Freeing Your Team with Automation: An Auto Finance Proof of Concept

by Zoe Adams, Accounting ’23 

For the final internship project, we had the choice of partnering with a business to automate a repetitive process for them. Since my dad works for Citizens Bank, I inquired as to whether his team/department had any projects or processes that would be beneficial to automate.

At the time, they were working on a project that required them to enter numerous fake applications into RouteOne, a dealership software. The purpose of the project was to test the system. Entering the number of applications they would need to do so would be time-consuming and repetitive, the perfect job for automation.

After proposing the automation project to the team leader, and undergoing an approval process, the Auto Finance department took me on as an independent contractor. My dad supplied me with the Excel sheet of fake data they would use, and I set to work designing a bot in UiPath Studio to automate the process of transferring the Excel data to the application page.

My bot utilized various clicks and text-grabbing operations to both fill out and process each fake application. The resulting automation processed each application in approximately 2.5 minutes and continuously entered each row of the Excel into a new application. The bot not only processed information faster than a person, but while it worked through the Excel sheet, team members were able to work on other tasks.

The time saved as a result of the bot allowed the department to finish their project early. My father had also been trying to work automation into the department for some time, and my bot provided an example of the benefits of automating processes.