Rabobank streamlines complex process from three weeks to three minutes using Microsoft Power Platform
In this blog series, we are sharing examples of customers who have been able to Do More With Less by utilizing Microsoft Power Platform in their organization to build applications, automate processes, determine insights and more. This week, we are highlighting how Rabobank has been using Power Platform.
Rabobank is a multinational banking institution headquartered in the Netherlands, with more than 40,000 employees in 38 countries. It has a long history of cooperation, innovation, and people-centered solutions.
As part of a broad digitization strategy, Rabobank adopted Power Platform to streamline internal processes. Rabobank currently uses more than 2,500 Power Apps and Power Automate solutions. One of their solutions to support their company re-org process reduced processing time from three weeks to three minutes. Additionally, they use Power Virtual Agents for a personalized customer support experience, automating 40-50% of customer calls – equivalent to 60,000 to 80,000 calls per month.
Streamlined company re-org process from 3 weeks to 3 minutes
As Rabobank moved to a new, digital model, the bank has been reorganizing its workforce to better align to that model. But the process was time-consuming. Previously, HR professionals would spend weeks pouring over Excel spreadsheets matching employees with new job roles.
The new solution used Power Apps and Power Automate to compile relevant HR data, and enabled the BAPPS (Business Applications) team at Rabobank to provide controlled access to the process by managers and employees. Previously, the process was open to only the HR team. Now, employees can review and, if needed, update their personnel data and managers can review new roles recommended by the system—all contributing to better placements overall.
“With our reorganization app (“R@pp”) built with Power Platform, analysis that used to take three weeks can now be done in three minutes. Better yet, we have achieved a placement accuracy of 99.1%, which is far higher than what we could manage previously.”
– Alex Meijvis: Product Owner for Transition at Rabobank
Read more about how Rabobank developed their solution with Power Platform
Automating up to 50% of customer calls
To help manage customer inquiries, Rabobank had initially adopted an on-premises virtual agent solution, building a conversational platform that had proved functional for routing customer calls to the right service team, but it wasn’t efficient as the system for virtual chat bots, and virtual call agent were independent – resulting in a need to maintain both systems separately.
Within four months, Rabobank reconstructed its virtual agent solution using Microsoft Power Virtual Agents. This allowed the team to simplify operations, reduce costs and create a more cohesive experience for customers. Within four months, the first virtual agent was deployed to production in April 2022.
Before Rabobank moved to Power Virtual Agents, only about 20 percent of Rabobank’s customers were using the online chat option as their first point of contact. With the new solution, usage of the chatbot has increased by 25% and 40-50% of customer calls now do not require escalation to a human agent. This adds up to 60,000 to 80,000 calls per month being handed entirely through automation built using the Power Platform.
“Doing conversational AI right can lead to cost savings. Becoming more cost effective allows us to stay competitive and retain our investment capabilities. At the same time, labor market conditions increase the need for efficient operations through automation.”
– Alex Meijvis: Product Owner for Transition at Rabobank
Read more about how Rabobank streamlines and personalizes customer support with Power Virtual Agents
Scaling low code throughout the organization
Above are two of several examples where low-code solutions have proven to be highly valuable for Rabobank. To scale adoption across the organization, they’ve established a robust Center of Excellence. They have over 2,500 Power Apps and Power Automate solutions in use with over 55% of the organization using Power Platform solutions each month.
As with any financial organization, Rabobank puts a high priority on security and compliance. So, while the efficiency of Power Platform was appealing, it was equally important that development on the platform be controlled and secure.
To meet that objective, Rabobank rolled out a Center of Excellence strategy before making Power Platform available to employees. This included a distinct set of environments, policies, and controls aligned to different types of users. The governance model at Rabobank has enabled citizen developers across the organization to build solutions in a secure and compliant manner.
