Blue Ocean Strategic Partners provided 80% in time savings by streaming and simplifying the cumbersome bi-monthly resident billing process with digital bots.
The Intelligent automation solutions provider transformed the manual process of billing 4,300+ residents into a fully automated process, freeing up the team to focus on supporting the business.
90% reduction in processing time – 40 hours saved each month – 100% data accuracy
Introduction: Blue Ocean Strategic Partners and The Problem:
Blue Ocean Strategic Partners is an intelligent automation software provider (located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) that transforms cumbersome and repetitive human processes into digitally automated solutions. Their goal—” automate to elevate” —is to replace the mundane, mind numbing tasks with digital processes, increasing job satisfaction, improving team effectiveness and enriching lives.
Blue Ocean Strategic Partners’ client, Asbury Communities (https://www.asbury.org/), consists of nine Senior living communities in three states with more than 90 years of service. Asbury is the 15th largest not-for-profit senior living organization and serves over 4,300 adults in the three states. The Finance team at Asbury is led by Andrew Jeanneret (CFO) who saw the value in eliminating the team’s cumbersome tasks. Andrew kicked off the project by saying ‘if it makes my team happy, I am happy’.
At Asbury, the Accounts Receivable and Treasury teams (led by Jason Hershey and Jill Fristoe) spend about 40 hours each month in creating the billing for the residents and then to upload the ACH files for each entity to the various banks. The cumbersome and manual steps was replaced by automated steps as detailed here:
Here it is, step by painstaking manual step that took about 40 hours each month:
Open ERP and access ‘Existing Claims or Pre-Bills’
Create Audit Report Table based on ACH claims as Excel spreadsheet
Modify spreadsheet data for exceptions
Request / receive updates from billing coordinators and update spreadsheet accordingly
Modify claims in the ERP according to the updates
Create EDI for ACH claims (split to batches of 60)
Check if totals in ACH files match with Audit Report Table
Save to LAN drive location
Move files to the Treasury folder for review
Create ACH files based on each bank’s requirements
Once reviewed, it is uploaded into the corresponding bank account one file at a time
Blue Ocean Strategic Partners understands the value and power of applying digital automation to this process and built a solution for Asbury that not only eliminates hours of manual work that can now be focused elsewhere, but also one that eliminates errors. The project was completed through their Robot-as-a-Service (RaaS) offering which uses flexible, open-source development practices and Python, also leveraging Robocorp for secure (HIPAA compliant) orchestration and monitoring. What is especially unique about this RaaS offering is it makes the historically expensive and mostly unattainable concept of software automation, now cost-effective and approachable for organizations of all types and sizes!
The Results
Blue Ocean Strategic Partner’s approach included meeting with their client, documenting the relevant processes, identifying any bottlenecks, and constructing the bots. As a team well-versed in the needs of CFOs and finance leaders, no time was wasted understanding the business in order to present valuable opportunities for automation to Asbury. Having swiftly obtained a detailed view of the billing process, the project was then efficiently developed and is now delivering the ROI promised.
From the initial meeting, it took 8-9 weeks to finish implementing the bots.
Blue Ocean Strategic Partners was able to bring together the various steps involved in the bi-monthly billing processes by creating attended (user-triggered) bots to automate the tasks, significantly reducing processing time, specifically, down from 40 hours to 4 hours each month.
“In the vein of our kickoff with Asbury’s progressively minded CFO, Andrew – ‘we’re happy that our client is happy!’ Working with Jason Hershey and Jill Fristoe’s team to deliver automation that was professionally evaluated for its ROI, documented, developed rapidly, and now being maintained securely is what brings happiness to all stakeholders.” – Bharath Bangalore, CEO
If you too are seeking to elevate your company’s happiness with automation that successfully removes the burden of painstaking and time consuming repetitive tasks, Blue Ocean Strategic Partners matches CFO-level process understanding with technical expertise in order to deliver valuable digital workers “as-a-Service”.