Robotisation at Wüstenrot has led to a significant increase in the efficiency of processing extraordinary repayments and repaid mortgage loans. At the same time, the need for the recruitment of new employees and short-term overloads of staff has been eliminated.
The Wüstenrot Group consists of a building society and a mortgage bank. Loan administration staff had to deal with a large number of items and occasionally a very high volume of work when processing client requests for regular and extraordinary loan repayments.
The Automation Team at StringData proposed a solution for both areas using the UltimateRPA tool. Robotisation has made processing mortgage repayments more efficient, increased the user-friendliness of work processes and significantly saved human resources.
Robotisation improves work efficiency and saves human resources
Wüstenrot wanted to increase the efficiency of processing various types of mortgage repayments. The solution was to include processes to minimise the risk of not processing extraordinary loan repayments and to reduce the error rate in processing repayments. Speeding up processing extraordinary repayments was to lead to an improvement in the quality of services for the company’s clients.
The company also wanted to address the potential overload of its staff. Following previous experience, the aim was to alleviate work-related stress in the loan administration department. Last but not least, an increase in human resources in the loan administration department was considered.
The robotic process automation tool can handle any situation
We suggested that the client use automation to process all types of mortgage repayments. Software robotisation in the form of the UltimateRPA tool is used for this purpose. The robot is set up to perform the same processes as a human. The difference mainly lies in the fact that the robot is faster and does not make mistakes.
It might seem that a tool like this can only handle simple processes. In fact, the robot can process a variety of input information and assign it the correct action. If it identifies something significantly out of the ordinary, it will know exactly how to proceed. The robot’s performance is set to allow it to handle the largest possible volume of required activities. Saved human resources and a reduction in the time needed to produce outputs can be seen almost immediately.
It was important for the client to be able to easily connect the solution to its existing corporate IT infrastructure. One of the advantages of robotic process automation with UltimateRPA is its low operating requirements. A regular workstation, such as a laptop, or space on a physical or virtual server is usually enough to get it up and running.
Robotisation surpassed human limits
The pilot project instilled confidence in robotic process automation. Significant savings in human resources were evident from the outset. Expectations for streamlining processes and reducing errors were also confirmed.
Human processing entailed a certain degree of error, including the risk of not posting extraordinary payments to accounts. Errors like this had a direct impact on the satisfaction of Wüstenrot clients.
Following the deployment of StringData’s robotic process automation, each extraordinary payment is automatically registered. The saving is in the range of 0.7 FTE. Human processing 1,122 items, which took an employee 95 hours, takes the robot only 152 minutes.
The capacity of the loan administration department meant that it was able to process a maximum of 190 accounts per month. Unfortunately, this was not enough. Occasional increases in workload required the ad hoc involvement of staff from other departments.
Robotisation resolved capacity issues and has led to an improvement in the quality of service. The frequency of processing client requests has changed from monthly to daily. The robot’s capacity is not limited. The solution resulted in savings in the range of 0.2 FTE. It took a person 30 hours to process 1,350 items. The robot can do it in just 220 minutes.
The European Union directive known as the Mortgage Credit Directive (MCD for short) has resulted in an increase in workload.
All administrative operations relating to the MCD are now handled by the robot. At the same time, duplicity has been eliminated in the administration of extraordinary mortgage repayments. The UltimateRPA tool saved the company human resources in the scope of 0.2 FTE. Processing 1,042 items, which took a human 30 hours, takes the robot only 34 minutes.
A StringData internal team consisting of members with expertise in business, process modelling and information systems worked on the project for Wüstenrot.
We have a specialist Automation Team consisting of developers with 13 years of experience and hundreds of projects under their belts at StringData.
This project comprising 3 processes took 16 weeks, i.e. 4 months. We began work in September 2016, then launched a pilot version for a month of testing in January 2017. We switched to standard operation in February without babysitting. We have successfully deployed 16 processes in the framework of this project to date.
