growth. Customer satisfaction hasn’t been measured against this specific project as often customers do not know about the change. This project was to ensure errors were reduced, thus reducing time correcting errors and speeding up the actual transactional processing. By improving efficiency and processing times it allows for further growth and increased customer added value; offering additional services such as compliance health checks on their payroll. The payroll team have embraced the changes and this award would be in recognition of their engagement and hard work, along with recognition for Toby Woodhead and Alan Jardine in our IT service; without them this project wouldn’t have been possible. covering the three councils of East Sussex, Surrey, and Brighton and Hove, providing ‘backoffice’ or business support services. Orbis also works with a range of other public sector clients and supports over 650 schools and academies across the south east with fully managed payroll and transactional HR services, processing over one million payslips annually. An onerous task performed by the Payroll Team was the monthly calculating and uploading to the Teachers’ Pensions website of an individual summary of the contributions paid for every school Orbis supports. The process was highly repetitive and time-consuming – taking two people around two days each month to complete – and pulled Payroll Team members away from other more valuable work. A ‘eureka’ moment came when the Payroll Team met with the Orbis Robotics THE ORBIS ROBOT Orbis is a public sector partnership
Team, who were attempting to raise awareness of the potential capabilities of robotics across the organisation. The Robotics Team were looking for a process to use as proof of concept, since RPA has the potential to bring improvements to the organisation by enabling more work, in less time, with fewer people. All the things that made the uploading process a horrible task for humans were the same qualities that made it ideal for trialling with the new robotics technology. The Payroll Team provided details of the process, and the robotics team set about building/writing the robot. The initial phase took just two days as the Robotics Team incorporated a macro that had previously been developed to collate data, so only the final task of uploading the data to the TP website needed to be automated. The next step was to test the solution could complete the task end to end. After a thorough programme of testing, approval was given. Overall, it took a couple of months from the first conversations to the robot performing the entire upload process by itself for the month of March 2018. Communications The Payroll Team were consulted and kept up to date throughout the short life of the project via weekly meetings and written progress reports. Also, to counter the idea that robots were infiltrating the organisation and taking over the jobs of humans, a wider programme of communications to highlight the benefits of RPA and dispel myths was delivered via weekly blog posts on the Orbis Linkedin page. Pensions website of an individual summary of the contributions paid ... ...uploading to the Teachers’
£7,000 per annum for this one process. ● Greater accuracy – zero chance of human error. ● Greater resilience – previously only certain team members were trained in the process, with no allowance for absence, annual leave etc. Now the only training requirement is how to start the process (i.e. ‘switch the robot on’). ● Team members are now free to do more value adding, customer facing work – which translates to higher levels of customer satisfaction. ● Potential exists for further applications – the same robot could be put to work in any situation that requires a file to be uploaded to a website. The project succeeded in proving robotics could work in Orbis. This is important as Orbis transforms services to provide the most efficient means of supporting the three partners, our residents and customers into the future. Individual summary statement We managed to build, test and implement a working robot within the space of a couple of months. We did this from a starting point of limited prior experience, no prior training, no specialist skills, no dedicated budget, and initially not even a technical platform to work on. As a result, we have dramatically cut the time required to complete a task, freed staff to concentrate on more value adding, customer focused work, whilst also fulfilling our obligations to customers. RPA has brought greater accuracy, team resilience, and could potentially lead to new business opportunities. The robot could easily be applied to other similar situations that require a file to be uploaded. Ultimately, the project has proved that we can design and build (write) a robot and give it responsibility to complete an entire task from start to finish; all without impacting customers, except in a positive way. Postscript Since the initial robot, Orbis now has thirteen processes automated with more ‘bots’ in development. Total savings are in the tens of thousands, and the partnership is developing a reputation as trailblazers in the field of automation in local government, with several other nominations and awards (http://bit. ly/2TT90M6). n
Project benefits The project has brought a range of benefits, including:
● Time saved – based on an eight-hour day, that’s 192 hours of staff time over the course of a full year. ● Financial savings – estimated at
| Professional in Payroll, Pensions and Reward | April 2019 | Issue 49 48
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