As one of Africa’s leading financial services organizations, Old Mutual Life Assurance South Africa helps millions of customers thrive and achieve lifelong financial goals. To best serve their customers, Old Mutual focuses on continuous improvement and innovation. They’ve utilized intelligent automation for more than five years — which has helped them deliver superior customer service and maintain a competitive advantage over newer market entrants. To enhance performance, take advantage of new features in the latest version and further reduce infrastructure costs, Old Mutual partnered with SS&C Blue Prism’s professional services for their RPA upgrade.

Challenge

Old Mutual migrated to the cloud but wasn’t able to optimize all applications prior to the move. As part of an effort to enhance the stability and performance of both their applications and infrastructure, they decided to upgrade to one of the latest versions of SS&C Blue Prism. This would allow them to take advantage of new features like browser extensions, browser automation agents and API support. However, since Old Mutual has a robust automation program — 250 SS&C Blue Prism digital workers running 85 automations across 130 processes — they needed to be certain the upgrade wouldn’t cause downtime for their digital workforce.

Solution

Old Mutual capitalized on SS&C Blue Prism’s product assurance offering. Their robotic process automation (RPA) team collaborated with a dedicated team from professional services. Together, the teams thoughtfully considered Old Mutual’s current challenges and developed a personalized roadmap to ensure a successful and smooth upgrade. Professional services’ knowledge of the necessary and optimized infrastructure was particularly helpful. Without their guidance, it would’ve been difficult for the RPA team to know what kind of infrastructure to put in place and to avoid overprovisioning. 

Old Mutual completed its upgrade in three major phases: pre-migration and planning; migration and execution; and post-migration. They opted to utilize new infrastructure instead of completing an in-place upgrade, which allowed them to have a more controlled migration into the new environment. This approach offered them a clean slate as they migrated their processes to the new environment; it also virtually eliminated downtime since they were running parallel environments. This built-in contingency plan assured the team that if anything unexpected occurred, they could revert to the old environment until the issue was resolved.

Since the upgrade, Old Mutual has experienced significant improvements in the stability of the system, which has resulted in faster delivery of new process automations. They’ve reduced the infrastructure required to run their automation program, which has led to cost savings. And because the application is optimized and running smoothly, they anticipate reducing current infrastructure by half in the coming year.

Old Mutual’s customers are also benefiting from this optimized solution. When they submit a claim to withdraw funds from a policy at Old Mutual, digital workers quickly get to work authorizing and disbursing the funds. Where customers used to have to wait several days to receive payment, they now receive it almost immediately. Digital workers process thousands of these transactions every day — up to 50% faster in some instances.

Learn more about Old Mutual's RPA upgrade experience, in the SS&C Blue Prism Community.