
RPA wins over PGGM employees and saves company 1,200 hours annually
ABOUT
PGGM provides services in the field of pension administration, communications, executive advice, and asset management. As of December 2018, the company managed pension assets worth EUR 211 billion. PGGM works to meet three important challenges: To devise a new sustainable pension contract, to communicate openly and honestly with its clients, and to ensure costs are transparent.
THE CHALLENGE
PGGM’s main accounting system required a lot of manual work in Excel sheets to process invoices before they could be paid out. The company was looking for ways increase the employees’ time spent on the analytical aspects of the work rather than data entry. PGGM was looking to achieve results quickly, and RPA was identified as the ideal solution.
1,200
Hours saved annually
10
Bots deployed
2
Weeks to build first bots

“We were able to build our first bot within 2 weeks. I don’t think that’s something we could have accomplished without Automation Anywhere’s software. It really speaks to the quality of it.”
-Martin Riehl, RPA Developer
THE SOLUTION
At the start of the RPA pilot program, an external consultant was enlisted to start building the bots needed to remove the mundane data entry tasks from employees’ workload. PGGM discovered it was becoming too dependent on the company’s expensive set-up processes so they turned to Automaton Anywhere and were delighted to discover they were able to build their own bots quickly, in less than two weeks.
Processes Automated

Cost administration

Data processing/ conversion

Performance reconciliation

Cash flow processing
THE WHOLE STORY
The development team started the process of risk assessment on all RPA-related tasks by meeting with all related internal departments. From this they created a mitigation plan that ultimately resulted in a written policy for RPA. The main goal was to first focus on RPA within its own team, and then to take on requests from other departments. After a successful deployment, the PGGM development team went to work on deploying RPA for other groups.
Initially, employees were hesitant about the idea of bots and RPA. But after seeing automation successes and understanding the time benefits that RPA yielded, they were happy to discover what bots could do for them.
One of the most impactful use cases that drove the power of automation across to the employees was invoice processing. Before, processing an invoice required a lot of manual work. Now, when there’s an invoice, Excel and data entry is no longer needed. Instead, a bot performs all the checks and balances automatically and the invoices team receives an e-mail notification from PGGM’s script that a certain invoice has been checked and is approved or declined. Only one human interaction is now required to finalize payments.
LOOKING INTO THE FUTURE
The RPA team is ultimately working on establishing an official Center of Excellence within the company. Now that they have proven the business value of automation, they are looking forward to helping other departments within the company accomplish more with automation.
Having already implemented RPA, PGGM is now evaluating Automation Anywhere IQ Bot’s cognitive capabilities, to address some of the unstructured documents within the company’s many processes.
“In the beginning, employees were apprehensive about the bots and were hesitant to use them. Now, that more departments have actually seen what bots can achieve, they’re a lot happier. Automation can make your job a lot more interesting.”
-Jim van Es, RPA Developer
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