ICL Services

Checking mail and generating a report, these are simple but routine tasks that require a lot of attention. This is a fairly linear, specific process, which is described in an instructional document. Employees had long been saying the process should be automated; therefore, the decision was made to do such for RPA. In addition, the developers knew the task well, and analytics did not take much time.

The robot opens a shared mailbox, sequentially reads new messages and analyses the attachments. It accesses the web application and performs reconciliation, distributes all letters by folders and automatically forms a report for the interested person, where it indicates the results of the test and the errors found. All this happens without human intervention.

Since this was the first development experience, there were some difficulties. However, it came to be a working solution. In addition, the very need to train new employees to perform the operations disappeared.

Another robot helps Service Desk specialists.

A large client project was planned, the scaling of which would require an increase in employee capacity. The company was looking for a solution to automate some of the works.

In the course of analyzing the entire work of the Service Desk, we found a linear process that can be assigned to RPA — the creation of user accounts and modification of their data.

The robot simulates user actions and interacts with the user interface. Therefore, it was important to see how the employee creates the records — what applications he/she starts, what tabs he/she opens, which buttons he/she presses, what data he/she enters. Thereafter, the process was modelled for the robot. An important stage before the development of the robot is the testing of the systems for compatibility. ICL Services is a silver partner of UiPath, the leader of the market of RPA platforms. This platform is compatible with many systems and makes it possible to recognise elements at a graphic level. However, working with specialised systems may require the manual description of the work of selectors.

To automate the Service Desk, a robot is needed to interact with the ITSM system, Excel and the web application. After checking the compatibility with ticketing and web application, it became clear that the robot could not be developed as quickly as planned. The standard capabilities of UiPath did not make it possible to correctly unload the data from the ticketing system; therefore, each element had to be defined line by line. This complicated the development, but did not make it impossible.

All the formalised requirements were ready for the development phase. Usually, the analyst prepares the documents, but if the business process is simple, the developer can handle it himself. Generally, high-quality analytics should be equal to development time. Analytics should not be too quick; otherwise, the tasks that the analyst must perform will have to be performed by the developer.

To automate simple tasks, ICL Services provides for 80 hours of work of an analyst and 80 hours for development. In addition, you should consider the time required to obtain the accounts to access the systems.

The robot works on a dedicated machine and starts functioning when a request is received for the creation or modification of a user account. It opens ticket storage every 15 minutes, scans the pool of the tasks and processes them sequentially. After data interpretation, the robot opens the web application, enters the login and password and enters the information for the creation/modification of a user account — just like a Service Desk employee would do.

After a successful automation of this process, another robot was implemented. Via computer-aided learning, it helped the employees to classify requests.

Often, the employees of the help desk write to the client, ask questions, inquire, but don't receive an answer. It is inconvenient for the help desk to constantly monitor whether the client responded. The partner of ICL Services had a “three strike rule” in place: if the client does not respond after three reminders from the help desk, the request will be closed. It was decided to entrust robots with the implementation of this rule.

If the robot sees that in a few days the client did not answer the question of the help desk employee, it checks in. If there is a response from the client, the robot transfers the incident to the help desk employee.

As a result, the robot helps specialists not to waste time on silent clients, but to solve real user problems.

ICL Services has its own system, in which the employees log working hours. And certain customers have their own logging systems — with a different interface, with other markers. Integrating such systems can be difficult, so all the information had to be virtually duplicated.

The transfer of information from one system to another by an employee took up to one and a half hour per day, which resulted in 320 hours per month. It was not possible to automate the transfer of information, so it was decided to implement RPA.

After compatibility testing, process modeling, preparation of documentation and implementation, the robot freed up to one-fifth of the working day for the employees.

Monitoring, creating records and logs, updating records, interpreting requirements, checking for compliance — all these and other typical processes can be automated using RPA. Robotics complements (not replaces!) automation, thus making it possible to speed up the repetitive operations associated with manual data entry and processing.

ICL Services successfully applies RPA both for internal and client projects.