Cineplex saves 30,000 hours a year with Power Platform and generative AI

Cineplex is one of Canada’s leading media and entertainment companies. To streamline business processes, over 100 employees are using Power Platform to develop innovative automation solutions for finance, guest services, and other departments. This includes scalable RPA desktop flows with deep integration to backend systems as well as AI-driven copilots. Together, these solutions save the company over 30,000 hours a year in manual processing time.

Cineplex is a leading media and entertainment company with over 10,000 employees across Canada and the United States. As Canada’s largest and most innovative exhibitor, the company welcomes millions of guests through its circuit of over 170 movie theatres and location-based entertainment venues.

Back in 2021, a small group of employees at Cineplex started working on automation solutions to streamline business processes. The group was led by Bo Wang, Vice President of Taxation & Treasury at Cineplex—a self-taught citizen developer who had started using Microsoft Power Automate to build robotic process automation (RPA) solutions for his team. This quickly expanded to automation for other departments. After a competitive review, Cineplex decided to adopt Power Automate more broadly across the company.

Today, there are over 100 makers working on solutions at Cineplex. To help drive adoption, Wang’s team and the digital & technology team worked together to develop an automation Center of Excellence using the Automation Kit for Power Platform. The kit provides tools to manage automation projects along with a Microsoft Power BI dashboard to capture the savings generated from automation.

Personal productivity solutions are managed by individual developers through a default environment. More advanced enterprise, production-ready solutions are run through Managed Environments. “One feature we particularly like in Managed Environments is pipelines in Power Platform. Pipelines have helped many of our developers streamline our solutions, allowing easy monitoring of deployments—from development to test and production—in a centralized application or feature,” says Desmond Ing, an RPA developer on the Digital & Technology team at Cineplex. Pipelines have also provided the team with an effective way to prevent deploying solutions into the wrong environment versus manual exporting and importing.

To showcase, inspire, and incubate new automation ideas, the Automation CoE organizes an annual hackathon—their “Bot Battles” competition. Every year, teams from across the organization are given eight weeks to build automated solutions for real business scenarios with support from the Automation CoE, culminating in a presentation to the executive leadership team. In the first edition of these Bot Battles, eight teams developed solutions that are now saving thousands of hours annually. “Once people saw the impact that automation can have on their own business processes—and then saw how easy it was to build automated solutions with Power Platform—that’s when adoption of the platform really took off,” says Wang.

Since Cineplex started working with Power Platform, they have developed over 1,700 Power Automate flows which drive over 400 solutions. Together, these solutions are saving the company over 30,000 hours a year. “I think the culture of automation has definitely taken over,” says Karawan Abdulkhalegh, Manager, Treasury & Intelligent Process Automation at Cineplex.

Enhancing automation with copilots

Along with new projects, developers at Cineplex are also leveraging the flexibility of Power Platform to rapidly evolve existing solutions. Take the company’s automation of ticket refunds, for example. It all started with automation for a specific type of refund (i.e., refund requests after a movie had occurred) and then progressed to a solution that could automatically address other refund scenarios.

The original automation focuses on capturing and validating information sent by Guest Services via email. One flow processes the refund, and another flow handles seat count adjustments (based on the refunded ticket) and completes the journal entry in an in-house legacy application. Multiple unattended flows run in parallel to speed up the process—which also enables the team to scale up and down based on demand. "We were literally able to turn around that automation in a number of days. That's when we really saw the value of Power Platform," says Del Hines, Sr. Manager, Enterprise Products. The solution saves 5,000 hours annually.

In the new solution, these Power Automate flows have been integrated with Microsoft Copilot Studio to create an advanced copilot—a new generation of intelligent conversational experience that goes beyond traditional chatbots. Now, a Guest Services agent simply enters a booking ID and date into the copilot, and an AI model inside the copilot takes it from there. The copilot recognizes the refund type and initiates the appropriate desktop flows, which include integration with ServiceNow and the company’s other backend systems.

