Where business robots are part of the team

“The culture of our organization is we work as a team,” explains Dr. Everton Gomede, Head of Technology at Sicoob. “I do one task, another person does the next task, and so on, and we produce together. But people have limits to how many tasks they can perform in a day.”

Many processes at Sicoob, such as those for insurance quotes, payroll loans and customer registration, are document- and form-intensive, and require a significant amount of data entry. For example, until recently, opening a customer account was a two-day process of due diligence, with employees reviewing and evaluating multiple customer-provided forms for legitimacy. After, they manually entered the data into the ERP system. When there were errors, employees had to backtrack, which added more time. They repeated the process for each account opening request — roughly 150 a day.

“When people type data all day, data quality suffers,” says Dr. Gomede. “Humans are very good at creating things. But we aren’t good when we have to repeat tasks or activities over and over again.”

Ensuring compliance to complex data protection regulations was also a challenge because mistakes could put the company at risk of penalties and fines. “It was very difficult to guarantee that all the tasks were performed following the rules of compliance,” adds Dr. Gomede.

In 2019, Sicoob launched a robotic process automation (RPA) initiative aimed at reducing lead times of key business processes. But equally important was the goal of freeing employees from menial tasks so they could engage with and contribute to the company in more meaningful ways.

Since deploying its business robots, Sicoob has gained an average of 80% time savings for key business processes. This translates to 10% – 20% in costs savings, depending on the process. “By reducing our processing and lead times, we also reduced expenses because expenses are related to people, fixing errors and managing information,” explains Dr. Gomede. “Plus, when we use robots, errors are near zero.”

Today, for instance, customer accounts are opened in 30 – 40 minutes, instead of two days. What’s more, the data is error-free. In the past, this process was handled manually, and provided no visibility into where a task was in the process. Now with new report building capabilities, managers have visibility across processes and the entire workflow.

With the password vault, the fraud detection process that used to take up to 10 hours a day is now fully automated end to end. The employee in charge of that task now uses their skills to investigate advanced types and causes of fraud. The password vault also supports compliance and security efforts because it enables Sicoob to control who can access systems and which parts of systems. For instance, when an RPA bot uses the vault, it has exclusive access to the platform, system and financial account. Without knowing the password, employees can access only the information in the system, not the platform, thereby protecting the platform.

“Automation reduces losses and costs, not people,” says Dr. Gomede. “The bot is a member of a team that performs a lot of tasks. The interesting point about the technology is how the organization absorbs it. Robots improve our velocity and our business strategies, which help us reach our goals.”

When implementing new robots, Dr. Gomede deeply respects the value of human knowledge. “It’s important to think about what kind of tasks a bot can perform and what tasks humans can perform,” he concludes. “Because it’s totally different. Let the bots process information and tasks. Let humans create new processes, interact with our customers and think about our strategy and business.”