Tata Sky, a joint venture between Tata Sons and Disney, is India’s leading content distribution platform. It was the first in the country to launch 4K-enabled set-top boxes that allow users to access content from their mobile devices. The company currently has more than 17 million connections across India.
Like other companies, Tata Sky considered outsourcing its manual processes to a BPO and was concerned about value leakage. The company decided that it was time to optimize within and reduce spend. They were looking for solutions that would allow them to do more with less while addressing speed and accuracy of their processes—making them overall a more efficient organization.
-Vikas Kapoor, Senior Vice President, Finance
Tata Sky partnered with EY for their expertise in processes automation. EY helped Tata Sky select Automation Anywhere RPA and helped them determine which processes would be the best to automate, providing the greatest return on investment. Tata Sky began automating processes within its finance, supply chain, and treasury departments before moving to more complex processes within its taxation and tax-related reconciliation teams.
RPA was a perfect addition to Tata Sky’s transformational strategy roadmap. And while there were some initial concerns about the limitation of software bots, the company quickly discovered that automating even the smallest of processes helped free up a lot of employee time to engage better within the company and with partners. A lot of routine activities were automated, helping transaction accuracy improve to around 98%, as exceptions were ironed out in user flow.
Another example where bots provided a great benefit was around the goods service tax, or GST, which is implemented on air travel when one flies from one city to another in India. The GST component presented a challenge for a large organization like Tata Sky, where a large number of employees were frequently flying across the country. Processing GST credits manually was tedious and time consuming. Now, thanks to RPA, a bot would read and capture each airline ticket directly from a travel agency system, uploading it into Tata Sky’s accounting system, helping to utilize the GST credit much more effectively.
Today, 5 bots have been implemented, 17 processes automated, overall improving cash flow for the company and minimizing processing times.
— Vikas Kapoor, Senior Vice President, Finance
Tata Sky is planning on automating 2 new processes and the team is evaluating RPA to bring the efficiency benefits to its HR department. Next, they are planning on focusing on bot performance and diagnostics. They are looking at creating an RPA center of excellence, to assist with bot performance management and report out successes.