A case story from Keva – Finland’s largest pension insurer

Introduction

This year (2023), we had the pleasure of hosting a lunch for the directors of Finland’s largest pension insurers. As part of the day’s program, Tommi Heinonen, Keva’s CIO, shared a thought-provoking story about their journey and results with automation.

In this article we summarize some of Tommi’s story and other discussed ideas at the event, offering insights into the challenges and potential solutions for further advancement and increased value from automation within organizations that are already well-established in process automation.

Keva in brief

Keva, the largest pension insurer in Finland, is responsible for managing the pensions of various public sector organizations. These organizations include the state, municipalities, church, the Social Insurance Institution of Finland, the Bank of Finland, and the wellbeing services counties.

Currently, Keva serves approximately 2,000 employer customers, catering to 1.3 million employees and pensioners associated with these organizations.

The pension insurance sector’s operational environment and regulatory requirements concerning the use of automation

Keva must consider a multitude of ethical, legal, and regulatory requirements when it comes to implementing automation within its organization.

The pension insurance sector has to comply to the legal requirements for accountability in the provision of public services. These are particularly emphasized in the case of Keva as a public law entity.

Key regulations to be taken into account in the responsible use of automation are included in the amendment to the Administrative Act that entered into force on 1 May 2023. The provisions concern automated decision-making, its conditions, and legal remedies.

The Information Management Act, on the other hand, contains requirements for process quality assurance and documentation. In particular, documentation requires significant work. The Service Automation Act contains provisions on, for example, the conditions for using chatbots and the quality of counseling.

In addition to the international regulation, the EU’s forthcoming AI regulation is to be considered. The EU also has an AI strategy, and the OECD has presented Ethical Principles for AI.

Given the dynamic nature of evolving automation laws and regulations, highly regulated organizations like Keva must possess the ability to adapt quickly, and proactively address security and sustainability concerns related to automation.

Keva’s Automation Journey: Enhancing customer service through robotics

Keva embarked on its robotic process automation (RPA) journey in 2018 as part of the organization’s aim to transfer all customer interactions to electronic self-service. By 2023, the self-service rate has reached an impressive 91% of all customer contacts.

Keva’s customer service solutions utilize various technologies, including automated forms, Blue Prism robotic process automation, and AI for image recognition and meta-data extraction. In addition, a chatbot named Ilona is employed for customer-facing tasks. Keva transferred its bots to Digital Workforce cloud service in 2022 as part of its cloudification efforts and to increase flexibility and scalability of the solutions.

Through his speech, Tommi Heinonen stressed the significance of continuing to advance toward fully automated customer service and utilizing automation, in general, more effectively. In a mature organization, however, running is no longer as simple – or at least the challenges in the way of advancement are different.

Keva’s challenges related to gaining more value from automation

– Slowed down development:

“Low-hanging fruits” are already picked. New opportunities are less easily identified, and solutions are more complex.

– Slow realization of savings in staff costs:

Staff savings only materialize after many years, mainly through retirement.

– Ever-increasing need for knowledge development:

After the initial easy wins are accomplished, establishing new success becomes more complex. Advancing requires a profound and nuanced understanding of both the business and the rapidly evolving technologies. This knowledge also needs to be spread across the organization.

– Incorporating automation into business culture:

Business culture and the availability of adequate human resources can influence investment decisions. A conservative or cautious culture and limited resources can lead to slow progress.

A public sector organization like Keva aims to sit just behind the wave’s crest in the suction of automation forerunners. According to Tommi Heinonen, balancing forward leaning and conservative strategies in automation can sometimes be challenging.

– Non-standardised processes:

Business processes need to be described in sufficient detail. When these are lacking more work goes into identifying process candidates and developing automations.

– Limiting the scope of robotics to support processes:

At Keva, the core solution and payment processes are implemented using traditional application development. These solutions work well for their purpose but have left less need for robotics and AI to be introduced across all business areas.

When technological knowledge is confined to specific organizational functions, it can hinder the recognition of fresh prospects in other areas and impede collaborative efforts for cross-functional solutions.

– Enhanced quality demands in customer-facing processes:

Ensuring excellent quality from the outset is crucial in customer-facing automation. A positive initial customer experience promotes engagement with new digital channels, while a negative encounter may foster resistance to change and favoring traditional methods. Maintaining excellent quality control in intricate customer service processes, however, can slow down progress because it demands significant resources.

