Improving Corporate Secretary Productivity using Robotic Process Automation

摘要

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) has been introduced as a solution to automate highly structured business and operational processes that involve extensive labor and high error rate. It has been implemented in various business processes, including finance, supply chain and human resources, to improve the companies' overall productivity. In this paper, we aim to develop an RPA system that supports Corporate Service Providers (CSP) in Singapore with their annual compliance processes for its clients and their ad-hoc requests or inquiries from its clients. These processes are highly structured and required in-depth understanding of several regulatory requirements in respect of clients' compliance affairs which are heavily regulated by relevant government agencies. The proposed RPA system aims to reduce manual interaction with clients which has administrative in nature by having the system guiding the clients to follow through the necessary actions in fulfilling their requests. It is also designed to manage statutory record in response to various requests by the clients which may or may not require the record to be updated. We implemented this RPA system in two CSPs in Singapore for six months. Based on our evaluation, the RPA system is able to significantly improve the CSP's productivity by over 1,051% for annual compliance processes and over 1,321% for ad-hoc client's requests/inquiries as compared to manual processes. To complement the evaluation results, the managerial impacts for implementing this RPA system are also reviewed.