Burnley Borough Council

The processing of Revenues and Benefits within a Local Authority involves significant amounts of repetitive manual processing that can be automated using suitable Robotic Process Automation (RPA) tool-set. After analysing the business processes, we have estimated that 20-25% can be automated within a Revenues Collection (Council Tax, Business Rates) and 25-30% can be automated within a Benefits process. Some examples of these processes are:
* Generating various reports including government returns using multiple data-sets
* Decisions based on a set of rules, for example Risk based Verification
The funding will be used to conduct the Discovery phase to test the RPA approach for the above processes using the tool-set of a leading provider.
Based on our analysis, the expected benefits are:
* Release of valuable human resources that can be deployed to focus on vulnerable customers
* Faster processing and decisions, thereby improving customer service
* A saving of 20-30%  on the processing costs. With processing costs in the region of £1 million for a Council of our size, the resultant savings are expected to be in the region of £200,000 to £300,000.

The end-result will be to develop a product designed for Local Authorities   in partnership with a leading RPA tool-set provider.