Telkomsel Says Hello to Happier Employees with Intelligent Automation

Seamless workflows boost efficiency, resulting in high employee satisfaction. The secret? Employing unseen robots that streamline operations.

Telkomsel’s employees used to pore over hundreds of invoices each day. As the hours dragged on, monotony and fatigue would set in. Today, this part of their job has been automated using robots, and they can work on more value-added tasks such as data analysis and exception handling.

The Indonesian telco, which serves more than 170 million customers nationwide, underwent an internal digitalization in recent months to simplify its business processes across the organization to become future ready.

As part of this transformation, Telkomsel worked with Deloitte Consulting and UiPath to implement an intelligent automation (IA) platform that eliminates repetitive back-office processes using robotic process automation (RPA). IA refers to the mix of technologies that empower digital transformation. This program achieved three key outcomes:

1. The quality of processing rose as robots improved the accuracy of tasks.

2. Processes became easier to track through embedded analytics.

3. Manually intensive tasks were automated, which allowed employees to focus on value creation.

Faster invoicing with robots 

Before embracing an IA platform, Telkomsel’s accounts payable team was inundated with around 3,000 invoices per month. Each invoice had to be scrutinized for errors before being uploaded into the payment system. With the new IA platform, invoices are now categorized by an intelligent document processing software, and the data is ingested at a faster pace.

Human intervention and validation is required only for invoices with poor image quality. This has reduced manual checks to less than 10%, resulting in shorter payment cycles. 

The IA implementation brought good experiences through new ways of working, where employees work together with robots to deliver better and more efficient results.

Muhammad Dodi Darmawan • General Manager A/P and A/R Management

Greater time savings

Telkomsel’s IA project was spearheaded by its Information Technology (IT) team, which set up the digital architecture, handled quality checks, and provided governance of the RPA implementation.  

IT worked with Telkomsel’s business units and Deloitte Consulting to automate several back-office processes. The participation of the business teams—the primary user of this platform—in the solution design workshops guaranteed minimal changes to additional processes.  The redesigned and automated processes have saved the company between 30% to 70% in processing time. 

An example is the creation of the daily tax catalogue, which maps vendors to different tax codes and types. This task used to take between three to five minutes per transaction, but can now be done in half the time with automation.  

Using IA allows organizations to provide 24/7 monitoring and support services to clients, reduce workload for employees, freeing them from drudgery, and allowing them to focus on strategic aspects of the business.  

“The business started realizing benefits immediately after robots were operationalized,” said Wira Manuara, General Manager, Consumer IT Business Partner. “RPA awareness and close collaboration with business users ensured that the right processes were selected from the get-go. This also ensured shorter implementation cycles and less rework.” 

Planning for full-scale automation

While digitalisation brings many benefits, it also brings change for employees. Enablement sessions were crucial during the organisation’s change management journey.

“The next step is to create a strong centre of excellence (CoE) to ensure effective governance, delivery, and support when new robots are added to the virtual workforce. The CoE will enable alignment across opportunities, people and processes, towards the same vision and business objective. We would like Intelligent Automation to become an organisation-wide capability,” said Saurabh Punjabi, Head of IT Technology Advisory.

“While we plan to deploy many more robots, we need to ensure they work hand in hand as an integrated partnership with our staff,” said Manuara.

Telkomsel is making sure of this balance and avoiding delays in implementation by putting the right structure in place. Its business teams are mitigating risks through proactive gap analysis, which helps them speed up their robot operationalization and unearth potential shortcomings.

Deloitte Consulting conducted extensive RPA training using the UiPath Academy to impart expertise and build the necessary skills in selected employees, who will form a group of RPA champions. These champions will form the CoE and are the foundation for future automation endeavors.

“Telkomsel’s intelligent automation transformation is impressive as they have succeeded in creating a large-scale virtual workforce and best-in-class capabilities over a very short period of time,” said Romain Dehaye, Deloitte Consulting Southeast Asia’s Director.  

This was made possible by setting a clear strategic vision early on, securing tremendous support from the management and business teams, and capitalizing on Deloitte’s industry-leading expertise.

Romain Dehaye • Deloitte Consulting Southeast Asia’s Director

Growing with RPA

With an eye on the future, Telkomsel aims to build quality robots with minimal external support.

Our RPA journey has been challenging but an enriching experience. We have set up and operationalized processes across multiple business units, including Finance, Procurement and IT, which is aligned with Telkomsel’s digital transformation roadmap. With real benefits realized, we are determined to further scale our digital transformation journey with UiPath.

Saurabh Punjabi • Head of IT Technology Advisory