How Caerphilly Council is improving customer experience despite a shrinking budget and workforce
Caerphilly Council's Richard Edmunds explains how he aims to save £40m over four years while improving services using robotic process automation
Caerphilly, a small town in South Wales best known for its castle, also boasts one of the larger local authorities in Wales. Supporting a population of around 180,000 people, its current budget stands at around £325 million per year.
Richard Edmunds, Corporate Director for Education and Corporate Services at Caerphilly Council, heads up the education and corporate services function, which includes IT, customer services and the entire back office.
He tells Computing that impending budget cuts mean that he has had to rethink the way the council meets the needs of its citizens.
"We have, not unlike local authorities in England, been going through austerity," begins Edmunds. "As we started to take strides on our transformation journey, we've started to get a feel for what the funding envelope going to be.
"It's clear that business as usual is not going to work. We've just signed off the 2019/20 budget with £15 million of savings included. That may not seem a lot, but we need to then remove another £40 million in the next three to four years."
This need to slash budgets whilst finding a way to improve services has led Caerphilly to embark on a transformation programme, with automation at its core.
"So this has been a real financial driver for us to introduce technology to improve efficiency and the customer experience.
"We've started a wholesale transformation programme of which digital is a significant foundation stone. Within that, intelligent automation and RPA [Robotic Process Automation] started to tick a lot of boxes."
Robotic Process Automation is a technology which enables software ‘robots' to perform certain sets of prescribed actions within a system, or even multiple systems. That could be for instance validating invoices sent from a supplier, and sending them through for payment - the idea being that the staff who used to perform those functions are freed up for other, less menial tasks.
An aging, disappearing workforce
To compound the issue of needing to improve service whilst significantly reducing budget, Edmunds is also grappling with the issue of an ageing workforce.
"We're dealing with an ageing workforce, so there are limited opportunities to bring in new members of staff, and people across the organisation are ageing. We're running workforce planning exercises to allow people to exit if they wish.
"We're experiencing a diminishing workforce, and that's only likely to continue. At the same time we're seeing a rise in demand for our services, and a rise in expectations as to how they perform.
"So we need to move quickly from the traditional ways of meeting those needs to more fleet of foot approaches - approaches which are more flexible and can be scaled.
For Edmunds, it's now clear that the only way to protect and improve services is to deploy a ‘digital workforce' - in other words a bunch of algorithms, or robots as they're often known in this context - to supplement the more traditional human labour.
"So we'll have a mixed workforce, with digital largely focused on repetitive sequential tasks, which will give time back to the human workforce so they're free to deal with more complicated customer enquiries. That gives us the best chance of protecting our services."
The project was kicked off in 2018 with what Edmunds describes as "very prudent budget management", where a sum was set aside for the council's digital transformation. There are a number of initiatives within the wider programme, of which this automation project is one.
Caerphilly chose Thoughtonomy largely due to their suitability for the organisation.
"We appointed Thoughtonomy through the G-Cloud framework [an agreement between the government and suppliers to provide consistent and recognised terms for cloud-based services]. It was very obvious that their product and fit was incredibly strong, and it was in the right window in terms of financing."
Edmunds admits that his excitement is building now that deployment is beginning.
"Once the procurement process finishes your excitement level builds as you start to see what's possible. The initial focus though is to understand what to do first to provide the biggest impact."
How Caerphilly Council is improving customer experience despite a shrinking budget and workforce
Caerphilly Council's Richard Edmunds explains how he aims to save £40m over four years while improving services using robotic process automation
He says that they're very much in the early stages of deployment, describing their progress as being "in the foothills". But he adds that they've selected a number of processes to automate, with many more to come.
"The business case we've developed with Thoughtonomy is based on a number of functions, some back office and others customer-facing, because it's good to get a mix. This technology has the potential to transform every aspect of our business. It's about transforming the customer experience as well as our own efficiency."
The first process in the pipeline is something called ‘Tell Us Once', and it's an initiative the value of which everyone can recognise.
Most people have suffered through the irritation of being transferred between several organisational departments on a call, having to give personal details and explain the complaint each time.
The idea with Tell Us Once is that this won't happen.
"We're an organisation which delivers over 600 different services, but customers have a view that if they tell us once that they've changed address for instance, they shouldn't have to tell us again. That means that information need to automatically filter through to every single database.
"Traditionally that would rely on a member of staff to update what could be nine separate systems, a very manually intensive process. With this technology, you take the information from the public, and it places it in all the relevant internal systems safely and securely."
This task is currently taking the equivalent of one full-time employee's (FTE) worth of effort each year.
"Being able to replace that with a digital worker immediately generates capacity saving."