Crossing the next threshold – boosting value creation in Keva’s automation mature organization

– Comprehensive customer-centric approach to automation

Comprehensive customer-centric automation involves identifying opportunities to enhance processes with a focus on improving the customer experience. Recognizing that customer’s service journey often encompasses various business functions and interconnected processes is essential.

– Focus on core operations and ensuring transparency

Impactful automation relies on identifying core business operation and utilize automation to excel in these areas. This requires taking a step away from task automation and focusing attention on larger sets of interconnected processes. Additionally, overseeing these larger-scale operations necessitates implementing measures to guarantee the availability of accurate performance data and complete operational transparency, providing valuable insights for informed decision-making.

– Continuous skill development and acquiring new talent:

Tommi Heinonen emphasizes that cultivating a deeper and more comprehensive grasp of AI technologies, especially their business applications, is a pivotal part of advancing Keva’s automation. Specialist skills can also be acquired as a service, but doing so effectively requires a close collaborative relationship between the customer and the client.

Tommi Heinonen predicts that data scientists will hold crucial roles in the near future at Keva’s organization.

– Raising awareness and knowledge distribution:

Comprehensive automation understanding across organizational levels ensures commitment to strategy integration. It fosters internal innovation and prevents motivation-dampening disappointments when expectations do not match reality.

– Adjusting organization and roles:

According to Tommi Heinonen, project organizations that effectively blend expertise from both IT and business domains will play an increasingly important role in driving Keva’s automation forward.

– Setting the right indicators and monitoring results:

Performance indicators must be kept up to date and focus on reflect value created – not activities done. Achieving goals will change the indicators to some extent.

The Future of Automation in Keva’s Organization

Keva continuously works to ensure full transparency of its operations and processes. In line with the legal core mandate, Keva acts in accordance with the law and recommendations and respects data protection and security. Operators have a duty to demonstrate compliance, i.e., the obligation to answer the question, “How do we operate?” To achieve this objective, the “actual” activities must be adequately reported, and reasoning and responsibility in decision-making must be clearly demonstrable.

Operational transparency also involves assessing Keva’s current solutions and practices. The organization continues to refine its metrics, and align automation with the business and enhancing customer experience.

According to Tommi Heinonen, there’s still significant room for improvement in customer service. “We envision a complete digitization of pension-related processes and payments”, Tommi says about Keva’s objectives adding that more expansive cloudification is part of actualizing this vision.

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Digital Workforce Ranking Highest in Current Offering Category Among RPA Services Vendors

A Strong Performer in RPA

Digital Workforce has been named a Strong Performer in The Forrester WaveTM: Robotic Process Automation Services, Q4 2023.

Digital Workforce had the highest score possible in the following criteria in The Forrester WaveTM: Robotic Process Automation Services (Q4 2023):

• Innovation
• Vision
• Pricing flexibility and transparency
• Number of customers
• Software assets and IP

”DWF is particularly strong in healthcare; it also has specific capabilities in financial services in the Nordics that it hopes to bring to North America. The company impresses with strong implementation capabilities and innovation in areas such as IA and AI.”
The Forrester WaveTM: Robotic Process Automation Services (Q4 2023).

and/or

“Reference customers commented positively on the company’s depth of automation knowledge, ability to provide a complete support wraparound for its program, and low barrier to entry offered through its pricing models.”
The Forrester WaveTM: Robotic Process Automation Services (Q4 2023):

Download your complimentary copy of the Forrester Wave Report to see why Digital Workforce has been named a Strong Performer in RPA Services.

