At Mphasis, RPA slashes transaction handling time from 30 mins to 20 seconds: Renjeev Kolanchery
With cognitive powered automation, Mphasis is helping clients and employees innovate, grow and compete successfully
Mphasis has applied Robotic Process Automation (RPA) across certain repetitive tasks within the company, which has increased efficiency and is helping to optimise talent for high-end tasks. Few years ago, Mphasis introduced the ‘Ask Dexter’ app – a dynamic bot that improves the response rate to user queries by adopting a conversational approach. Dexter resolves leave balance queries, learning related queries (voice enabled), general FAQs related to company policy and bona fide letter generation.
On the talent front, Dexter specialises in giving an overview of job openings available, future job openings that may arise and the preferred skills for each. It simplifies the sourcing of all operational tools such as Employee Release (ER), Contract Management (CCMT) and the Mphasis Sales Marketing Tool (MSMART). Dexter is also integrated with Mphasis’ ITSM platform and services employee’s requests related to software installation, IT resource provisioning, etc (zero touch).
Automation of finance function
Paper-based invoices, bills, re-imbursement related to Account Receivables (AR) and Accounts Payables (AP) have been eliminated and instead Mphasis has automated the entire process. The company has deployed a bot to complete the accounting process across Mphasis legal entities spanning across countries where Mphasis has a significant footprint. The bot helps streamline the process through data extraction, validation and processing. New Third Party (TP) invoices, corrected TP invoices, TDS- invoices are received in the BOT Email Account, directly from the client, following which invoices of multiple formats are segregated based on their input template during processing.
The bot reads structured emails with specific subject lines and input files by keyword identification and extracts the excel attachments. The bot then checks for data validation based on pre-defined standards and any invalid data is marked as exception for the AR team to further investigate. The bot processes TP and non-TP invoices based on the mapping conditions, filtering out the records and then informs relevant teams about the process completion through emails.
Renjeev Kolanchery, Senior Vice President and Head – Automation, Mphasis, says, “Standardisation and automation of the salary template and pay slip process across CFO organisation was our next move. We have further plans of automating internal processes like integrating the access maintenance system with the leave records system.”
Key benefits
Automating inter-company transfer, invoicing and collections by deploying a bot to complete all accounting tasks, helped the finance and accounting team in saving time and effort, and at the same time, record 100 per cent compliance. In the pre-automation phase, the transaction handling time per record, for three applications was at 30 minutes which after automation has reduced to 20 seconds.
Kolanchery states, “Data accuracy was mapped at 80 per cent with manual access, whereas deploying bots enhanced accuracy levels to 100 per cent. The transaction handling time has dramatically reduced from 30 minutes per record to 20 seconds per record. Deploying the ‘Ask Dexter’ application has enabled enhanced user experience and improved productivity at the employees’ end by reducing the need for service desk tickets by 25 – 30 per cent.”
Evolution of RPA
The evolution of the automation journey has been powered by cognitive technology, which has significantly expanded the scale and nature of software-addressable problems. With cognitive powered automation, Mphasis is helping clients and employees innovate, grow and compete successfully.
“We bring the best of solutions from our Research Development and Innovation Labs – ‘Next Labs’ for our clients and ourselves. From our AI offering – ‘DeepInsights’ we leverage Optimise AI (process mining), Cognitive OCR/data extraction, Cognitive Microservices and Customer 360 to bring in automation and benefits to our CFO organisation, business operations like faster employee on-boarding, forecast/predictions for our internal financial operations. We also leverage image recognition, voice transcription, predictive analytics and predictive maintenance to improvise our business, HR and admin operations. Combining Cognitive solutions with RPA has helped us immensely in automating our enterprise and has brought in valuable benefits,” says Kolanchery.
He further adds, “Every organisation should pivot technology around the impact it has on end customer/s and work backwards towards augmenting the experience and stickiness. Just as companies such as Facebook and Netflix have delivered hyper-personalised user experiences that build loyal customer relationships, we strongly believe hyper-personalisation through next-gen technologies, including RPA, will both transform how organisations engage with employees and signal profound implications for organisations of the future.”
