Video transcript - Intelligent Automation

Lorraine Brown

North Lanarkshire’s vision really is to make our services, much more streamlined and easily accessible for everyone. It’s also recognised that people want to the deal with the Council in a different way.

Stewart Wilson

Local authorities haven’t been set up to deal with digital, so they’ve got a real difficult challenge in terms of trying to turn a battle with the rising demand, the economic pressures and then actually trying to modernise to deliver better customer experience that’s really fit for the digital age.

Helena Clennell

We identified that robotics process automation could be an area where there was an opportunity to improve some of those processes alongside people development.

Grant Shipway

And we were looking to define what the future would look, identify the costs of investment that North Lanarkshire would need to make and also identify the benefits that could be realised through digital transformation.

Lorraine Brown

PwC have been working with us for the last probably two years helping us to try and drive the business transformation and one of the areas that was identified is that we could do some of our processes a lot quicker, with a lot less staff if we were to introduce sort of artificial intelligence.

Darren Griffin

Public sector organisations have quite specific software applications dedicated to particular tasks. RPA really allows us to bring an element of intelligence and automation to those applications.

Grant Shipway

Applying a robot to a high-volume transactional process in many ways is often better and safer than having the human do it themselves

Paul Doherty

…not only that, we can improve the quality of work for our employees and the quality of the service, to the general public of North Lanarkshire Council.

Elizabeth Ajayi

So the approach, with North Lanarkshire Council, is to help them test and pilot this technology in a secure way, in a way that really brings to life the benefit of robotics; in parallel, educating the Council, so they understand the technology and how they can use it wider.

Paul Doherty

We were looking for something that’s high transactional value, but a relatively straight forward process that we could implement quickly, and the result, we picked this direct debit rejection to apply to Council Tax accounts.

Paul Doherty

Speaking to one of the members of the project team there was 600 items to be processed. He reckoned if he was sitting still within the team that would have taken him a day to process. RPA processed that in about 50 minutes.

Stewart Wilson

A really well-run Council, in the future, will embrace all the benefits of digital technologies, using the best of information, to enable residents and businesses to access the right data, the right information, to help them make decisions, to help them access services.

Helena Clennell

It’s really important to start looking at, you know, across the organisation enterprise wide to say, ‘Where is the biggest return on investment?’

Darren Griffin

New software brings far more in terms of productivity and agility, and the ability to increase output.

Lorraine Brown

We’ve already commissioned PwC to start looking at what other processes within other service areas we can very quickly follow this kind of proof of concept with.

Paul Doherty

One of which is free school meals and clothing grants applications…

Helena Clennell

...housing Benefit but also social care.

Stewart Wilson

Connecting neighbourhood officers, police and residents to make safer neighbourhoods.

Darren Griffin

Its fertile ground for RPA and we’re getting really, really good engagement from the client in doing this.

Helena Clennell

You don’t just go and automate everything just because you can automate it.

Lorraine Brown

We will always need our frontline staff who are out there sort of dealing with the public.

Helena Clennell

It allows the humans to focus on things that we’re good at and the robots to do the things that they’re good at.

Grant Shipway

The value that we bring as a PwC team is the collective experience, the access to specialists in relevant subject matter, and also the passion and commitment that we have for working with our clients in local public services.

Stewart Wilson

What’s really important for me as the Consulting Leader in Scotland is that we leave a legacy and we leave this Council stronger and fit for the future and in the digital age.

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