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The Future of Healthcare Is Here
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“It became quite apparent that, if we were to meet the needs of our members, we would have to undergo a significant digital transformation,” said Mark Saldanha, Planet Mark’s head of digital. “Our stock in trade is carbon measurement, which can be quite complex. To scale it with human analysts simply wasn’t feasible from a cost perspective.
What the company needed was a way to take out as much of the manual work as possible, so that the analysts could focus on the more complicated tasks. At the time, much of the work Planet Mark’s team carried out was to crunch data, provided by its members, using what Saldanha described as “rudimentary tools, such as Excel.”
It became apparent that there were two key parts to the project – building a new database and analytical reporting, and then improving the speed through which data is collected from the analysts and uploaded to the database.
“The database and reporting were relatively straightforward,” said Saldanha. “The number crunching, less so. But that still left a chunk in the middle which needed to be tackled. This left a gap, and it became apparent that automation could help significantly.”
Solution – Finding a partner in the sweet spot
At first glance, this would have appeared straightforward, with several carbon measurement tools available in the market. As Saldanha discovered, however, none suited Planet Mark’s needs. “When you’re digitalising processes that are unique to your own organisation, they never truly connect with an off-the-shelf interface, so it quickly became clear we were going to need to build something.”
To help, Saldanha and the team started looking at robotic process automation to support the analyst team and free them up to focus on more value-added tasks. Initial research served only to confirm their perceptions of RPA: that implementation demanded significant upfront investment, and it was dominated by the ‘Big Four’ professional service firms and a handful of major IT consultancies, all of which had a chequered history. The only alternative seemed to be start-ups with little or no proof of having carried out implementations themselves.
Saldanha said “I was prepared to have my assumptions challenged, and I was aware that RPA has been around for a while, the technology itself is more stable, and there’s a greater awareness of what it can and can’t do. The problem was finding a partner that matched our needs.”
Then he found Digital Workforce. “Digital Workforce hit the sweet spot of our demands,” Saldanha said. “The company wasn’t too large, nor too small, with clear evidence that it had completed implementations similar to ours.”
This early impression was sealed when Saldanha spoke with Leon Stafford, Digital Workforce’s UK country manager. “Quite often, you get a junior or less experienced sales executive, who really only knows how to push the product. One thing that stood out when speaking to Leon and the team was that they were only interested in working out what was best for us, not their bonuses.”

The other thing that won Saldanha over was Digital Workforce’s platform agnostic approach. “There are always multiple opinions about software. I’ve got to be able to sell a solution internally, and that can mean challenging preconceived notions of the right sort of technology. When choosing an automation partner, we didn’t want to get pushed into one particular type of tool but be able to choose exactly what worked for us.”
These types of conversations extended throughout the initial engagement, which took the form of a discovery exercise.
“We needed to act quickly, but we also needed to make sure we knew what was possible, and what would work. The Digital Workforce team were focused on helping us find the right way for us, and in conducting that discovery process, we’re now in a better position to identify what we need to do.”
The discovery phase itself, or initial assessment project, started with an initial walk-through of the Planet Mark Business Certification Process. This revealed several areas which could potentially benefit from automation.
These were:
• Detecting data discrepancies, for instance exceptional year-on-year increases/decreases
• Highlighting common and recurring mistakes, such as incorrect data formats
• Applying specific rules/transformations to help accelerate processes and/or make them more reliable
• Automating copy-pasting of data
• Extracting relevant data from evidence (such as invoices) submitted by customers as part of the certification processes
These opportunities were then investigated in more detail, with a full review of the end-to-end processes and a business case analysis to determine how feasible and, most importantly, how valuable automating the areas would be. From here, a roadmap was developed which gave guidance on how to automate the various sub-topics that made up the opportunities.
Upon completion of the assessment project, Planet Mark estimated that it could automate in the region of 1000 reports, with a business value of around £100,000.
Results and the future – Laying the groundwork for implementation success
The discovery phase was so successful, it actually delayed the implementation of automation in the business. “It might seem a bit odd, but the discovery phase was so thorough, it prompted us to not only consider the technology we needed, but actually to look at our strategy and how automation can help us achieve our goals.”
Those questions even cover Planet Mark’s core offering, how it measures. “We’re in the process of realigning ourselves to support our members tackle net zero,” Saldanha explained. “It’s a bit of a shift for us, which means looking at the problem of how we scale more efficiently in a new light.”

When the implementation does take place, Planet Mark will be confident in the foundations it has built, thanks to its partnership with Digital Workforce. “Leon and the team have given us sound advice, guiding us in what not to do as much as what to do. What’s more, they’re quite happy to wait before heading towards deployment. There has been none of the heavy pushing into decision-making you can get from some suppliers, which has been a strong positive element throughout our relationship. It’s rare to find companies that take that mature attitude, so when you do, you want to keep working with them.”

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Toyota Financial Services Norway (TFSN) is a part of the global Toyota Financial Services Corporation which operates in more than 30 countries and regions. In Norway, Toyota Financial Services provides car loan and lease services to private and corporate customers through Toyota retailers across the country.

SERVICE PROVIDED BY DIGITAL WORKFORCE

TFSN began working with Digital Workforce in 2018. The decision was influenced by its Finnish sister organization’s positive experience working with Digital Workforce and its unique competence in delivering automation as-a-service. Digital Workforce’s expansive service offering meant TFSN could outsource to just one partner all elements needed for automation success, from consultancy and training to technology and automation maintenance.

