Combining IDP, RPA and AI to solve a complex process

The client's challenges and objectives

IQera, the French leader in receivables management, is the result of the merger of several companies, including DSOgroup, which assists companies in the development of their customer capital.

The biggest challenge for the company was to put an end to time-consuming, repetitive manual data entry tasks that were not very rewarding for the employees of the debt division.

To do this, iQera started an automation process and asked Novelis to assist them.

After an initial study confirming the potential for automation, the group decided to optimize a pilot process using RPA: the scope chosen concerned the automation of the “Banque de France” admissibility process managed on behalf of one of its insurance partners.

In fact, this leader in receivables management was facing a number of difficulties in the manual management of the eligibility process at the “Banque de France” which did not allow it to respond quickly to its insurance partner:

Repetitive and costly manual process (equivalent to 3.5 FTEs)
Data entry errors that delay the process and can invalidate a claim
Processing 7,000 documents per year, at a rate of 45 minutes per document
Delays in responding to files that affect the customer experience and the relationship with the insurance partner
Long process : the agent should enter a part of the data, waits for a confirmation to continue while respecting some business rules

Our achievements

To meet this challenge, here is how we have automated the above process:

The paper documents are received from the “Banque de France”
The paper documents are then scanned and the OCR tool of our partner ABBYY (FineReader) extracts the raw data
The data extracted by the tool is analyzed and structured using our partner NICE’s tool and NLP algorithms from our in-house research lab Novelis
The structured data – about fifty – are then integrated into the information system according to a business decision tree

In addition, we have:

Provide an OCR solution for processing paper mail received from partners, such as the Banque de France
Automate repetitive manual process: reading the mails and then entering them in an external system of iQera (web debt app) in 2 steps/time

Results

Thanks to the RPA, NLP and IDP technologies implemented, we were able to eliminate 100% of human input errors. The unit processing time is reduced from 45 minutes per file to 1.5 minutes.

With the automation of the process and the real-time processing of information, iQera has seen :

Significant reduction in the Time to Market within its organization
Elimation of repetitive and time-consuming tasks in order to devote to a higher value-added tasks that generate business
Identifaction of targets for optimizing agent activities, particularly in the Customer Contact area

The equivalent of 3.5 FTEs of manual tasks have been automated, freeing up time to devote to higher value-added tasks that generate business for iQera.

Novelis' added value

Our expertise in Smart Automation

Through our expertise in AI, NLP and IDP, we are able to help our clients to deliver efficient automation projects: Smart Automation.

This means taking into account a general vision of the technology and its contributions in order to deliver a relevant solution to manage both structured and unstructured data, always with the concern of being aligned with the IT roadmap and impacting the economic performance (ROI). In addition to our software robots, we also add a particular expertise in the “process mining” dimension in order to allow the rapid identification of processes and tasks to be automated in priority. Our Business Analysts complete this system in their ability to propose a high vision of the potential of the technology, the investments to be made, the architectures to be deployed and of course the expected ROI.

Valérie Crespin

Business Manager - iQera

Expertise, agility and customer service, Novelis: a quality partner.

Smart Automation, RPA / Credit Management