Read more about how Rabobank selected Power Platform as its default development platform
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In this blog series, we are sharing examples of customers who have been able to Do More With Less by utilizing the Microsoft Power Platform in their organization to build applications, automate processes, determine insights and more. This week, we are highlighting Coca-Cola Bottling Company United (Coca-Cola United), who have used Power Platform to (a) automate on-demand shipment requests – reducing order validation time from half a day to seconds, and (b) automate a complex multi-step SAP invoicing process to handle over 50,000 orders – an achievement that would not have been otherwise possible with just one employee tasked with managing the process.
Coca-Cola Bottling Company United (Coca-Cola United) is one of the largest privately held Coca-Cola bottlers in the United States. Serving about 200,000 customers demands an impressive infrastructure: 5,000 trucks to deliver more than 600 product lines to a full spectrum of consumer channels, from small convenience stores and restaurants to mega-retailers.
Efficient Order processing from half a day to seconds
Coca-Cola United wanted a faster way to process on-demand shipment requests (or “forced shipments”) from customers. Previously, account reps had to submit orders and check inventories manually, which often led to shipping delays.
A solution was built in just a few weeks using Power Apps and a custom connector was used to integrate with the central SAP system. Here’s how it works:
The benefits of automation were dramatic. What used to take half a day to validate inventories and other order data can now be completed in seconds. Along with more efficient processing, the new solution has also resulted in fewer errors, faster delivery times—and higher customer satisfaction.
“The solution has helped restore customer confidence—which has driven even better sales,” says Bob Means, Director of Business Solutions at Coca-Cola Bottling Company United.
Automating a cumbersome 11-step manual process
Coca-Cola Freestyle is a strategic brand builder—a self-serve dispenser that reimagines single-serving beverage sales and offers more than 100 Coca-Cola product choices, from bottled water to Sprite, many in a variety of formulations. But more choice for consumers complicated distribution.
The customer relationship management representatives had to go through a complex and manual 11-step process including cross-reference customer and material numbers, process the order and manually push it through the system, scanning the invoice and walking it to the Accounts Payable department.
Multistep manual invoice process carried out by the customer relationship representative
To automate this cumbersome process, the solution was built by the company’s fusion teams of citizen developers and professional developers and its partner, by using a series of integrations between SAP and Azure with Microsoft Power Platform acting as the automation agent to automate the entire process.
Power Automate RPA took mundane, tedious tasks and enabled employees to focus on more strategic initiatives. Coca-Cola United can now schedule and trigger events that increase end-to-end automation of high-volume tasks—like its suddenly expanded orders for Freestyle. It also allowed Coca-Cola United to automatically process orders received from multiple channels – beyond having to have the agent to work on each order.
As a result, Coca-Cola United could benefit from immediately freeing up one full-time employee to work on more strategic activities, and better yet could profitably scale to execute the strategic local Coca-Cola Freestyle campaign where it would have taken a maximum of ten full time employees if done manually.
Process automated by Power Automate
Since then, Coca-Cola United has gone on to automate other business processes with Microsoft Power Automate RPA capabilities.
“We are very excited about this solution that will dramatically reduce labor costs, minimize the various points of error in our current solution and will allow us to rapidly expand the Local Freestyle Campaign to better support our customers.”
– Kaylan Cannon: Customer Service Manager, Coca-Cola United
Read more about how Coca-Cola Bottling Company United dispenses streamlined order management with RPA in Microsoft Power Automate
You can also learn more about how Coca Cola United automated their process from a video presentation below:
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Equinor, a forward-thinking energy company based in Norway, delivered a solution by their DigTEAM and citizen developers with an estimated annual value of over 500 million NOK (approximately $49M USD)
VITAS Healthcare is nation’s largest single-source provider of end-of-life care delivering meaningful hospice and palliative care to its patients and their families across 14 states and the District of Columbia. VITAS has used a Power Platform solution called “Emmy” to process 2 million patient visits – equivalent to 92% of all patient visits.
