When we developed Millie in August 2018 we really weren't sure whether she would work, but we were determined from day one that she would be a part of the team. So we developed Millie with an avatar (see above) and therefore a personality. Her personality is that she is reliable, clever and works all hours of the day!
When we started building Millie it was a very slow process. The key to having RPA (Robotic Process Automation) work is having consistent inputs. This took us a lot of work working out how to set up the information in our CRM system, what to call each field and then Melanie and Carey spent many many hours getting the data into a consistent format.
For example - an IRD number has to be xxx-xxx-xxx and a date of birth has to be dd/mm/yyyy. Mobile phone numbers require a consistent format of xxx xxxx xxxx (depending on how many numbers).
Alongside that we had to document and understand our processes in minute detail. Because Millie can't think for herself, if we missed out one step, she wouldn't work.
For the first year, Rachel from Q4 would come into the office, set up a screen recorder and record every step of the process. To make sure that we weren't wasting Rachels time, Carey would have to know the process pretty well before she arrived.
Rachel would then go away and document the process, each step, with flowcharts, screenshots and instructions on how it works. Any emails that Millie sent had to be stipulated to the letter - identifying who it was sent to (ie the adviser, the supplier, or just to Carey or to all of our team), what the subject line is and what the body will say.
Whenever something had to be added in to a document, or an email it is expressed within <> brackets.
Carey and Rachel would then spend ages going back and forwards and testing these documents and making sure they exactly worked, then they would go to the developer. Saravanan then programmed them, and would have questions, so more time going back and forth.
When each stage of the process was finished (our main process is our annual reviews and we broke it down into three main phases in initial programming and each bit had individual processes in it), it came to testing time. Oh, how I hated that testing (Carey's note). It ended up happening in December 2018 and January 2019 and in Chennai they don't celebrate Christmas. We wanted to launch the process with our January annual reviews, so there was a lot of stress and testing to get it right.
At the start, Carey didn't believe it could work, but after a few issues with January annual reviews, it hit its stride in February 2019 and we haven't looked back!
As soon as we worked out that this RPA thing worked, we started working on automating other things, to the extent where now - in late 2025 we really do think we have automated everything. Our last big process was the move from OneAnswer Wrap Platform to NZX Wealth Platform (we have no idea how people do this without a robot!).
Over time we developed a lot of our own 'on the fly' processes - probably the most significant didn't happen until July 2021. That is when we worked out that we could set up a 're-run' of the process. We now have this on most of our key processes.
Every now and then the process wouldn't work (see next months blog post), and we would be left frustrated. It was a huge lightbulb that went off when we worked out that we could set up a process to ask Millie to rerun the process again. She would archive or delete the work she had already done and start again. 95% of the time, one rerun is enough, but if the data input just isn't right (usually human error on our CRM), it might take a few more times, but she keeps at it, producing new things for us to review.
Over time the Process Definition Documents have become far more streamlined - because we don't have the skills of Rachel to make them as detailed and pretty and Saravanan knows how Millie and all our systems well.
These days, Carey writes up a document, with Background then each step that has to be taken. During the process, as in the original processes, when the development starts, there are often tweaks (which, during the platform transfer, Carey finally worked out it would be a good idea to add to the written process, instead of adding ot the pile that she now has to go back and update).
As providers change their websites and as we get new ideas to do things, or realise they can be done better we are continually updating the processes.
It has been satisfying (although time consuming) process. We estimate that with Carey and Melanies time in building the system we have invested well over $1.5m - and every cent has been worth it!
