Why automation saves more than just time with INX SAM Suite
When your workforce numbers in thousands, the daily requests you need to manage can be overwhelming.
Shifts in rosters, updates to worker profiles, booking amendments or flight changes all need review, approval and actioning — usually requiring a Site Travel and Accommodation Team member to manage the process.
We have one client who was receiving upwards of 2300 requests a day from their thousands-strong workforce, requiring a team of people to each process 150 to 250 requests a day.
Not only can this be unrewarding work but one missed request or an error can snowball, creating additional challenges that take longer to review.
But although all requests need attentive processing, the outcome of many will be decided based on rules — meet a certain set of criteria and the request will be approved; fail those criteria and it will need to be reviewed, weighed, accepted or rejected.
This use of clear guidelines makes workplace requests ideally suited for automation, using rules and robots to bring order to the chaos.
How we take away the workflow request pain
INX +Automation adds the power of robotic automation to INX SAM Suite’s Workflow.
Rule-based robots are deployed to assess each type of workflow document your company might use, which would normally require manual human approval.
Rules can be set by your company based on your internal protocols and applied automatically to workflow documents.
For example, a request to reschedule travel might be approved in all cases where the travel booking has not yet been processed, and the proposed date of travel is more than 30 hours in the future.
The same request might always be rejected if the proposed new flight is fully booked.
Once a request is filed, the system robots leap into action, checking if agreed criteria are met. If they are, the request is approved and actioned.
If the request doesn’t meet the rules, though, there are other options.
You can decide that a request that fails to meet certain criteria will be automatically rejected and the worker informed.
Alternatively you can allow requests that meet some other threshold — the seniority of the person making the request, for example —to be forwarded to a human processor for consideration, where it can be assessed based on a more detailed review.
Save time, reduce stress and avoid unnecessary expense
The advantage of INX +Automation can be measured in savings.
For our client with 2300 requests a day, we were able to reduce the number of Workflow documents that required human intervention by 700 — effectively freeing up four people from the team to do other work.
There are benefits for those people who continue to process a large volume of requests as well.
They can tune out the noise — those easy requests that need a simple yes or no — and focus on those that need their attention.
Visibility of the workforce improves, as booking requests and other workflows managed by automation are tracked on a dashboard giving real-time updates on what remains outstanding.
Security can be maintained, with dashboards that can be set to provide users with different permissions to have varied levels of access, including being able to drill down on data to understand trends.
Best of all, companies can build the automation environment that aligns with their goals — whether that is a simple rule-based triage for requests or a more complex robotic workforce that manages multi-step requests for a large workforce.
Client testimonials
“The best thing about automation is that documents will be processed accurately because you have put the rules in place. I love it because there is no manual processing and as you dictate the rules there is no room for error. Automation takes the pressure off the team and allows them to work on more complex items.”
– Large client
“It is fabulous and ticks away in the background and one job less for my team to action. In the early days of having this robot, we were getting about 100 of these documents per day. Automation took away the pressure of completing these documents when there are other requests that require more attention. Knowing that it is working for us 24×7, 365 days per year gives great peace of mind.”
– Small client
“It’s helpful having after-hours support without having to physically have a team member processing these requests. It gives support to process the easier requests, resulting in a good balance for requests needing to be actioned by a person in my team, especially during the very busy times like shutdowns, where we see a major influx in the number of requests being submitted.”
– Large client