Digital Workforce is the Nordics’ leading provider of industrial-scale intelligent automation services. Digital Workforce’s intelligent digital workers utilize different technologies, including Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), to automate and optimize its customers’ business processes.

“It is really the package that you have – all of it. I have one person and one company that does RPA and I don’t need to ask different people about different things.”
Harald Auvi Kyvik
IT Manager, Toyota Financial Services Norway

An additional reason for choosing the partnership was Digital Workforce’s physical presence in Norway. Toyota Financial Services currently has one Digital Workforce consultant working full-time as part of its Norwegian team.

Digital Workforce is helping TFSN grow its internal RPA competence and build the required solutions and sustainable infrastructure to leverage automation. Digital Workforce delivers Blue Prism RPA technology to TFSN through its Robot-as-a-Service on-demand platform. If issues arise with developed solutions or updates are required, Digital Workforce is responsible for resolving the incidents and proactively ensuring that TFSN’s automated processes run as they should 24/7.

INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION AT TOYOTA FINANCIAL SERVICES

TFSN recognized that automating routines could cut operational costs, allowing it to invest more in new business areas. By reducing routine work TFSN’s objective was to enable its employees to spend their time on more complex and exciting work; for example, new strategic initiatives.

“We are financing cars, and the whole industry is changing from pure cars to mobility, so we all need to change and be efficient in what we do today so we can make investments in new business areas… One focus area is RPA because we know in Norway operational costs are high. We need RPA to do the routine work so our staff can spend their time on new business areas.”
Harald Auvi Kyvik
IT Manager, Toyota Financial Services Norway

THE KEY DRIVERS FOR TOYOTA FINANCIAL SERVICES TO INTRODUCE DIGITAL WORKERS

Ensure operational efficiency and business agility by:
Cutting costs related to routine work
to reallocate funds to more strategic areas.
Freeing up people’s time
to spend on strategic initiatives and decision-making.
A Kaizen culture, which encourages everyone to participate in continuous innovation, shapes Toyota Financial Services leadership and operations. Questions like: “Why we do this and could we do it in a smarter way?” sit at the core of TFSN thinking and align precisely with the cultural requirements of automation.

Thanks to its direct impact on people’s most tedious workloads, RPA has been very well received by TFSN staff, who enthusiastically contribute to new ideas for automation. The long list of ideas, open to all to suggest, is evaluated and prioritized by TFSN’s Center of Excellence to identify the best targets to pursue based on potential.

“Everyone is positive because we can see we are going to save a lot of time… We have too many manual processes, so we are actually eager to spend that time on something else.”
Marianne Sulland
Dept. Mng., Operation/Customer Services, Toyota Financial Services Norway

INITIAL TARGET PROCESS

Project scope

The first process selected for automation was the company’s loan claim process – a core business process that tied down a significant amount of time and costs in daily manual work.

The back-office process was manually performed whenever a dealer approved a client for a car loan.

The manual process consisted of:

– Receiving via email or in paper-form an approved loan contract and the dealer’s invoice
– Checking controls
– Filling into the core banking systems information data from the received documents
– Paying out the loan

Completing the process results in a new active contract in TFSN’s system. From the customer’s perspective, this means getting access to TFSN’s customer portal and correctly receiving invoices and other communications. The car dealer also gets paid the loan amount.

AUTOMATED LOAN CLAIM PROCESS

In the first part of automated solution, TFSN uses Canon IRIS to scan the received documents, pick and store the relevant data into a document management system. IRIS, Canon’s Intelligent Document Processing- solution, enables TFSN to structure data received in an image to a form that RPA can process in the next stage.

Once IRIS has stored the metadata in the document management system it gives the scanned documents a special status. The changed status triggers the RPA part of the process where the robot logs into the TFSN’s core banking system and checks the digital signature and all values from the metadata against information stored in the system, such as possible prior invoices and contracts.

If everything looks ok, the robot moves to another part of the system, where it continues to do a few more controls before automatically paying the loan to the dealer.

The automated process includes:

– Scanning the approved loan contract and dealer’s invoice to extract relevant information in structured digital form
– Automatically performing controls against information stored in the core banking system to ensure data quality
– Filling in customer and contract details into the core banking system
– Automatically paying out the loan

The loan claim process is fully automated and requires no human interference apart from exception handling.

