Life Healthcare is a global, people-centered healthcare organization group in South Africa currently operating 68 healthcare facilities. The Group owns Alliance Medical Group, the leading independent provider of medical imaging in the U.K. and Europe. They’re improving patient, doctor, and staff experiences through their Southern African patient and financial services, and national credit risk department. With RPA, they’re freeing staff from repetitive manual tasks, improving processing times, and delivering quality patient care to keep Making Life Better.

Challenge

Life Healthcare experienced process bottlenecks, keeping their staff from higher-value work. They had to process extremely high volumes of daily Pharmacy Accounts Payable invoices when the group implemented SAP in the pharmacy, procurement, and finance departments.

In the finance department employees were tasked to allocate emails with PDF invoice attachments to users across the department. Opening these invoices was a time-consuming process involving manually typing into the SAP system, generating a document number, and uploading it into the SAP shared drive. In total, this task could take seven to 20 minutes per invoice when done manually. The average incoming number of invoices was 1,000-1,500 per day, with the employee only able to complete about 80 invoices per day.

Solution

Life Healthcare implemented SS&C Blue Prism’s Decipher IDP and RPA solutions to resolve their process bottlenecks.

Accounts Payable Invoice Processing Up to 5x Faster

With SS&C | Blue Prism® Decipher IDP processing, Life Healthcare deployed digital workers to run their end-to-end processes, with a human in the loop verifying the data. They put the vendor PDF invoice through Decipher IDP’s OCR tool to extract the information and then passed the information to a digital worker to process the Invoice data into SAP for payment to the vendor when the invoice and purchase order information matched... instead of seven to 20 minutes for each accounts payable invoice, the bots processed them in a minute to a minute-and-a-half. In the latest version of Decipher, Life Healthcare reached a 70-80% success rate by automating these vendor invoices with the human-in-the-loop required. By implementing Decipher IDP and creating an RPA process Life Healthcare is able to process between 2000-2500 Vendor Invoices per day depending on the number of Digital workers available.

Life Healthcare has automated 20 processes with plans to grow their automation further using SS&C Blue Prism’s RPA. They’re hoping to scale their in-house team for better cost-savings and employee empowerment and to grow their ROI by automating more processes across their organization.