Reducing Manual Work In Heavily Repeated Processes

Problem

We had a large client that had a large number of internal processes in which many teams would only have user or analyst privileges but were forced to do heavily repeatable processes in order to maintain a separation of duties stipulation. This lead to a large number of highly technical resources being utilized for trivial tasks that were very prone to error and resulted in fines and extending timelines.

Analysis

Dynamic Duo found that the environment was very locked down in terms of the services that would be enabled in the environment. This would require a dynamic solution that would have to take multiple angles of approach. First step was to analysis the multitude of different portals and derive their flow architecture. After we broke down the process, we looked for available data that could be parsed from the portals to aid in automating the process. All available data sources were defined and documented.

Solution Engineering

We found that we could replicate the process from a users terminal using a lightweight application because of the core technologies that were bundled with a general users terminal. We then took our data sources and created user defined application that would be able to perform decisions based on information from the sources. Our solution would allow for a users terminal to gather information from the multitude of different sources that they were required to use, analyze them and provide key pieces of information that were manually provided before this solution. We then ran a user script that simulated the manual users intervention and enable the process that took many resources to be completed by one (to start the application).

Results

  • Data sources were consumed and analyzed in a systematic process.
  • Application developed that would perform user transactions systematically with a significant reduction in resources and higher level of accuracy.
  • Application was developed in an acceptable manner per the restricted environment.
  • Application details were properly knowledge transferred to on-site resources for on-going maintenance.