CoreLogic completes migration to Power Automate and frees up over 50,000 hours of capacity

CoreLogic Asia Pacific (CoreLogic) is a leading provider of property data and analytics in Australia and New Zealand. The company collects billions of data points to create a unique 360-degree view of over 14 million properties. The company uses this data to help clients identify and manage growth opportunities, improve performance, and mitigate risk across a wide range of industries, including corporate, real estate, government, insurance and construction.

To optimize its own operations, CoreLogic makes extensive use of business process automation. In 2023, a licensing change to its Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platform prompted CoreLogic to explore other automation strategies and platforms. The automation team at CoreLogic looked at a number of different factors, including complexity, cost, and feature sets.

Together, the team concluded that the best path forward was to migrate to Microsoft Power Platform, including Power Automate RPA. As Michael O'Brien, Senior Manager for Robotics Automation at CoreLogic explains, “Power Automate provided us with a much more cost-efficient platform as well as better AI and NLP capabilities for the future.”

Power Automate also provided another key benefit: speed. To avoid significant license fees, the migration needed to be completed in six months, before the next licensing cycle began. “The ease and efficiency of Power Automate helped us meet an aggressive timeline,” says O'Brien. As it turns out, with Power Automate, the project was completed in just 4 months.

An easy-to-use platform

The success of the migration to Power Automate started with effective planning by CoreLogic. The team worked through each automation to identify where they could merge and sunset flows. Then, they found opportunities where they could build and re-use generic functions that could be applied to multiple flows. This is where the team was particularly impressed with Power Automate.

“Power Automate has made it really easy to build commonly used functions and piece them together quickly like bricks,” says O’Brien. He provides a specific logging function as an example. In the previous platform, the team had a separate login script for each automation. With Power Automate, one login function was built that would accept input as username and password, process it, and hand back a browser object. This one function became the first so-called ‘brick’ in all Power Automate flows.

Other Power Automate capabilities also played a key role in the migration. At the time, the team was planning to build their own workflow queue manager to improve efficiency. Midway through the project, Microsoft announced that work queues would now be offered natively within Power Automate. It only took a few hours to switch work queues on for flows that had already been built. Suddenly, the team was already two weeks ahead of schedule. “We saw how Microsoft was making continuous investments in Power Automate and this one innovation couldn’t have come at a better time,” says O’Brien.

Better performance

In total, 16 automations were migrated from the previous RPA platform. The delivery was achieved with 100% accuracy in all re-written code along with a 5x cost reduction compared to the previous platform.

Power Automate has also enabled faster, more efficient business processes. This includes the option to run desktop flows concurrently across mutable virtual machines. Additionally, CoreLogic embedded all of their desktop flows into cloud flows, and they work together to perform end-to-end processes. For example, details can be passed into the desktop flow to assist with processing, allowing details to be stored outside of the desktop flow.

The resulting performance improvements are often significant. In one scenario, CoreLogic has a process where complex records are matched together to produce a report. Executing this with the previous, on-premises desktop automation would typically take a full day. By moving that automation to the cloud and using concurrency in Power Automate, that same process can be completed in just a few hours.

To push performance even further, CoreLogic has since built multiple cloud flows that historically would have been desktop flows. A process used to collect information to update a support ticketing system has since become the company’s single most significant flow from a concurrency perspective.

Faster development

With their migration complete, the automation team is now using Power Automate to deliver critical automation projects faster than ever.

For example, the company’s corporate group recently came to the team with an ambitious request. They wanted to automate 80% of their administrative tasks to make time for new and more complex work. Ultimately, the team automated about 87% of that team's workload—accounting for over 8,000 items processed a week—and they did it even before the additional work came in.

Many of the scenarios involved automated email communications out to clients, along with follow up requests. As with the previous migration project, the team created a basic set of functions in Power Automate to address one project, and then used these functions to more quickly build out the required flows for another.

Accelerating the pace of automation

Looking to the future, CoreLogic is exploring other Power Platform features, including the AI capabilities that originally attracted them to the platform in the first place. “As a data and analytics organization, we see huge potential in AI and how Microsoft Copilot Studio could help us capitalize on that potential quickly and easily,” says O’Brien.

Meanwhile, with professional developers at CoreLogic rapidly building enterprise-wide automations, the company is also enabling citizen developers to automate smaller jobs. These flows are then made available to other staff to re-use and re-work for similar projects.

The strategy is paying off. Back in 2023, CoreLogic had set a long-term goal of creating 100,000 hours of additional capacity through automation with Power Automate. Today, the company is already halfway there, giving back over 50,000 hours to its 5,000 employees to focus on higher-value work. “It’s all about liberating staff,” says O'Brien. “Power Automate is definitely helping us achieve more in less time.”

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