Another opportunity is the system which enables residents apply for blue badges, which enables disabled drivers park closer to their destinations.
"That's a well-defined legislative process with a set of prescribed questions and evidence exchanged. The ability to do that with digital worker provides us with great opportunity to do it faster and more accurately. We believe we're spending just under two FTEs per year on that, so there's a real saving to be made."
The aim is to automate some of the highest volume categories of enquiry, in order to generate the biggest impact, and thus win support for the next tranche of automation projects.
Edmunds cites the waste management process as similarly ripe for automation, with another two and half FTEs potentially saved.
"Three processes into this conversation we're already talking about five FTEs of productivity saved."
He goes on to list payments, catering invoices and starters and leavers as other areas with another eight FTEs potentially ripe for automation.
"So with those six areas we already feel we can save in the region of 13-15 FTEs, so we're not far off the investment attached to this. My instinct is this will take off at a rate of knots, it's the beginnings of a new service delivery model for Local Authorities."
What happens if the robots go bad?
All of which sounds like the beginnings of a grand plan, and one which could indeed meet the dual challenge of reducing budgets and ageing workforce.
But automation isn't without risk. When things start to go awry, the chances are a human will notice, stop the broken process and seek help. Without proper checks, or some degree of intelligence, a robot will just keep plugging away, potentially paying the wrong invoices, overwriting a database with bad data, or otherwise proving destructive.
How Caerphilly Council is improving customer experience despite a shrinking budget and workforce
Caerphilly Council's Richard Edmunds explains how he aims to save £40m over four years while improving services using robotic process automation
Edmunds explains that whilst Caerphilly is eager to start deploying RPA in anger, it's not rushing into anything without putting all the proper checks and balances in place first.
"We have an incredibly well-provisioned information governance section and security section, they're playing a key role in the implementation. They'll work with Thoughtonomy, and no step will be taken until everything has been thought through.
"This automation is a step we have to take, we just need to take it as safely and securely as we can. We don't decide not to do it just because there's risk."
He adds that they'll begin with some internal back office processes "to cut our teeth", before moving on to customer-facing processes. However, the aim is to have all of the six processes mentioned automated within 12 months.
Thoughtonomy will help with the first few implementations, but Edmunds sees a time in the near future when they'll be able to remove the training wheels.
"The idea is that Thoughtonomy will transfer skills to us initially, but once we've got through a few processes we can use the tools ourselves and accelerate at scale."
And the scale he's looking at essentially covers the entire organisation.
"On the surface these may feel like low level processes, but over the next 12 months we'll see whether this entire organisation can be built on this platform. We'll see if every process we operate can lend itself to this operation, and we'll leave no stone unturned."
Despite this bold claim, Edmunds is keen to stress that the plan isn't to replace the existing staff with robots, but to sustain services in the face of a shrinking workforce.
From automation to profit
And the bigger picture is to potentially turn this nascent RPA capability into a commercial venture.
"We're also keen to explore more commercial activities. The intent is to deploy these digital workers to allow us to free up capacity and reinvest that into commercial activities to generate revenue.
"It's also about reducing cost. Demand for services can be spiky, so being able to scale the workforce to deal with that is hugely attractive to the senior management team, as is building high quality customer experience.
"The desire is that by 2022 we will be a completely new organisation. Our intention is to embrace digital, and take this concept of intelligent automation to its fullest extent."
Part of this involves using more intelligence as they become more comfortable with the platform.
"The platform we've engaged allows us to turn more AI on as we go forward, and the processes we've already put in place do have elements of AI wrapped around them.
"At the moment we're looking at 80 to 90 per cent of these processes being done via digital workers, with the more cognitive tasks needing human judgement. But I can't see it remaining that way forever.
"There's been a trend for local authorities in Wales to do things at least 22 different ways. What we're really seeing here is an opportunity to trailblaze something.
"There are neighbouring local authorities interested in what we're doing here. I like the idea of a flexible digital workforce that can be shared with different local authorities, and can be deployed to help more than one organisation deal with engagement from customers.
"I'm not seeing it as just a Caerphilly thing, merely that we're taking the first step.
"There's a push coming from Welsh governememt to collaborate, but you always come up against difficulties relating to different process and terms and conditions. But with a digital workforce they're not bound by those things, so it becomes easier to share.
"So there's potential here to revolutionise local authority service delivery.
These are evidently bold claims set against a grand plan. But with the right governance there's a good chance that Caerphilly Council might just have cracked that age old IT problem: how to do more with less.
For the bigger picture, and an expanded version of this case study, complete with more on the procurement process, check out Delta, Computing's new market intelligence service for IT leaders.