An Innovative RPA Solution for an Urgent Business Need

Challenges

Member Benefits Financial Services (MBFS) is a Credit Union Service Organization that assists credit unions in providing business loans and other services. As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, MBFS was recently inundated with SBA Paycheck Protection Program (PPP) form submissions.

To put this into perspective… prior to the pandemic, MBFS was servicing over 2,300 business loans. Then the company took on over 3,100 additional loans with PPP.

Their existing lending platform, PCFS, would require that all those loan applications be entered manually into the system. This was simply unacceptable: It was inefficient, time-consuming, presented a high degree of data integrity risk, and required a costly commitment of resources.

Solutions

Sharing experience with similar challenges, Weidenhammer knew the ideal solution would be Robotic Process Automation (RPA). This technology allows computer software to emulate the actions of a human to execute a business process – in this case, data entry – faster and more accurately than humanly possible.

Weidenhammer recognized that the right RPA solution could provide MBFS with:

• Much faster data entry results.
• The opportunity to free up customer human resources so MBFS could focus on other urgent needs.
• Full data integrity and accuracy.
• Savings from a lower cost of ownership.

Before recommending a solution, Weidenhammer proposed a preliminary proof of concept effort to determine feasibility, risks, and overall estimated effort. This short process confirmed the best practice platform and approach to fit MBFS’ needs, timeline and budget.

Drawing on previous experience with a variety of different RPA platforms, Weidenhammer ultimately recommended UiPath due to its robust toolset and desktop automation capabilities – which were key considerations based on MBFS’ requirements and system-related constraints.

With a working proof-of-concept in place, Weidenhammer set out towards deploying a production-ready solution. Error handling and logging were implemented for accuracy and to ensure there were no gaps in the entered data.

To ensure the process would work flawlessly, rigorous stress testing was conducted with large quantities of test records. After reviewing the resulting data with MBFS, all parties agreed the process was ready for a production process run.

From there, Weidenhammer proceeded with implementing the fully automated process. As a precaution, the production database was regularly backed up and stored in a secure Azure cloud file storage location.

Results

With this streamlined implementation in place, Weidenhammer clocked the process to enter a PPP application record into the system at 2 minutes, 8 seconds – compared to 7-8 minutes with manual entry.

In addition to entering loan records 3.5 times faster, the RPA process also ran 24/7. So while one person could enter about 64 loans in a day, the RPA solution entered nearly 600 loans every day!

The RPA solution provided tremendous efficiency for MBFS – both in entering the data into its system more quickly, and in avoiding a costly commitment of significant man-hour resources to manually input the data.

Perhaps even more important, the solution allowed for full data integrity by eliminating manual entry, which is highly prone to human error.

Upon gaining an understanding of MBFS’ business and PPP challenge, Weidenhammer was able to combine their development and automation expertise with the robust capabilities of UiPath’s RPA platform. The result was a rapidly-implemented technology solution that allowed MBFS to overcome its business challenge quickly and cost-effectively.

“Weidenhammer’s RPA solution provided MBFS with tremendous value – saving us time and money, and enabling us to remain focused on serving our clients. Knowing that the data entered was correct also gave us true peace of mind.”

Mark Ritter, CEO, MBFS