Automating processes and winning hearts and minds

In early 2020 Cattolica Assicurazioni, one of Italy’s main players in the insurance sector started exploring scaling-up automation technologies to drive digitalisation and improve efficiency. This journey started off top-down and has since ended up being embraced by employees throughout the company.

The company decided to work with UiPath from the start for a number of reasons. They researched the market and found that UiPath had one of the most diverse and differentiated suites of solutions, was integrated with a wide range of softwares, and had one the highest speed-to-market of new deployments. Additionally, they engaged Sprint Reply, as a consultancy company to support them in deploying RPA solutions, and got a definitive confirmation that UiPath was also used by many of the top consultants in the market.

Setting up the Center of Excellence

Cattolica Assicurazioni had several objectives forits automation program. On one hand, to speed up tasks delivery and customer retention by reducing the time each task took to complete, on the other hand, to improve how the tasks were done by standardising them. This would result in improved efficiency and scalability. They established a Center of Excellence in July 2020 and since then they have implemented a series of processes in several different departments.

With our RPA program we had two main objectives – improve efficacy and efficiency. We created a master plan of all the processes we could automate over the year and started implementing the plan – we now have 38 processes automated and counting!

Erica Boninsegna • Head of Automation

The automation team started analysing the Business Operations department to find out whether there were repetitive, manual tasks that could be automated. Following a scouting phase, a number of opportunities arose within a series of different business units, from back-office administration to back-office finance.

One of the processes that jumped out at the team early on was the manual monthly reconciliation of financial statements. The automation team set about analysing the task by deploying the UiPath component Task Capture, which is a process discovery tool, that allowed them to track every single action the team member did, whilst finding patterns and rules. This then allowed them to understand how they could optimise the process and what could be automated. They found very few exceptions and were able to deploy a robot that could conduct the whole reconciliation process, matching the incoming 20.000 lines of numbers to that of the financial records and sending an automated e-mail announcing completion. The Finance Department had given them six months to implement this, they completed it in two months. With more than 90% of this process being automated, the time of completion of the task was sped up 20 times whilst the error rate dropped to zero, allowing the financial department to concentrate on process exceptions and more value-added tasks.

Generating goodwill across the company

UiPath’s RPA robots also came in useful during the COVID19 pandemic in a number of ways. At the height of the pandemic, there was a significant increase in the number of tasks and paperwork that had to be processed. The CoE team noticed that many back-office processes, which needed a team to handle, were very rules-based and repetitive – the perfect candidates for RPA. So instead of training a new team, they deployed robots to perform processes such as contract terminations, portfolio research, SAP cross-checks, etc.

Another benefit was the goodwill that RPA engendered within the company. As employees found that RPA robots made their working lives easier, less stressful, and more productive they not only accepted the robots but proactively called for more robots to automate more tasks. Team members from 30-year-olds to 65-year-olds were approaching the CoE suggesting new automation ideas.

After automations deployment we would always ask for employees’ feedback – they’ve all been very satisfied with the robots and not only that, but they’ve been pushing for more tasks to be automated. RPA provided many benefits to our employees, especially during the pandemic, and this has allowed us to grow even bigger.

Erica Boninsegna • Head of Automation

RPA is now well embedded into Cattolica Assicurazioni, with robots deploying neural networks, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology to scan, read and understand a wide range of different documents, contracts, and files.