Automation drives innovation: immediate impact on ZS

ABOUT

ZS is a professional services firm that works side by side with companies to help develop and deliver products that drive customer value and company results. They leverage deep industry expertise, leading-edge analytics, technology, and strategy to create solutions that work in the real world. With more than 35 years of experienceand 6,000-plus ZSers in 23 offices worldwide, they are passionately committed to helping companies and their customers thrive.

THE CHALLENGE

Across their business, ZS saw opportunities to automate manual, time-intensive, data processing with RPA. The company’s Customer-Centric Marketing space houses two of its core offerings, Access MonitorTM and Affinity MonitorTM. These offerings collate large amounts of data to deliver deep market insights to subscribers. With the entire reporting delivery cycle dependent on data readiness, ZS realized that as gathering and collating critical data manually across multiple modules usually takes up to three months, its 10-person analytics team lost a lot of productive time each reporting cycle.

70%

Reduction in turnaround time

25+

Task bots deployed

100%

Accuracy

“RPA was the catalyst to reimagine our entire business process from the ground up. The result was faster and more accurate analyses.”

— Stephen Redden, Principal, ZS quote

THE SOLUTION

ZS identified automation as a key component of the evolution and competitiveness of their solutions. RPA held the dual promise of increasing bottom-line profits by removing cumbersome, manual work and increasing value delivered to clients with faster cycle times. Automation Anywhere’s offering hosted in the AWS cloud was a perfect match for ZS all-cloud approach using AWS.

Processes Automated

Data entry

Data validation

Reporting

THE WHOLE STORY

ZS had a vision for advancing their core solutions Access Monitor and Affinity Monitor to compete in the digital future. That vision required reimagining manual, time-intensive processes that used up valuable resources of the analytics team, which could instead be focusing on innovation and improving client delivery. Automation Anywhere enabled quick deployment of bots, reducing manual, painstaking data processing work. As a result, the cycle time has reduced by 70%. The success of the project has now inspired the team to think beyond automation and reimagine the offerings as self-service tools in the future.

With RPA as an orchestration engine, ZS developed a solution involving Python, VBA macros, Unix scripts, and machine learning algorithms to deliver an end-to-end automated solution.

THE FUTURE

Armed with the building blocks of automation—RPA, Python, machine learning and the right mindset—ZS is already moving towards reimagining business operations across their enterprise.