McMillan Shakespeare Group (MMSG) was established in the late ‘80s. It started as a small salary packaging administration company with clients in the health and charity space. Since then, the company has expanded rapidly to offer innovative full employee benefits administration services for its employer clients. 

These include novated leasing for cars, asset management, operating leases for vehicle fleets, retail finance, and, more recently, NDIS plan management. Today, the company employs around 1,300 employees and is an Australian Stock Exchange-listed company.

Easing the Back-End Burden

“To better serve our clients under the Maxxia and RemServ brands, we started looking at robotic process automation (RPA) in 2018 as part of the digital transformation program that we commenced in late 2017,” relates Luke Mussared, Intelligent Automation Lead at MMSG. The initiative was launched to reduce operational costs and improve the customer experience.

“We wanted to enhance our digital capabilities through our online offerings and mobile app. But we also have a lot of back-end administration and are trying to find ways to ease the burden on our staff.”  

The company looked into RPA, a technology that enables users to build, deploy, and manage software robots to perform repetitive human actions within digital systems. Reveal Group was among those that presented the SS&C Blue Prism solutions, which are AI- and machine learning-driven automation technologies.

With the help of Reveal Group’s team, a proof of concept was developed for MMSG’s select processes. “We delivered on that within a couple of months and presented those to the business, which received great buy-in and approval from the executive team and stakeholders,” Luke recalled.

Following the approval, Reveal Group completed three waves of automation with MMSG. One of the processes that were automated was outstanding fee collection, which continues to deliver significant value to this day, after four years.

“That was the very first proof of concept process that we built, and yet it's been a great deliverer of value for the business,” said Luke. This process is tasked with collecting outstanding salary packaging administration fees that customers may have missed paying. This robot process would regularly grab data from a report, and navigate into the customer salary packaging account in the applicable system. If the robot determines that there is a customer balance available to collect outstanding fees from, it then sends an email to the customer to inform them that MMSG would use the balance to pay the fees. Within 24 hours, the fee would be taken from the balance. To date, the company has collected over half a million dollars in client-missed fees, Luke said.

Recently, Luke reports the onboarding of a new Victorian-based Government client, which needed to transition an estimated 4,000 novated leases across from the current provider to Maxxia.

“We had six to seven robots running daily setting up those leases in our systems using an existing process automation. It had to be tweaked a bit to suit the transition though. The task was completed in two-and-a-half weeks, which would never have happened if we tried doing that five years ago with just Operations people.”

With an eye to the future to continue its digital transformation, MMSG is looking at SS&C Blue Prism’s other offerings such as the AI Surface Automation and the ability to schedule work based on SLAs and business priorities. These new tools will support the vision to enable customers to manage their own accounts through digital platforms, such as the ability to change an address and have the changes reflected in the digital platform almost immediately.

“It's really trying to enhance the way customers interact with us through that mobile app and online functionality,” Luke said. “The way the world is changing, they want to do everything digitally at a time of their choosing. We need to have support in the background through system integration and robotic process automation to support that immediacy that we're looking for.”

To find out more, watch the SS&C Blue Prism Refresh on-demand webinar to be in the fireside chat with Eric Jacobsen, Partner, Reveal Group to learn how MMSG is delivering quality customer services through automation.

SS&C Blue Prism Refresh is a series to give our customers a full lowdown on intelligent automation in just 60 minutes – keeping you up to speed with all the latest SS&C Blue Prism news and insights. The session aims at bringing you important insights around the SS&C Blue Prism solution updates and the roadmap, the benefits of a Blue Prism digital workforce, and the value of putting digital at the heart of your transformation.

Join us!