How we helped

The Supporting People Team within Caerphilly County Borough Council has historically had a magnitude of information to go through manually. This has lead to double keying information as well as a plethora of repetitive and mundane tasks taking the team away from the vital work they do within the community.

We wanted to create a solution that freed up the team to work on the more fulfilling aspects of their roles, which is working with the most vulnerable people within the community. We identified two processes that would benefit from automation: invoice payments and case referrals.

The case referrals were manually read through by the team to check for things such as learning difficulties, debt, addiction or homelessness. The personal details would then be updated and checked in a different system. We programmed a virtual worker to complete this.

Invoices were received from over 40 suppliers, who provide care and/or assistance for residents of the Borough. Some invoices require up to 200 separate payments and this manual process was a mundane and time-consuming task. We automated this and it’s now carried out by a virtual worker, with a sense-check only for validation before payment.

Results

By removing the administration around case referrals, new cases are ready for the team to assess and action immediately without the need for searching & manually updating records. The virtual worker has also given the team over 60 hours back every week, meaning they can focus their time on supporting people within the community. The entry time per case referral has been reduced and given 10 minutes back to the team per referral, meaning that the team are able to support even more vulnerable people who need it.

By automating invoice payments we have reclaimed over 50 hours per week, allowing teams to be dedicated to support the most vulnerable people within our community, rather than spending time on data entry and administration