Robots prove their worth in migrations
Robots are ideally suited for deployment in the financial sector. In fact, ITDS is currently, and successfully, using a robot for migrating policies to a new system. So say Karin Terburg, Associate Manager at ITDS and ITDS Business Consultant Pim Wilbers, who go on to insist that ITDS is ready to support clients in the area of Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
The role of the robot in a migration process speaks volumes about its added value. In the past, the acceptor had to migrate all policies manually. Nowadays, using image recognition, a robot can be made to learn this process flow, which it will then carry out automatically. Using a trial migration and an audit trail, we can remain fully in control during the whole migration process. The trial migration gives us prior insight into how the actual product migration will go and then the audit trail records which policies have been migrated and which ones haven’t.
LOWER THRESHOLD
The financial sector is characterised by countless repetitive actions, which can easily be carried out by robots. In the case of the migration referred to above, they can offer many benefits. For example, a robot can process more policies per minute than we humans can, and with less chance of making mistakes too. Moreover, a robot can work day and night. All this makes a huge difference to the total lead-time of a migration. Using a robot is also surprisingly economical and its set-up can be arranged in just a week! These advantages significantly lower the threshold for a company to use a robot, both in terms of cost and the potential impact on the organisation.
There is still, of course, plenty of room for improvement. Robots, for example, rely heavily on how fast the back office system is, and they cannot cope with changes or exceptions. Fortunately, this is changing quickly. Whereas at the moment every exception has to be manually entered, thanks to self-learning, robots will be able to do this themselves in future. Consequently, it will then also be possible to use robots for bespoke applications.
ITDS’ ADDED VALUE
Regarding the use of robots during migrations, ITDS’ added value will be found in the preliminary phase. We know which advantages robots can offer our clients, and the disadvantages too. While clients are impeded by a lack of experience with robots, robot suppliers can only give them technical expertise. Fortunately, at ITDS we can offer these clients all the support they’ll need in this area. It’s one of the ways we focus on our core competence, which lies at the cutting edge of business and IT.
