South Hams District Council

The Challenge

South Hams District Council was charging ahead on a mission to supercharge productivity and efficiency in administrative processes, using Netcall’s Liberty Create and Liberty Converse to streamline operations and elevate citizen experience across the council. Next, they wanted to eliminate bottlenecks by automating and optimising process and workflow elements.

The main barriers to improvement and accelerating workflows were data entry and transfer between systems, leading to delays, errors and inefficiencies. The Digital Team could see that processing tasks were being hampered by manual keying. It was consuming significant time and workforce - often trapping high-paid specialists in low-value tasks.

Automated processes work a heck of a lot faster. From a service point of view, things are quicker, and the customer experience is better. We get fewer complaints and fewer phone calls as we’ve capitalised on the opportunities digital provides to automate services. Now that almost everything is available online, our phone calls have been steadily declining by about 10% each year. When a process can be done online or over the phone, 80% of people choose online.
Jim Davis, Head of Customer Improvement, South Hams District Council

The Solution

South Hams introduced Liberty RPA to automate these repetitive tasks, freeing staff for other work and enabling specialists to focus on higher-value activities.

Temporary event notices

An early RPA project targeted the administration of applications for temporary event permissions. This process used to take around 45 minutes per application in data entry alone. Now it's fully automated, freeing staff from manual rekeying. The automation of data transfer and administration dramatically accelerates processing times for applicants, leading to greatly improved response times. Highly qualified specialists can now put more time into critical, high-level tasks, improving their productivity and job satisfaction.

Automating revenues and benefits account updates

Another challenge was updating accounts for 'Revs & Bens', specifically when debts had been transferred to bailiffs. This process required manual review of daily reports, which was both time-consuming and prone to error. Daily reports were buried in a folder alongside hundreds of similarly named reports, which staff had to manually open and scrutinise one by one; they often found no action was required. With upwards of 50 reports to check each day, this manual task was tedious, inefficient and easy to get wrong.

Liberty RPA was deployed to automate report parsing. The bot searches for specific keywords, such as "account", transfers the data into relevant systems and flags reports that need action. Each morning, the bot analyses the reports and fires off a summary email to staff, highlighting only the files that need their attention.

Automating this process saved up to an hour each day by eliminating manual report checking. As staff receive a ready-to-action report directly in their inbox before they start work, their day is now more focused on progressing cases and critical tasks.

Dealing with duplicate records

South Hams uses Liberty RPA to run a report, checking for duplicates across all contact records in the system. Using several rules, it establishes whether this is a duplicate record for the same person or two separate people who happen to have the same name.

It produces a report of likely duplicates and doppelgängers. Staff can then assess and decide whether to merge records, which isn't always straightforward. There's scope to train the bot to merge accounts after a human has made the decision, which is planned for a second phase. For now, it’s a perfect example of how bots and humans can share the workload effectively: The bot identifies problems in the data, and the human makes the decisions.

Service Example: Water supply test results

South Hams processes private water supply test results, relying on pinpoint-accurate data entry to ensure reliable test results. This is critical for public health and safety, as incorrect entries carry serious consequences.

Staff had to manually enter multiple data points detailed to 3 or 4 decimal places from spreadsheets into a South Hams system. Each spreadsheet took 10-20 minutes to process. It was slow and demanded constant concentration, as it's very easy to miss an extra zero or skip an entry by mistake. But because it was boring, time-consuming, and frustrating, it was wide open to inefficiencies and potential inaccuracies.

Now, a Liberty RPA bot extracts the relevant test results and enters the data into the system with precision. It flags any discrepancies or missing data, alerting staff to potential issues. This has dramatically decreased the likelihood of errors, ensuring accurate data throughout the system. And it's lightning-fast - the hours that staff save in the morning processing data are now invested in more valuable tasks. When issues are flagged, notifications are clear, allowing staff to address the problem promptly. Further work has been undertaken to automate the issuance of certificates if the results indicate a pass for water quality.

The Results

Efficiency gains: Automating data transfer and admin tasks has significantly reduced processing times in many areas
Resource optimisation: Highly qualified specialists can dedicate more time to critical, high-level tasks, enhancing their productivity and job satisfaction and ensuring the council doesn’t utilise highly paid staff for low-level tasks
Service delivery speed: Removing admin bottlenecks ensures improved response times, driving citizen experience and customer satisfaction
Time savings: Automated processes save hours every day across different departments by eliminating manual checking and data entry
Efficiency: Staff receive ready-to-act reports, allowing them to focus on progressing requests, complexities, problems and more urgent customer issues
Accuracy: Liberty RPA minimises the risk of human error associated with manual data checking and ensures 100% accuracy in identifying reports needing action
Clarity: Automated processes ensure that incomplete tasks are easily identifiable, even when staff are absent, preventing backlogs
Consistency: By archiving completed tasks, the system maintains clean, organised workflows, making it easy to track progress

Our teams are wowed at the amazing time savings we’re able to hand them when we introduce Liberty RPA into their workflow. The more the teams learn about it, the more ideas they get, and teams often offer up more processes for us to automate. We’ve even been able to use it to automate one-off high effort tasks that would have taken a team of people weeks to do. This shows the benefits of RPA to a wider range of services and gets them thinking about the possibilities in their normal processes.
Jim Davis, Head of Customer Improvement, South Hams District Council

South Hams District Council