It is said that Switzerland is a country where residents book appointments to do laundry in their own homes.
In other words, they leave little for chance.
But when the unexpected intruded on the mountain nation, the Canton – or state – of Zurich had to scramble to deal with the aftershock of the COVID pandemic.
Almost overnight, the number of applications for short-time work rose to more than 10,000 – up from 10 in the months before.
In a three month stretch, 30,000 payments had to be processed – a task that previously took 25 minutes per imbursement.
In normal times, an applicant would have had to download an Excel file, fill out certain parts by hand, and send it out by mail. The form would then be scanned and uploaded to a 30-year-old document management system with a complex interface.
Even then, much of the data was inaccurate or incomplete.
The result-oriented Swiss were not about to revert to these flawed methods when so much was at stake. The flurry of applications would have required the canton to hire an additional 70 full-time employees – a near-impossible undertaking when so much of the country was locked down.
But what if humans weren’t brought on?
What if the Canton of Zurich turned to robotics instead?
Human ingenuity and automated efficiency
With a population of more than 1.5 million, the Canton of Zurich is considered the heart of Switzerland’s economy. And as the global center of banking and finance, the city of Zurich is the canton’s de facto capital.
As in the rest of Switzerland, citizens appear to be obsessed with getting things right.
Determined not to make any mistakes as it developed the short-time work application and payment solution, the canton began working with enterprise resource planning (ERP) software leader SAP. SAP’s Business Technology Platform (BTOP) would handle basic and backend functionalities, while SAP’s Intelligent Robotic Process Automation (iRPA) provided the software robots and digital workers.
Working under a tight deadline, SAP Services and Support mobilized a versatile, global team specializing in flexible problem-solving. Once targets were agreed upon each morning, the iRPA developers began coding various parts of the application.
The iRPA was linked to two older legacy systems, eliminating the need to create expensive and time-consuming interfaces.
Every evening, business experts conducted application tests, delivering feedback to the developers and project team.
Meticulous timing
The platform faced close scrutiny when it was deployed in April 2020. Within two weeks, the processing time per application had decreased from 25 minutes to 30 seconds. How’s that for Swiss precision?
Two bots took on the primary responsibilities for automating the applications and payments, as well as ensuring that most data was digitally authenticated according to local business rules.
Payments were received in less than two weeks.
In total, the canton was able to rely on an automation level of 85%, with just 15% of the documents having to be revalidated by a live human being.
No additional staff members needed to be recruited and employed during a period when most Swiss citizens were working from home.
Without the solution, “we would never have managed to process and pay the enormous number of short-time working compensations,” observed Christian Truog, CFO of the Canton of Zurich’s labor authority.
Most importantly, the canton now understands the fine points of developing a modern iRPA application – knowledge that can be called upon to meet the next challenge.
As a result, the office of information technology at the Canton of Zurich’s department of finance received a 2022 SAP Innovation Award, based on the pragmatic project approach, swift implementation, business benefits and positive feedback on the new platform. You can get the details on what they accomplished to earn this coveted award in their pitch deck.
Despite the pressures and the quick turnover, the solution managed to embody everything about the Swiss character – a culture where, as the adage goes, spontaneity is considered wonderful, so long as it’s planned.
