A quick and massive automation rollout yields $635,000 in monthly savings.

ORGANIZATION PROFILE

Granite provides advanced communications and technology solutions to businesses throughout North America.

CHALLENGE

In 2021, Granite began exploring intelligent automation as a stop-gap solution to automate functions while committing to migrate to a permanent solution within five years. It needed to achieve some quick wins to connect the dots between several disparate systems and relieve the manual burden on its employees. The company hoped to put workers in a position to learn an automation tool as quickly as possible, and the Automation Success Platform provided that solution.

$635,000

Monthly savings

15,000

Hours saved per month

80+

Automations in 9 months

We were able to pull in over 80 automations within the first 9 months."

Paul Kostas, Vice President of Strategic Infrastructure Management quote

Solution

In only eight weeks, Granite's Automation Center of Excellence (CoE) team completed Automation Anywhere University and were automating their first use cases. Paul Kostas, Vice President of Strategic Infrastructure Management, acknowledged that their initial use cases were more challenging than most would typically tackle. But this ambitious effort proved they could accomplish more with Automation Anywhere than they had anticipated. Within nine months, Granite had over 80 automations in production, 10 of which were self-developed on the Automation Success Platform.

Processes Automated

Invoice processing

Business quoting document processing

New business placement

Collections reconciliation

Customized billing reports

Soliciting field technicians

STORY DETAILS

The key differentiator in Granite's approach to intelligent automation was to immediately form a team of internal subject matter experts (SMEs) and let their perspective guide the CoE toward use cases worth automating. These SMEs became the chief drivers of process discovery and documentation. When a third-party partner was brought in to take on the development of bots, the SMEs were able to efficiently translate challenges and information to streamline the process.

Automations in production at Granite include document processing for the business quoting team, accounts receivable reconciling for the collections team, soliciting field technicians around the country, and customizing billing reports for customers. Another automation workflow for business quoting strikes a harmonious balance between an Automation Anywhere bot, Google Cloud Document AI, and Granite human-in-the-loop, where invoices are batch ingested overnight, and data is read, extracted, and added to a spreadsheet. A human can then simply review the output in the morning.

In all, they have over 80 processes working alongside employees, saving $635,000 in manual hours each month. Employees acknowledge that engaging with automation has freed up time to focus on more value-added work and devote time to projects where they can really shine. Employees’ embrace of their digital co-workers is also evident in their enthusiasm to name them: Betty, Barbara, and Billy are a few of their valued digital sidekicks.

Employee excitement has also manifested an accelerating use case pipeline. What started as a CoE "pull" for opportunities to automate has resulted in a "push" from workers returning with more automation requests.

THE FUTURE

Earlier this year, Granite paused the development of new automations to refine and enhance some existing processes as part of a phase two effort. With development ramped up once again, Granite expects to reach over 100 automations soon and grow from there with a focus on automating complex, end-to-end processes. This scaling effort means Granite wants to get the power of Automation Anywhere into more hands. The company is already considering utilizing citizen developers to expand internal development beyond the few members of the CoE.

Automation has empowered Granite's team to focus on strategic and engaging initiatives by offloading functions better suited for intelligent automation.

Paul Kostas, Vice President of Strategic Infrastructure Management. quote

CASE STUDY

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