Automation AI
Contract operations improves processing time by 10X with RPA
ABOUT
Automation Anywhere’s contract operations function is responsible for reviewing and processing order forms, statements of work, and governing agreements for the company’s internal sales team and customers.
THE CHALLENGE
Near the end of fiscal 2018, there was a massive spike in demand for Automation Anywhere products. As a result, contract operations was flooded with new contracts, putting a considerable burden on the small team. Contract administrators and managers worked late nights, weekends, and holidays attempting to processes every request as fast as possible. Even so, bookings slowed down, jeopardizing internal and external customer satisfaction and contract operations’ reputation for delivering documents in a timely manner.
In response, the team outsourced parts of the process, which only solved some logistical issues.
88%
reduction in contract processing time
100%
reduction in exception handling with AARI
80%
decrease in signature processing time
“There were times when I had to stay up until 3 in the morning processing order forms. Now, the bots handle the processing, and I can focus more on customers.”
-Brandi Ford, Senior Contract Administrator, Automation Anywhere 
THE SOLUTION
To better support the booking processes and rely less on external resources, contract operations decided to automate some of its workflows. By partnering with the Automation Anywhere technology group, the team quickly launched its first bots. With the support of automation, the team was able to keep up with the increased demand without expanding or straining their human resources and even significantly reduce the overall processing time. After experiencing this initial success, the team expanded its automation initiatives. Leveraging cloud RPA to increase citizen development and AARI to streamline the activation of their Digital Workforce, contract management was able to achieve even greater efficiencies.
Processes Automated
Contract signing and approval
Order status updating in Salesforce
Order status notifications
Queue management
THE WHOLE STORY
The first project the contract administrators tackled with automation was booking contracts. The team used to manually enter order details into Salesforce and then send out alerts to stakeholders when documents were executed. Now, the bot automatically collects the information emails, notifications from e-signature applications, and other sources to update tickets and send out alerts, resulting in increased satisfaction from internal customers.
To accelerate the overall order processing further, the team rolled out AARI. Before, the contract operations team had to send specially formatted emails to the bot to trigger an action, opening the door for errors and requiring about five minutes for bot-related processing. With AARI, the team now uses custom interactive forms to send all details directly to the bot—no need for emails in most cases. By implementing AARI, as well as coupling the bot with MuleSoft technology, contracts are not only being processed without errors, but the end-to-end time has also decreased from approximately five minutes to just 25 seconds, a 10x improvement. With AARI handling the bot interaction, the team has become even more productive.
Prior to developing the second bot, contract administrators had to manually put together and review the contents for Adobe Sign envelopes, with each document taking about 10 minutes to process. Now, a bot automatically prepares the envelopes—including recipient detail extraction from Salesforce and document(s) type identification—in approximately two minutes.
One of the team’s biggest successes was leveraging the cloud platform to ensure accurate reporting of tickets. Ticket items used to get stuck in the queue and remain there until someone took action—skewing the team’s performance metrics. The latest bot was quickly built and rolled out via Automation Anywhere Enterprise A2019. It looks at “inactive” tickets and sends a notice to the person responsible for the ticket about the status of the item(s) to prompt action.
THE FUTURE
The contract team has become one of the biggest RPA ambassadors at Automation Anywhere, always looking for new automation opportunities. Speaking of new bots, they plan to develop a bot that will fully automate all incoming ticket assignments to regional managers.
“We’ve been able to scale our processes and pivot with little to no effort since our automations have become an established part of our workflow.”
-Brandi Ford, Senior Contract Administrator, Automation Anywhere
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