How Blue Ocean Strategic Partners provided 50% savings and 90% efficiency by simplifying the complexities of financial processes with digital workers

Introduction: Blue Ocean Strategic Partners, The Problem, and Why Robocorp

Blue Ocean Strategic Partners is an intelligent automation software provider (located in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania) that transforms repetitive human processes into digitally automated solutions. Their goal—”automate to elevate”—is to replace mundane, repetitive tasks with robot process automation (RPA), aiming to increase job satisfaction and efficiency.

Blue Ocean Strategic Partners’ client, Hardy World, LLC, is a real estate company that owns and leases commercial properties across the U.S. The client was unaware of RPA technology, and Blue Ocean Strategic Partners educated them about the benefits and the possibilities of automating their complex financial processes to transform their business.

Hardy World, LLC has 25 entities with 40 bank accounts which takes 1 full-time employee (FTE) anywhere up to 3 hours to go through daily, and about 14 days if done at month end. Because of the daily time consuming aspect of the reconciliation process, it was often pushed out to month end, which created a bottleneck. The delay in data input due to manual processes impacted their client’s ability to analyze monthly performance in a timely manner to understand the problems and make quick decisions to resolve issues. This delay extended the time to value and slowed the growth of their portfolio.

Our value proposition we are providing to our clients for this use case is to consolidate the whole month-end process in its entirety – faster cycle time for the month end,which means on the first business day of the month our clients know how they did rather than waiting 2 weeks to get the results/reports to make strategic decisions.

Bharath Bangalore, Founder & CEO of Blue Ocean Strategic Partners

The Solution

Hardy World, LLC, worked with Blue Ocean Strategic Partners to automate their back-of-house accounting processes, including daily bank reconciliation and balance sheet reconciliations and reporting. The focus was to automate several different processes for faster daily and monthly financial close. The daily accounting process includes downloading bank statements, reconciling daily transactions, logging transactions and reconciliation status, and emailing reconciliation reports. Blue Ocean Strategic Partner’s website provides detailed information on the bank reconciliation and balance sheet reconciliation RaaS solutions implemented on Robocorp Cloud.  bank reconciliation and balance sheet reconciliation RaaS solutions implemented on Robocorp Cloud.

Blue Ocean Strategic Partners understand the value and power of Robocorp’s platform and have built their Robot-as-a-Service (RaaS) offering on Robocorp Cloud. They developed an unattended bot (a digital worker) to automate the complexities of daily and monthly accounting processes fully. The automation provides instant access to daily and monthly reports. It ensures that the financial books are kept up to date and the month-end report is automatically delivered to the stakeholders.

The developers used Python to build bots and Control Room to deploy and manage all processes that automated different business scenarios. They also use the Control Room to schedule processes, review logs when troubleshooting errors, and manage exception handling for processes that require human interaction for additional data input. They were also able to combine many of the existing processes to create master processes. The online functionality of editing the robot code allowed the developers to make quick-edits for debugging and view changes in the code execution.

Blue Ocean Strategic Partners have implemented more than 30 processes on the Robocorp platform, and they find Control Room a valuable and resourceful orchestration tool for deploying and managing bots. “The Control Room is easy to use, with a flat learning curve. It solves the challenging tasks of organizing and tracking all of our processes and allows us to focus more on implementing the business logic rather than dealing with process management.” said Furkan Cetin and Muhammed Unuvar, Lead Developers, Blue Ocean Strategic Partners “The specific benefit is that I don’t have to spend too much time on organizing the robots or the workforce in general. Instead, I can focus on being more productive in designing the robots and writing code.”

The Control Room is easy to use, with a flat learning curve. It solves the challenging tasks of organizing and tracking all of our processes and allows us to focus more on implementing the business logic rather than dealing with process management.The specific benefit is that I don’t have to spend too much time on organizing the robots or the workforce in general. Instead, I can focus on being more productive in designing the robots and writing code.

Furkan Cetin and Muhammed Unuvar, Lead Developers, Blue Ocean Strategic Partners

The Results

Blue Ocean Strategic Partner’s approach included meeting with their client, documenting the relevant processes, identifying bottlenecks, and constructing the bots. From the initial meeting, it took 4-5 weeks to finish implementing the bots.

Using Robocorp’s platform to build a RaaS offering, Blue Ocean Strategic Partners brought together the daily and month-end processes by creating unattended bots to optimize the back-of-house tasks, significantly reducing processing time precisely down from 14 days to 1 day. According to Blue Ocean Strategic Partners, this is a tremendous achievement because most companies still take up to 15 days to complete these reconciliations.

With the automation, it now only takes 5 minutes daily to review the reconciliation report for any special transaction status. Previously, it would take a week or more every month. Without automation, they needed more than 2 FTEs to complete this work in time. While this provides significant savings in FTE costs and time, it also provides their clients with valuable insights to analyze and consider real-time financial data to make strategic decisions to grow their commercial property portfolio.

The value of Robocorp’s open-source platform is that it provides developers the flexibility to build robust bots in Python. We can maintain the code in Azure DevOps repository and use Robocorp Control Room to deploy and manage all automations in a single pane of glass.Another important aspect for me is that the Robocorp team excels at customer service, which makes it much easier and a pleasure to work with them.

Bharath Bangalore, Founder & CEO, Blue Ocean Strategic Partners

Next up, Blue Ocean Strategic Partners are working on defining and automating processes for HR, IT, and Marketing