Global Nonprofit Saves 800+ Hours of Manual Data Input Annually with Automation

Obstacles & Opportunities

One branch of a global nonprofit organization focused on youth development and social responsibility required that managers within their organization complete an online form when an employee under their supervision had a change in status, such as a promotion, raise, manager change, or termination. This form then triggered a series of actions/processes. 

The online form recorded changes in a Microsoft SharePoint list as part of its daily payroll maintenance process. Once changes were approved by corresponding managers, another employee would manually enter necessary data for each affected employee into the online ADP system. There were anywhere from a few to more than 100 changes depending on the time of year and other factors, with each status change requiring 5 to 10 minutes or more of manual data entry in ADP. For example, if there were 10 ADP updates that required on an average seven minutes per change, this absorbed 70 minutes to complete. Obviously, this was a time-consuming and error-prone process. 

The organization needed to find an automated solution that could cut personnel time, boost efficiency, and mitigate human error. Staff also needed to free their time to focus on more strategic and meaningful activities, thus enhancing job satisfaction, morale, motivation, and productivity. 

Solution

Once AAFCPAs’ Business Process & IT Consulting Practice had an understanding of the current process and end goals, the team used Robotic Process Automation software to build a customized bot. The bot then logs into ADP and cycles through the data changes record by record to update the corresponding employee record within ADP. 

For each row, the bot searches for the employee using their employee ID and navigates through various ADP menus to make changes as appropriate according to the type and reason along with associated specific rule-based instructions. Once the bot completes a row, it then updates an automatically generated log file with a record of actions taken in ADP. If a change is not processed for any reason, the bot makes a note of this in a log file for manual review post-processing. As soon as all changes are successfully processed, the bot then sends an email that includes a brief overview of the actions taken with the logfile attached.