The main challenge in developing the highly secure solution with quick response time related to building integration between the Azure-based RPA and TFSN’s own AWS cloud environment.

BUSINESS IMPACT

Automating the loan claim process has met its objectives in terms of freeing up employees’ time to do more value-adding work. It has improved cost efficiency, enabling TFSN to invest more in new business areas. Dealers are paid more quickly, and the faster process improves the customer experience by giving clients rapid access to the TFSN customer portal. It also ensures that invoices and other customer communications are sent out correctly, by eliminating the possibility of human error.

The automated process:

– Frees up time to do more strategic work.
– Cuts operational costs – enabling more to be invested in other areas.
– Eliminates the risk of human error and verifies data quality.
– Speeds up loan payments to the dealer.
– Ensures a positive customer experience by…
-> giving quick access to TFSN’s customer portal
-> ensuring invoices and other customer communication are sent out correctly.

TFSN is most proud, however, of its staff’s support to adapt to and use RPA.

FUTURE VISION

TFSN is a very lean and adaptive organization, which closely relates to its vision for automation: for staff to spend their time on what can’t be automated. RPA – and automation in general – has an essential role to play at TFSN where, by automating many core-business processes, the company sees a way to become increasingly agile and efficient. In the fast-changing car industry these traits are prerequisites to success.

Due to the strategic role of automation and the desire to scale up quickly, TFSN is currently focused on building its internal competence – particularly in developing new solutions – to maintain control of its business-critical processes.

Many processes within TFSN also use the same applications making automation easily scalable.

Next processes in the automation pipeline are:
Finance process for leasing and private lease:
Checking documents and making the payment to the dealer.
Mileage schema to track on a lease or private lease
when there is an agreement about how many miles the car can drive before being delivered back to the dealer.
Other areas of investigation include using more APIs over screen recognition in developed solutions and combining RPA with AI to enhance customer service.

Toyota Financial Services subsidiaries are locally-led but often share core systems and processes. While local businesses make their own decisions about RPA, they also do a lot of knowledge sharing to distribute learnings and experiences between the different countries. For example, TFSN was able to learn from its sister company in Finland about RPA. The Norwegian team also looks forward to supporting its counterparts across Europe on their automation journeys.

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THE ORGANIZATION

Toyota Material Handling is part of Toyota Industries Corporation, which spans 17 different companies operating in five sectors. The company is a supplier of material handling equipment, including the market-leading truck, forklift, truck service, and storage equipment brands. In Norway, Toyota Material Handling Norway AS (TMHNO) is the largest player in the industry, with around 180 service technicians across the country. Although part of a world-leading group, TMHNO focuses on being the best at home. It offers its Norwegian clients localized service and a wide range of customizable solutions.

SERVICE PROVIDED BY DIGITAL WORKFORCE

Digital Workforce is the Nordics’ leading provider of industrial-scale Intelligent Automation services. Digital Workforce’s intelligent digital workers utilize different technologies, including Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI), to automate and optimize its customers’ business processes.
Toyota Material Handling began working with Digital Workforce in 2020 because of its proven competence and expansive offering. This enabled TMHNO to meet all its automation service and technology needs through one partner.
Digital Workforce delivers automation solutions to TMHNO that utilize Blue Prism Robotic Process Automation (RPA) technology. It also delivers online training to help TMHNO build internal competence in RPA.

INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION AT TOYOTA MATERIAL HANDLING
THE KEY DRIVERS FOR TOYOTA MATERIAL HANDLING TO INTRODUCE DIGITAL WORKERS
Create competitive advantage through excellent customer service by:
speeding up lead-time,
eliminating mistakes, and
freeing up more time for customer interaction.
Enable growth by:
reallocating time from administrative tasks to acquiring and serving more customers, and,
streamlining processes to be able to handle greater volumes.
Increase work satisfaction by:
eliminating tedious, repetitive work.
TMHNO introduced RPA to help enhance customer experience, increase the quality of deliverables and ensure a sustainable workload for employees. The first process selected for automation was the company’s sales order process, which – although complex – carried significant improvement potential for the organization.

The manual process involved four different systems and required retyping the same information on each system because of a lack of integration. The business-critical process was time-consuming, tedious to complete, and prone to costly errors.

The company recognized that by freeing up the sales team to do more customer-facing work, cutting lead-time, and eliminating mistakes, they could improve customer and employee satisfaction while simultaneously processing more orders.

