Proximus is Belgium’s largest telecommunications provider, serving more than five million mobile customers and over two million Internet customers. While the organization prides itself on keeping its customers happy, Proximus was also keen to improve the experience for its own staff. The telco had already established itself as a digital disruptor. So, to give their staff a boost, and help with everyday repetitive tasks, Proximus brought in a Blue Prism digital workforce.

Challenge

Although innovative in its approach toward digital disruption, Proximus still needed to complete the usual range of tasks common to most telcos. For example, Proximus must calculate, generate and send hundreds of thousands of invoices every month. Many of these invoices are handled automatically, but there can also be manual checking involved, taking employees away from other work. 

Similarly, the installation of new technology had to be thoroughly documented in multiple systems across the entire organization. In one such instance, documentation for the addition of their new MX equipment totaled more than 300 pages alone. Proximus knew there was no avoiding these tasks; they had to be done. But for the back-office staff tasked with doing them, their repetitive nature was impacting employee satisfaction.

Solution

Proximus was determined to aid its employees tasked with repetitive work. To assist the accounts payable team with invoicing, Proximus brought in a digital worker who collaborates with Blue Prism Decipher, an intelligent document processing solution, to identify and extract data from invoices. The combined solution now handles more than 150,000 invoice scans, which were previously being manually processed by the accounts payable team. Intelligent automation is improving the business-to-business customer and supplier experience and, as a bonus, giving 1,000 days back to the business each year.

On the operations side of the business, a digital worker, called Nadia, is helping employees manage the documentation of newly installed telecommunications technology. Nadia now standardizes the output of documents, thereby reducing lead times, and executes tasks without errors. This is giving employees at Proximus a better overall view of the configuration of new equipment and returning 90 work hours back to the business, every month. Seeing the many benefits of intelligent automation first-hand, today Proximus has 65 digital workers operating across its entire operation.