With the new copilot, handling time for agents has been reduced from 5 to 15 minutes per request down to less than a minute—and typically just 30 seconds. "Our Guest Services agents are thrilled with the simplicity and functionality of the Microsoft Copilot Studio," says Monique Binder, Vice President of Guest Services at Cineplex. “Our copilot has processed over 5,000 refund requests in just 5 months—while reducing our handling time, back-office work and increasing both guest experience and our agent CSAT.”

Better customer support through AI

Refund requests were a big part of the workload coming in from Guest Services. But how to manage a wave of other email inquiries coming from customers? In this case, it wasn’t just about manual processing. The main challenge was that email inquiries were often missing key information needed to process the request, which led to lengthy email chains between departments.

Tiffany Lu, a treasury analyst at Cineplex, came up with a better idea. She created a flow that uses generative AI actions to categorize different case scenarios in an email, recognize when information is missing or unclear, and send back a Microsoft form to fill the gaps.

To train the AI model, Tiffany utilized a prompt including keywords for each case type to filter the type of requests received which made it more adaptable in handling different types of situations. The prototype flow processed actual inquiries from Guest Services Agents and routed them to the team for analysis. As Tiffany explains, “This process will reduce the amount of email exchanges required between the departments so we can focus on more urgent requests. Also, instead of having to build long list of keywords to trigger flows, we can leverage generative AI in far less time while also creating a more responsive, conversational experience for our agents.”

Once the necessary information has been provided, another flow logs the case using Power Automate work queues which triggers a desktop flow to process the requests. The solution is expected to save an estimated 1,300 hours a year, and provide faster, more efficient customer service.

Streamlining payment processes

Yet another copilot—built by Eric Li, Tax Manager at Cineplex—uses generative AI to categorize invoices from vendors and determine the applicability of provincial sales taxes (PST). The AI-driven copilot was built to improve the efficiency of Cineplex’s invoice payment process.

One of the challenges with this process was correctly identifying the products in an invoice. For example, a product may be listed with only a technical product description (i.e., “4K UHD 120Hz” for a monitor) which would often require additional time to research. Rather than having to maintain an internal database of product information, the copilot leverages OpenAI to draw product details directly from vendor websites and other resources. This allows the copilot to automatically identify and categorize products. The categorizations determined by Generative AI become filter criteria in a tax rule table in Dataverse which the copilot uses to determine the applicability of taxes.

Equally important to the solution were safeguards to manage errors or incorrect determinations. If an invoice is above a risk threshold, an approval is sent to Eric and no determination is released until the approval is done. If the invoice is below the threshold, processing continues, and the tax determination is posted as a message to the Microsoft Teams Channel for review and recording purposes.

“The chatbot is saving an average of 30 minutes each time the copilot is used and has greatly expedited our payment process in the three provinces where PST tax applies,” says Li.

Extending the benefits of Power Platform

The success of projects in the Treasury department is leading to greater interest—and confidence—in the generative AI capabilities of Power Platform across the company. For example, teams are exploring how AI Builder in Power Automate can be used to predict future outcomes from historical data. “Microsoft Power Automate continues to enhance our automation efforts. Its generative AI capabilities and integration with other Power Platform products like Microsoft Copilot Studio really sets Power Automate apart from competing solutions,” says Wang.

Success with Power Automate is also leading to broader use of other parts of Power Platform: The enterprise tech team, for example, is building their own applications using Power Apps. The company is also exploring Process Mining in Power Automate to gain insights into existing processes and discover ways to optimize them.

Meanwhile, the Automation COE continues to evolve. This includes better use of Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) to ensure smooth migrations between environments and monitor flow exceptions. Better governance through the COE is helping foster even greater confidence in the company’s citizen developers and their ability to deliver mission critical automations. And that’s leading to even more automation benefits.

As Gord Nelson, CFO at Cineplex says, “Power Platform has been a key factor in our automation success. By empowering our citizen developers, we’re able to better identify and prioritize use cases that are best for the business and free up that critical resource—time.”

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“Microsoft Power Automate continues to enhance our automation efforts. Its generative AI capabilities and integration with other Power Platform products like Microsoft Copilot Studio really set Power Automate apart from competing solutions.”

Bo Wang, Vice President of Taxation & Treasury, Cineplex