INITIAL TARGET PROCESS

Project scope

TMHNO began by automating its sales order process – an unusually complex first process – involving multiple systems, paths, and outcomes.

Inviting everyone who worked with the process and associated systems to the discussion was essential to formulating an effective plan. The inclusive approach allowed TMHNO to precisely map out each manual step and critically evaluate, standardize, and streamline the process.

To manage the scope of implementation, the process was divided into four parts:

1. Automated order requests
2. Data verification and control, populate back-office system and prepare e-sign
3. Build order to specification
4. Order submission

Some challenges were caused by the target systems using different ways to register information, all of which the robot needed to understand, transfer and translate between the systems. Digital Workforce consultants worked in close cooperation with TMHNO’s team to correctly resolve these issues. It also provided mentoring to the Toyota technician assigned to work on RPA.

AUTOMATED SALES ORDER PROCESS

Toyota Material Handling uses Canon e-Forms for submitting customer orders for clear, concise and organized access to information. The smart forms can dynamically change based on previous submissions and perform simple calculations. Moreover, all information collected on forms can be conveniently saved and easily processed. In the sales order process, Canon e-Forms are used to structure data and ensure that all required order details are captured by the sales team.
The automation is triggered when a salesperson submits an e-Form. The robot picks up the new e-Form and extracts an offer from an XML file in TMHNO’s sales quotation program. Next, it adds the customer details to a back-office system and continues to another system to complete specifications about the ordered machine.

If the order is subject to e-sign or special design requests, the robot stops and notifies a human colleague to take action. If not, it completes the details on TMHNO’s ERP and back-office systems and submits the order. Orders that require human intervention return to the robot for completion after being approved.

BUSINESS IMPACT

Automating the sales order process has significantly improved the quality of TMHNO’s output by eliminating errors. This has led to a better customer experience, improved quality, and cost reduction in alignment with the company’s original goals.

People whose work has been directly impacted by the robot have received it very positively. The team has already been able to allocate time worth two full-time employees for more customer-facing work and quality checks.

Perhaps most excitingly, the automation has enabled TMHNO to grow the business and handle more sales orders than was possible with a manual process.

Dependency on single individuals in the business-critical process has also been reduced, which ensures uninterrupted order flow at all times.

FUTURE VISION

From the very beginning, TMHNO recognized the potential for scaling automation across the business. Many processes are shared across Toyota Material Handling’s global organization and could be easily replicated in the sixteen other companies. The same Sales Order Process ties up more than 500 full-time employees in Europe alone.

In Norway, the company has already begun to identify new use cases in areas such as after-market management. It is currently building automated handling of online orders to extend the existing automation. As Toyota Material Handling’s leading online country, many Norwegian clients submit their orders through an online form that is received by email. The processing of these online orders will soon feed into the newly automated sales order process.

The post Empowering agile customer service with RPA – Case Toyota Material Handling appeared first on Digital Workforce.

When the inhabitants of Lillestrøm municipality were to be vaccinated continuously with available vaccines, the municipality’s medical record system had to handle the vaccination process. The municipality’s medical record system was initially not intended for this number of transactions and type of registrations.

In the absence of a good booking solution for the inhabitants, Lillestrøm municipality chose to develop its own booking solution, which was in production until they implemented a new function in their business application to handle the process.

Due to a lack of integration between the booking solution and the medical record system, the appointments had to be registered manually in the medical record system. The number of vaccines received could vary significantly from week to week, corresponding to workload.

Solution
Lillestrøm municipality contacted Digital Workforce for an assessment of the process’ suitability for RPA automation.
The initial analysis concluded that a digital employee (RPA) could automate citizens’ enrolment in the vaccine program and complete registration in the medical record system. Digital Workforce provided an established RPA cloud solution to Lillestrøm municipality, which they could easily scale with the capacity to handle the large workload, and Digital Workforce was able to set up the cloud platform with a new digital employee two days after the municipality’s order.

The work process was documented, developed, tested and put into production within a week. A quick turnaround was possible because the municipality provided the necessary competent professional resources who collaborated with Digital Workforce’s RPA analysts and RPA developers. The co-operation resulted in a quick process description and an agile development process where verification of the solution aligned with the development process, which in turn enabled a rapid production set up.

