Elevating workforce capabilities with robotic process automation

RPA — Luxury Property Developer

Case Study

Real Estate

PiServe brought the RPA advantage for a premium real-estate developer in the Middle East, unlocking efficiency gains and cost savings

About the client

Located in the Middle East, the client is a global pioneer in integrated real estate development. Focussed on enriching lives through design excellence, the company has been at the forefront of infrastructure planning and project execution for over two decades. Today, it boasts of maintaining several iconic landmarks across the gulf nations in its portfolio.

Abstract

As a flagship developer and property manager, the client seeks to differentiate itself based on quality and timely delivery. It values low turnarounds and swift operational responses that can continuously define the standard for exceptional cultural, entertainment, and leisure experiences. However, its backend processes, being manually driven, have not been in conformance with this aspiration. Consequently, it must look for a reliable RPA partner to automate its business processes and reinvent the ways it works.

Business challenges

The developer maintains an impressive bouquet of hospitality, leisure, and commercial assets and has made significant contributions to transforming urban spaces across the cities in the Middle East into sustainable, healthy, and vibrant locations of the future. However, its work culture was yet to step into the Digital Age and embrace its possibilities for operational transformation. Perceiving the apparent gap, its leadership sought reliable technical intervention to address pain points, including:

Excessive engagement of its manual workforce into mundane and repetitive tasks, leaving little room for strategically rewarding ones like customer relationships and brainstorming for new ideas
Complex and protracted workflows like downloading procurement catalog files, filtering for global locations, buyers, and material statuses, then verifying dollar-value thresholds against catalogs, leaving many windows for exceptions
Prohibitively high operational costs and longer response cycles due to manual process drives

Our approach

The PiServe consultants thoroughly assessed the client’s requirements and the existing workforce practices. The team immediately detected considerable scope for flexing our Robotic Process Automation and Application Development capabilities, which are trusted across industries by companies looking to scale processes with speed and agility. Pinpointing the areas of intervention, our RPA engineers collaborated with the client’s stakeholders in designing a bot.

As a Key Performance indicator, it was mutually agreed that alongside speed, the new system should be able to deliver outcomes without variations or distractions. Accordingly, the PiServe team delivered an RPA system for the client that, among many things, can automatically:

Download files, navigate to web pages, filter for particular items, verify dollar values, validate request types, and compare prices against active catalogs
Toggle among spreadsheets, web browsers, and ERP systems for the copying and pasting of data across various system environments
Send responses over emails using a combination of updated numbers and mail templates

Implementation of RPA to effectively alleviate consistency issues in backend processes and allow the resources to invest more time and effort in strategic roles.

The result

By successfully handing over repetitive and time-consuming tasks to algorithms, the PiServe team brought more than a few good news for the client. The RPA implementation led to a sea change in the work culture of the company, characterized by:

Workforce optimization

By saving the hours otherwise spent on low-value, high-volume tasks, the client’s employees can now spend more time on exciting, value-added activities. It allows them to get more done within finite business hours.

Precision outcomes

By removing human intervention from tedious work, radical improvement was recorded in the data processing accuracy.

Catalog automation

Keeping the service catalog fresh and updated to avoid old and misquoted prices has been the elephant in the room. However, the issue was resolved through RPA, allowing the company to keep the catalog continuously active and updated in real-time.

The future

The client’s implementation of RPA to elevate its backend processes was a leap in the right direction, allowing it to modernize and be future-focussed. As industry experts, we feel that the move is in tune with the emerging trends, not only in real estate but also across other sectors where RPA is making steady inroads to automate use cases like:

Supply chain

Supply chain functions involve a high volume of structured data and extensive use of ‘if/then actions’ for event-driven processing. These make them suitable for disruption through algorithm-based RPA.

Data visualization

Automatically correlating colossal data sets to derive insights.

Planning, inventory, and order management

RPA can easily automate the generation of critical metrics like inventory turnover and forecasting while managing order diagnoses and disputes or tracking order complaint management.

Logistics

RPA can drive down transportation costs by continuously tracking, comparing, auditing, and analyzing data that would require hours of employee time filtering and making pivot tables.