The past few years have seen belts being tightened across social housing which, in some cases, have meant a reduction in services, particularly when a funding stream has come to an end. How do you deliver a service with potentially high social impact with diminished or discontinued funds?
At Link, we wanted to augment our welfare, money and debt advice service with a device loan scheme, in the form of a Chromebook and a ‘mi-fi’ unit to tenants without access to a large-screen device or connectivity. We could provide the hardware and the National Databank would support their mobile data requirements, but how could something like this be administered with no additional staff resources? Who would keep track of which tenant had which Chromebook? Who would order the SIM cards for the mi-fi units? Who would fill out the loan agreement, and how would we know when the loan was up?
The answer was robotic process automation (RPA).
For those not acquainted with RPA, this is where a trigger (i.e. an email arriving, a file being created, the submission of a form) will activate a number of actions, such as report generation, data entry or transaction processing.
There are lots of RPA products available, with UI Path and Automation Anywhere among the leaders, but because we work in a Microsoft environment, we use Power Automate.
The important thing for us was that there should be no manual administration of the loan scheme. There would need to be a referral, and our housing officer would need to physically deliver the device but no-one should be tracking the loan; that should be fully automated.
This is how we achieved that goal.
First of all, we created two process maps, one for the loan going out and one for it coming back.
Once we understood what was needed, we could create the necessary structures to allow automation to manage the administration. This would use Microsoft Forms, SharePoint Lists, DocuSign and the in-built approval process within Power Automate.
A SharePoint List was created, allocating an asset number to each device (also replicated as a printed label on each laptop bag). Each entry in the list was given a ‘choice-pill’ status (available, in-use or retired), with all starting with the status of ‘available’. This list would capture the tenant’s name and contact details, the date of referral and the housing officer’s name.
Loan being made
The trigger for the loan going out was the referral, via the submission of a Microsoft Form. Power Automate then checked the SharePoint List for the first asset with an ‘available’ status. The tenant’s details were then inserted into the SharePoint List against that asset number, and the status changed to ‘in-use’.
An email was then sent to the housing officer with the asset number of the device going out on loan and the tenant’s details. An order was also made by email for a SIM card for the mi-fi unit.
Power Automate generated a Word version of the loan agreement and populated it with the tenant’s details and uploaded it to Docusign, which then took over the management of that aspect with the housing officer and tenant both electronically signing the agreement on-screen.
Once these were all in place, the housing officer then delivered that specific loan device to the tenant.
Loan coming back
The trigger for the loan coming back is the date of referral plus six months; a Power Automate Flow runs every morning which reads the referral dates captured in the SharePoint List.
If the six months has been reached, an approval process email is sent to the money and debt advice officer who made the original referral asking if they want the loan to be extended. This email contains a ‘yes/no’ button; if the ‘yes’ button is chosen (to extend the device loan), the date in the SharePoint List is amended to the present date (after six months, the automation will be triggered against this again) and a new SIM card with a further six months’ data is sent to the tenant’s address.
If the loan has come to an end and the ‘no’ button is pressed, an email is sent to the original housing officer to pick the device back up from the tenant and perform a data cleanse on the Chromebook.
An approval email is also sent to the housing officer asking if they have picked up the loan device. Once this is confirmed, the automation clears the customer’s data from the SharePoint List and changes the status against that asset number to ‘available’ again.
Down with admin
You can see from this that a service where its administration is key to its management can be put in place with no human interaction with any of the administrative duties.
Not only does this make it an attractive prospect for staff (who likes admin?) but it can also make the introduction of a new service, where the time and expertise of staff is better used elsewhere, a realistic prospect.
Craig Stephenson is the digital participation and innovation officer at Link Group.
