Hot bots: The payoffs and pitfalls of robotic process automation - SiliconANGLE

Irish health insurer Laya Healthcare Ltd. needs to clean up thousands of accounts each month that carry balances that are too small to bother collecting. "A customer may have a balance of $150.12 and pay $150 because they can't remember the correct amount," said Information Technology Director Ian Brennan. "We're not going to chase them for 12 cents, so we apply a credit to zero them out." With 586,000 customers, the company has thousands of such tasks to address each month. "Our financial system didn't have the functionality we needed, and the vendor wanted a king's ransom to build it," Brennan remembered. Instead, Laya assigned the job to software robots developed by Blue Prism Ltd. For the past 21 months, Blue Prism bots have been logging into the debt ledger, identifying small-debt accounts and zeroing them out. "The ledger is much cleaner and our debtors' team can focus on real outstanding debts without bothering with the shrapnel of the job," Brennan said. Laya Healthcare has now automated more than 100 tasks this way, jobs that used to the take anywhere from five minutes to six hours per day for humans to process.