The challenge
St Helens Borough Council is one of six local authorities making up the Liverpool city region. Their ‘St Helens Together’ approach puts people at the heart of everything they do and drives the council to deliver on their big plans for the borough. One of which is transforming their organisation.
Working within budget constraints and limited resources, like all local authorities, St Helens saw the value of utilising technology to ease the workload, increase the speed of delivery for citizens, enthuse and retain their staff and also safeguard their services.
The solution
In social care, frequent visits to vulnerable children and their families must be completed, often scheduled by social workers to fit several visits into a day or two to make the best use of their time. This needed to be manually done in the office, after the day of visits, potentially 48 hours later and sometimes even longer if a court appointment or other emergency happened.
To speed up this process, Netcall set up an email inbox for the RPA bot – through the Liberty RPA solution – designing a layout for social workers to send information in immediately after their visit, from their phone. The robot receives the email, ensures that it meets the requirements and checks that the person emailing in is allowed to add care notes to the system for each child. The bot then confirms on the system the date that the visit happened and adds the notes to the record.
The automated workflow was simple and fast to build. The bot handles each email as soon as it arrives. A vital benefit of this immediacy is that the record is updated in near real-time which could enable better decisions concerning a child’s wellbeing. For example, if a neighbour has called to report an issue, and when this is recorded on the system, in parallel with the social worker’s notes, the evaluation of the situation may be viewed differently from the neighbour’s report in isolation.
The next project Netcall helped resolve for the council, was automating a laborious, mundane administrative task. St Helens had to deal with updating the rental increases on their social housing stock, managed via a partner organisation. Due to legacy systems that hold the data, the process was more complicated to build, but once set up, the bots removed the task from the team – freeing them to focus on their other work.
Another task that St Helens has given the RPA bot is their IT System Checker. Each morning, the bot is programmed to log into all vital departmental systems and make sure that everything is running smoothly. If any issues are found, the bot raises a ticket, alerting the IT Team to investigate and fix the issue as soon as possible.
The result
Safeguarding: Children in the borough are protected by notes being added to the social care system immediately using an RPA bot, ensuring all up-to-date information is available for key decisions.
Saving resource: Bots freed staff from the large-scale, mundane rental increase data task.
Employee experience and productivity: Bots alert IT staff to any early morning issues, enabling faster resolution.
Return on investment: While only using 2 of their 4 RPA bots, St Helens is already breaking even in savings generated from bot usage. The plan will be to use all 4 to capacity with future projects that will generate more savings.
