Global Travel Company: Transforming Core Efficiency

The client wished to explore ways to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of these processes while delivering better outcomes. The business sees large peaks and troughs in demand through the year and across regions. Combined with resource volatility, this put significant pressure on the processing teams and on delivering quality on a consistent basis.
Client’s management believed that automation could help solve these problems and asked TAO to develop the business case and demonstrate it through a rapid proof-of-concept.

The client has multiple processes covering Front Office functions. These processes relate to ticketing, schedule changes and itinerary changes and include:

• • Automatic Schedule Changes
  • Ticketing- Rejections
  • Ticketing- Exchanges.
  • Ticketing- Refunds

TAO led the assessment to develop the business case and identify areas where automation can be implemented in order to achieve high productivity while enhancing efficiencies and outcomes.

The assessment covered the following key areas:

• • Recommending the optimal RPA solution and its suitability for the process’s architecture and environment.
  • Selecting processes and prioritisation criteria and framework for future process automation opportunities
  • Identifying process improvements to reduce error rates and per-case handling time
  • Simplifying the process across different geographies
  • Creating a high-level roadmap for establishing an RPA Centre-of-Excellence

Over a period of two weeks, TAO partnered with the client to come up with a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solution to assess the benefits of RPA and design an automated solution to increase the efficiency and reduce the overall cost of processing.

The key challenges our client faced in these specific processes were:

• • There were multiple processes for different geographies. To provide 24X7 support to its customers across geographies and time-zones, the company had to deploy buffer resources to handle unanticipated work load.
  • Because of the high volatility in peak loads, the company needed to hire temporary staff to handle customer demand during peak seasons.

The following opportunities were addressed to overcome these challenges and set a new example for transformation in the travel ticketing and schedule changes management process.

• The TAO project team did a deep dive into the existing process and rapidly demonstrated that significant benefits could be realised quickly from Robotic Process Automation (RPA) by handling all data processing activities.
• We showed a simplified approach by segregating analysis and data processing activities at a process level so that a pre-analysed case can be handled quickly.
• Small checkpoints were proposed to handle errors related to incorrect data processing.

Business Benefits Delivered:
At the end of the successful assessment, compelling benefits from RPA were proven, including:

• An FTE take-out of 18%
• Immediate benefits delivery with the full ROI being realised in the second year of implementation
• An agile, reusable capability that can be selectively deployed across the company
• Significant reduction in process errors and complexity
• Productivity improvements, including reduced manual controls, higher quality servicing, less process variance and lowering of the error rate
• Process simplification by bringing up all the analysis task upfront so that BOTs can handle the case without any manual assistance in the latter half of the process

The client is now in a position to roll-out the automation of the process on the basis of the assessment and its demonstrated business case.

For more information on this assessment case please write to us at [email protected]