Blue Ocean Strategic Partners provided 80% in time savings by streamlining and simplifying the cumbersome bi-monthly resident billing process with digital bots.
We 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
The problem
Blue Ocean Strategic Partners is an intelligent automation provider, located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, that transforms cumbersome and repetitive human processes into digitally automated solutions. Our goal, "automate to elevate", is to replace mundane, mind-numbing tasks with digital processes, increasing job satisfaction, improving team effectiveness and enriching lives.
Our client, Asbury Communities, 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. Asbury's finance team is led by a CFO who saw the value in eliminating the team's cumbersome tasks, and who kicked off the project by saying: "if it makes my team happy, I am happy".
At Asbury, the Accounts Receivable and Treasury teams spent about 40 hours each month creating the billing for residents and then uploading the ACH files for each entity to the various banks. Here it is, step by painstaking manual step:
- Open the ERP and access "Existing Claims or Pre-Bills"
- Create an Audit Report Table based on ACH claims as an Excel spreadsheet
- Modify spreadsheet data for exceptions
- Request and receive updates from billing coordinators, and update the spreadsheet accordingly
- Modify claims in the ERP according to the updates
- Create EDI for ACH claims (split into batches of 60)
- Check that totals in the ACH files match the Audit Report Table
- Save to a LAN drive location
- Move files to the Treasury folder for review
- Create ACH files based on each bank's requirements
- Once reviewed, upload each file into the corresponding bank account, one file at a time
We understand the value and power of applying digital automation to a process like this, and built a solution for Asbury that not only eliminates hours of manual work that can now be focused elsewhere, but also eliminates errors. The project was delivered with flexible, open-source development practices and Python, using Robocorp for secure (HIPAA-compliant) orchestration and monitoring.
The results
Our approach included meeting with the client, documenting the relevant processes, identifying 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 before presenting valuable opportunities for automation. Having quickly obtained a detailed view of the billing process, the project was developed efficiently and is now delivering the promised ROI.
From the initial meeting, it took 8–9 weeks to finish implementing the bots.
We brought together the various steps involved in the bi-monthly billing process by creating attended (user-triggered) bots to automate the tasks, reducing processing time from 40 hours to 4 hours each month.
"In the vein of our kickoff with Asbury's progressively minded CFO – 'we're happy that our client is happy!' Working with [the Accounts Receivable and Treasury] 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, Blue Ocean Strategic Partners
If you too are looking to remove the burden of painstaking, time-consuming repetitive tasks, Blue Ocean Strategic Partners matches CFO-level process understanding with technical expertise to deliver digital workers "as a service".