Transforming integration and reporting at Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Tourism

Having set out to overcome challenges associated with the Government’s new national financial platform, the Saudi Ministry of Tourism’s automation pilot program has far surpassed its initial expectations. Now, with automation’s transformative power proven, the Ministry is readying itself for an enterprise-wide automation project.

Automation is a powerful problem solver, as Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Tourism discovered after deploying its first software robot in late 2020. In just one year, automation has revolutionized integration and reporting processes within the Ministry, achieving time savings of at least 95% in every automated process and an increase in accuracy to 99% across these tasks.

“We set out with one aim for automation: solve the integration and reporting challenges associated with a new national procurement platform. Now, we consider this to have just been the beginning of our automation journey —a pilot program that has proven the difference automation can make to the Ministry”, Hind Alkathiri, Enterprise Solutions Director, Ministry of Tourism, explains.

With success firmly under its belt, the Ministry is exploring where to take the power of automation next, with a strategic enterprise-wide initiative in its sights.

Finding the right solution

In 2018, the Ministry of Tourism began to manage its budgets, contracts, payments, and tenders through a new government platform. This required information to be inputted both into the new platform as well as the Ministry’s existing internal ERP system.

We witnessed the emergence of a huge double effort. Financial and procurement transactions had to be inputted twice, occupying huge proportions of employee time and becoming a seemingly endless task. Due to the nature of the undertaking, inevitably some information slipped through the net and several internal processes were starting to suffer.

Hind Alkathiri • Enterprise Solutions Director, Ministry of Tourism

It was evident that change was needed. When searching for a solution, a proof of concept identified robotic process automation (RPA) as the clear frontrunner. After considering the financial and technical offers of several RPA providers, the Ministry of Tourism began using UiPath software robots to expedite integration and reporting from these systems in 2020.

One of the first use cases involved automating the process of consolidating contract data across the platforms. Before automation, this required an employee to check each of the 3,000 existing contracts on the government system and update the internal ERP system manually. This was occupying 30 minutes per contract of employee time—a hugely time-consuming task when you consider volume.

A software robot now logs into the government platform daily, reads all of the contracts, automatically filters out closed contracts, and updates the internal ERP system with the required information. As a result, there’s been a 95% decrease in time spent on the task, reducing the time per contract to just 40 seconds, and an increase in accuracy to 99%.

To further improve the processes associated with the new platform, software robots were also deployed to assist with Vision Realization Office (VRO) reports, finance reports, procurements tender reports, and the procurement tender update process, all of which saw similarly remarkable results

Overcoming employee resistance

“When we first introduced the concept of automation to employees, there was certainly some resistance. People were worried about losing their jobs. However, the success of these initial use cases has proven to employees that software robots are only here to better their working lives, and now many remark that they couldn’t live without RPA,” Alkathiri comments.

The popularity of automation has resulted in several business users and IT professionals embarking on formal training with the UiPath Academy.

Our advice to any business looking to interact with automation is to onboard as many people as you can. Give them a good idea about what automation is and then if they want to learn more, teach them how to use the technology. We hope that we can take this a step further over the next year to empower citizen development within our departments.

Hind Alkathiri • Enterprise Solutions Director, Ministry of Tourism

Within the wider employee base, calls for further automation are now being made. This has included an ask to streamline the process for requesting legal advice.

Before automation, advice could be requested through several channels including email and via a portal. Now, a software robot works to collects these requests into one channel, extracting the necessary information, such as exactly who is requesting the advice, and presenting it to the legal team in an easily accessible format. This automation has reduced the time taken to process requests from one day to just five minutes, empowering the legal team to easily respond to those that need them the most.

“Departments are now continuously asking us to explore new use cases or are enquiring about when the next project might start. We are looking forward to expanding further into these functions in the upcoming stage of our journey,” Alkathiri concludes.

Pivoting from pilot to automation project

With the pilot automations running with continued success, the Ministry of Tourism is looking to launch its next automation project by March 2022. Ahead of the new project, Alkathiri and her team plan to act on the lessons they learned during the first year of automation.

The first step is to conduct a full process exploration exercise to ensure automation is an enterprise-wide effort that will benefit many stakeholders and embrace more complex processes as needed.

When we first encountered the technology, our problem-solving mindset didn’t denote a need for a full process audit. By considering the wider picture, we now want to utilize process mining technologies and the expertise of our employees, UiPath, and our implementation partner to discover exactly which use cases could benefit most from automation.

Hind Alkathiri • Enterprise Solutions Director, Ministry of Tourism

Discovering how complementary technologies such as UiPath Document Understanding and artificial intelligence (AI) could be integrated into software robots to improve hard-to-reach processes is due to become a key component of the upcoming project. Furthermore, to consolidate the effort and continue to bring new employees on the journey, a Centre of Excellence will be established to house and push the project forward.

While the Ministry of Tourism’s automation efforts began as a reactionary problem solver that quickly delivered remarkable results, it's clear that this is only the start of an exciting journey. By considering automation a strategic tool that can bolster the efforts of the Ministry as a whole, it has the power to free up employee time to focus on the bigger picture task: advancing the tourism efforts of a Kingdom.