Azure Integration Strategy & UiPath Process Automation

Client Overview

The Client is a leading provider of specific facilities management services across Australia, specialising in fire and security services.

Engagement Summary

The Client was facing several challenges around the integration between their various systems for various business processes across field service management & accounts receivable domains, leading to issues like double data entry by field technicians and office staff, as well as data quality issues and a legacy system that was failing to integrate with other systems due to security constraints and batch ETL approaches. 

The Client also provides call out services to their customer base; to validate job completion and approve payment most of their contracts have a requirement that the jobs are entered into the customers’ own systems. This was taking 5+ minutes to run the job plus an additional 5 minutes per job to complete. The Client wanted to automate this manual process to save time and improve efficiency.

Intelligent Pathways Value

Intelligent Pathways was engaged to design a solution to integrate several internal and external systems with a view to reducing duplicate data entry, increasing data quality, eliminating failures and speeding up processes. The architectural approach for this enterprise application integration is based on API-led, event-driven, serverless Microservices with Continuous Integration and monitoring & alerting to reduce costs & administrative overheads while providing high visibility and scalability. The solution is built using Microsoft Azure Enterprise Integration Services, including tooling such as Logic Apps, APIM, Service Bus, Event Grid, CosmosDB, as well as the Azure DevOps suite and works effectively and securely around legacy security constraints. 

A further engagement involved the  automation of the job completion process using UiPath RPA (Robotic Process Automation). The solution leverages the UiPath Connector for Dynamics 365 and browser automation for the CityFM portal and is based on the Robotic Enterprise Framework (REF).

Outcomes

Due to the integrations, accounts receivable debt collection turnaround times were reduced, customer onboarding time has reduced considerably, reliability of integrations increased significantly, less personnel were required to manage integration related overheads and data quality has improved with the removal of double data entry. 

RPA efforts have reduced the time to close a job from 10+ minutes to approximately 30 seconds, most of which is waiting for the CityFM portal to load the required pages. As the solution is based on the REF it automatically handles any errors and generates screenshots of the current state at the time of error. The solution was also enhanced to email a summary report at the end of the process, providing an overview of the days used to close each job and the status and, if applicable, failure details.