Case Study:
Reducing time spent on appointment scheduling with custom automation software
Miles IT works with an international financial services company to build a new scheduling system that automates hundreds of hours of appointment scheduling while factoring in various rule sets and restrictions.
THE CLIENT
Western Union
A leader in global payment services, the client focuses on helping people and businesses move money through digital, mobile, and retail channels. They offer international payment, risk management, and cash management solutions to over 550,000 agent locations around the world. To operate successfully, Western Union relies heavily on technology to deliver timely services and operate within the financial industry’s regulations.
THE CHALLENGE
Data entry, scheduling, and compliance checks take too much time and effort.
Every month, the client’s Operations group is tasked with creating a compliance review schedule for field staff. This involves manually entering information about each location’s rules, Compliance Officer experience, and distance traveled into an Excel spreadsheet. Between entering, reviewing, and finalizing the data, this process takes two weeks out of every month to complete.
As the number of client locations and Compliance Officers grew, the time it took to manually create and manage the schedule became impractical.
THE SOLUTION
An improved appointment scheduling system for compliance reviews
After assessing Western Union’s processes and interviewing the intended system users, we created a custom, automated, cloud-based scheduling system that generates the best proposed schedule while factoring in agent locations, site location rules, and Compliance Officer availability and restrictions. The solution provides a base schedule within minutes that the client’s Operations team can present to Management for approval.
Administration
The administration portion of the system allows the Operations team to manage the master list of agents, subagents, locations, and Compliance Officers. From here, they can store basic information, custom rule sets, and restrictions for each location and Compliance Officer in a unique profile.
Rules & Restrictions
This module allows administrators to create, manage, and update global rules and restrictions to apply to individual locations and Compliance Officers. These rules and restrictions are factored into the scheduling algorithm to prevent appointment conflicts.
Schedule & Export
The Scheduling and Export features allow administrators to generate a proposed schedule while factoring in global rules and restrictions for locations and Compliance Officers. This eliminates the majority of manual data entry and allows the generated schedule to be exported in Excel format for use in other systems.
THE RESULTS
A faster scheduling process — from two weeks to five minutes!
Western Union can now schedule compliance reviews faster than ever. Their new system automates appointment planning with consideration to location rules and Compliance Officer availability and restrictions, removing that responsibility from the Operations team.
The system also provides real-time visibility on the progress of the reviews, what has been completed, and what is scheduled — something their old spreadsheet method couldn’t keep up with.
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