Automating Finance processes to free up 2.5 full time employees

Helping the University of Plymouth to make a difference

In numbers

• 4 Finance processes automated
• 2.5 Full time employees freed up

The challenge

The University of Plymouth’s (UoP) student numbers are growing and investment in research activity is increasing. While this is great news for the University, it is putting added pressure on the Finance team. Many of the University of Plymouth’s processes are highly manual, meaning staff have been spending additional time on administrative tasks and taken away from more value-adding services.

The solution

The Foundry4 Intelligent Automation delivery team worked with the UoP project team to design, build, test and deploy four processes. These processes were all automated using our proven agile delivery methodology:

• Research invoices
• Research invoices - locate evidence
• Card payments
• New starters and leavers

We successfully helped UoP to demonstrate the benefits of Intelligent Automation to the Finance team as well as the senior leadership team. Through the delivery of this project we also helped UoP to build essential capabilities on the Blue Prism Enterprise platform. This knowledge transfer and training will help them become self-sufficient in automation over time.

The outcomes

The successful delivery of the four Finance processes has enabled UoP to realise their original goal of providing the equivalent return of 2.5 full time employee hours per year. This has led to a reduction in manual handling for staff in the team while providing additional benefits such as: reducing error rates and rework, building in additional resilience within the team by removing critical points of failure, and improving customer satisfaction through quicker response times.