How Intelligent Automation Boosted Employee Productivity

COMPANY

CIFI Group is a prominent real estate firm specializing in China’s property development, property investment, and property management. It has an extensive geographical presence ranging from first-tier cities to cities with high growth potential. CIFI Group’s developmental projects span residential, office, and integrated commercial complexes.  

CHALLENGE

When CIFI Group developed a Center of Excellence (CoE), it came with a rapid increase in the volume of transactional data. As a result, staff had to manually download, process, and verify data as part of the usual reconciliation process. This took up a great deal of employees’ valuable work hours.

They had to:

• Individually log into each of the 14 banking online systems
• Download the financial data from each bank’s online system
• Download the financial data from CIFI Group’s system
• Individually compare the financial data from all relevant systems for discrepancies  
• Write a report to be sent to the appropriate parties

Seeing that the process was painstakingly time and resource-intensive, CIFI Group hoped to use intelligent automation to cut the need for staff to perform the routine yet critical tasks. Given the large number of data sources involved and the repetitive, rule-based nature of the tasks, AI-powered robotic process automation (RPA) technology posed the solution to their needs.

AI-powered RPA can capture data, trigger responses, communicate with other systems, and perform various tasks independently and efficiently. Therefore, it can take over repetitive tasks that would otherwise have to be done manually.

However, one obstacle that firms often encounter when deploying RPA to handle financial data is using security tokens.

Many banks and financial institutions that CIFI Group cooperated with required USB Security Keys. These keys come in the form of physical flash drives required to connect to the machines to access the online banking systems.

To circumvent this, an RPA bot would have to identify and use the correct physical USB key corresponding to the relevant bank to enter the online system.

OUR SOLUTION

CIFI Group selected Laiye RPA as the preferred automation product given its needs. Laiye delivers the deepest, most advanced RPA, artificial intelligence (AI), and natural language processing solutions (NLP) to help businesses become more efficient, effective, agile, and successful. It also frees people to focus on meaningful, innovative, mission-critical initiatives.

To address the issue with the security tokens, Laiye introduced a network hub, a physical device that can store multiple USB keys for automation purposes. The network hub incorporated hardware and software that helped transmit USB data to the operating virtual machine and the PC via the TCP/IP network.

However, that alone was insufficient, so Laiye went further and developed a device named KeyBox which, besides having the ability to store up to 30 passwords, assisted in the input of passwords during the RPA operation.

IMPACT

With the authentication barriers tackled through the network hub and KeyBox, Laiye RPA was successfully implemented and deployed.

The data reconciliation process became fully automated as the RPA bot would do the following:

• Automatically log in and download the necessary transactional data from all 14 banking systems.
• Automatically download the data from CIFI Group’s system
• Automatically conduct cross-comparison while flagging any discrepancies
• Automatically generate a report to be sent to the relevant parties

Automation of the four steps enabled employees to direct their efforts on tasks requiring human thought. As a result, CIFI Group saw a reduction in labor hours and labor costs along with a boost in employee productivity.

Want to know more?

Contact our friendly team to discover how much time and effort Laiye can save your company. Also, explore the ways your firm can use the freed-up time to increase sales and improve profitability by reading our success stories.

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