The Automation-Ready Response to handle Peak Housing resource demands.
Every organisation experiences peak demands for services, response and support and being ready to scale to support these cycles can be challenging to resource.
Timings around high demand processes such as Universal Credit Services, Social Rented cost demands, or Uprating surges can mean diversion of resource, which impacts tenant services, additional temporary labour or can add long delays of administration for busy income and finance teams.
"Automation introduces ready scalability for those operational peaks. Your workforce can be expanded virtually at peak times, to cater for both planned and unexpected demands"
As with any peak planning process, the event needs to be planned for and managed. If you are deploying automation for the first time, it is important to identify the processes which will spike and prioritise these for automation, ensuring that you deploy the automation early and well ahead of peak. This will enable you to check the process runs smoothly and efficiently before scaling up for peak.
In parallel with deploying your automation "off-peak" to establish it, you can focus on these key automation factors to get ready for peak:
Processing times: a key measure of automation effectiveness is how quickly a transaction is handled end to end, as well as the overall processing time for the batch of transactions being handled. During normal processing periods, the automation will be scheduled to run at a certain time, interleaving with other processes. At peak, however, it is critical to estimate with some contingency. e.g. How long the additional volume will take to process and will it compromise other processes. The automation schedule must be reviewed to develop a peak processing schedule, focussing on agreed priorities
Capacity: the processing capacity of your automation framework needs to be reviewed with the following questions:
What processing capacity is available?
How much additional capacity could be required, looking at the average and range of volumes?
How does this range of volume translate into automation minutes?
How does this map against available capacity?
How will additional capacity be provisioned?
Are there any other processes that will be affected by peak volumes? How are both to be accommodated? Will both be accommodated?
Contingency Planning: to avoid a daily spike affecting other processes from running, one has to decide whether to partition automation by having dedicated automation resources for critical processes and shared resources for those deemed to be (relatively) non-critical. Moreover, you have to ensure that expert support is at hand to resolve any processing issues, especially for overnight automations.
Enterprise RPA has extensive experience on how to plan and manage peak processes, with many ready housing-automation processes Download the infographic here