In the production-based solution, vaccination appointments could be retrieved automatically from the booking system’s database and registered in the medical record system with the ordered vaccination time. With an updated medical record system, the digital employee wrote the appointment status directly back to the booking system – giving the vaccination team a complete overview of the individual order.

During the three weeks that the digital employees were in production, a large number of vaccination appointments were registered, which saved the municipality about 260 hours (approx. 35 working days) of manual work.

The digital employees who handled the vaccination registration have retired since the municipality’s business application now runs this process.

A quote from the Director of digitization, Torbjørn Pedersen, in Lillestrøm municipality:
“Lillestrøm municipality needed to automate the processes related to registration of appointments for COVID-19 vaccination. The municipality had established a solution where the inhabitants themselves could choose the time for vaccination. Still, the medical record system where the vaccination itself was registered lacked an interface for this. In other words, there was a need to register a relatively high number of hourly appointments manually. The municipality contacted Digital Workforce and managed to establish an RPA process that made the registration within a few days. There is no doubt that the RPA solution was crucial to our ability to deliver a user-friendly self-service vaccination solution. We saved a lot of time in a few weeks and at the same time ensured high precision and quality in the registration. Lillestrøm municipality is very satisfied with the expertise and collaboration with Digital Workforce, which can deliver quickly and with high quality.”

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Keywords: Digital Workforce, UiPath Case

Valmet is the global leader of technology and service solutions across a wide range of industries but is not content with what it’s doing. The company has the vision to become the global champion in serving its customers. This includes continuously improving its process efficiencies and productivity. When it began its software robotics automation journey in 2019, Valmet joined forces with UiPath partner, Digital Workforce, to implement a highly aggressive Robotic Process Automation (RPA) program.

Automating various employee tasks and processes has been part of the IT landscape at Valmet for many years. Because of this, the company quickly saw the potential for RPA to remove the mundane and repetitive tasks from employees and release them into more productive activities. After successful pilots, the company decided it wanted to move forward with RPA quickly. Very quickly!

Janne Järvinen, IT Manager and Head of Software Robotics at Valmet, says: “Our RPA vision was to reach a level of automation maturity in three years that has taken peer companies five. We set ourselves the goal of automating 70 processes by the end of 2021. The automation journey really began in June 2019 and, in May 2020 alone, we delivered four new automations into production so we’re advancing nicely.”

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The Swedish municipality of Södertälje turned to Robotic Process Automation (RPA) to ensure effective operations and excellent customer service during the COVID-crisis. Being forced to rapidly grow its temporary workforce in response to the crisis, Södertälje recognized a significant risk of overloading its manual processes related to managing its expansive workforce. Automating these administrative tasks enabled the municipality to focus on organizing its citizens the required services and support during the health crisis.

One critical automation that enabled Södertälje to better handle the new operational pressures replaced the manual sign-off of temporary workers’ work hours. The automation moved from idea to production in two months and has generated monthly time-savings worth 0,5 FTEs (full-time employees).

Södertälje is a public sector forerunner in digitalization and has worked closely with Digital Workforce, a leading expert in Intelligent Automation services, since 2018. Digital Workforce provides Södertälje RPA on demand through its Robot as a Service –cloud platform, RPA maintenance, and expert services. The global health crisis has further sped up the expansion of automation and digital initiatives in Södertälje’s organization and put additional pressure on public sector organizations, in general, to provide citizens with more effective digital services.

“I’m proud we have developed our RPA skills at Södertälje to the point that we can now have a proactive approach to automation. In this case, we could anticipate a problem and built a sustainable solution before ever being faced with it. In my opinion, public sector organizations should also think more about how they are viewed as employers. Having a job largely consisting of manual repetitive tasks is hardly exciting. This is one perspective to automation which implies a clear benefit to both the individual and the organization”, says Södertälje’s Digitalization Strategist, Tony Mc Carrick.

“We are honored to support Södertälje on its RPA journey and reaching its digital vision. The current challenging time has only highlighted the value of having a digital-first approach to running operations and the right skills to quickly implement new initiatives in the public sector. We expect many more organizations to follow Södertälje’s example and adopt a proactive outlook on automation”, says Ulrica Storset, Digital Workforce Sales Executive.

Additional information:

Municipality of Södertälje
Tony Mc Carrick, Digitalization Strategist
anthony.mccarrick@sodertalje.se
+46766481194

Digital Workforce
Ulrica Storset, Sales Executive
ulrica.storset@digitalworkforce.com
+46 707 61 64 41

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