China Overseas Land & Investment’s experience in digital transformation

The trend of digital transformation has spread to various industries. Real estate, as an industry that affects people's happy lives, has also begun to explore digital transformation. By optimizing management models, improving work efficiency, optimizing work processes, and upgrading system platforms, overall changes and innovations can be accelerated, thereby enhancing competitiveness.

As a pioneer and trendsetter in the real estate industry in mainland China, China Overseas Land & Investment (China Overseas Enterprise Development Group) is a forerunner in this transformation. Through in-depth research, the company discovered the pain points of its internal business employees. After thorough investigation and research, it chose UiPath RPA to quickly optimize workflows, accelerate internal business optimization, and lay the foundation for the digital transformation of the real estate industry.

Dispelling the fog and facing the essential problems.
Financial management itself is a complex and repetitive task. There are a lot of repetitive and tedious basic tasks, which take up a lot of working time. At the same time, the work method is mainly manual operation, which has low work efficiency and data is prone to errors.

For most real estate companies, there are many business systems within the company, and data interfaces need to be developed between the systems. At the same time, data also needs to be pulled between external systems and offline materials. China Overseas Land & Investment also has this problem. The manual work of sorting bank statements, printing bank receipts, and managing fund accounts is heavy, with low work efficiency, which is not conducive to the company's development and transformation.

Therefore, China Overseas Land & Investment investigated major RPA companies at home and abroad, and considered all aspects of their product technology, process development, service tracking, etc. In the end, China Overseas Land & Investment chose the UiPath RPA solution. UiPath RPA has rich products, a complete platform, and a simple configuration process, which can meet China Overseas Land & Investment's business needs and RPA construction ideas.

Efficient deployment and rapid management upgrade.
In early 2020, after conducting an RPA pilot, China Overseas Land & Investment quickly deployed 15 RPA robots, which were mainly used in bank statement sorting, middle-office accounts receivable, contract preparation and contract entry, asset matching and claiming, asset depreciation and amortization, bank receipt downloading, personnel change authority management and other scenarios.

Among them, bank flow sorting and bank receipt downloading are the two main application scenarios. Specifically, there are nearly 2,000 bank accounts in nearly 40 regional companies of China Overseas Real Estate. In addition to some of them that have achieved direct bank-enterprise connection, there are also a large number of non-directly connected accounts. At the same time, based on the needs of account and fund management, it is planned to connect all bank accounts online. At present, online connection with more than 50 login modes of about 19 banks including Bank of China, China Merchants Bank, Industrial and Commercial Bank of China, and Agricultural Bank of China has been realized. Specifically speaking of the bank flow sorting process, the RPA robot automatically logs in to major banks to download bank flow for the headquarters and various regional companies, automatically sorts according to the data format requirements, automatically matches into the financial middle office flow import template, and then imports it into the middle office system; in the download of bank receipts, it can also automatically log in to major banks to complete the download and archive for reference.

UiPath RPA mainly empowers China Overseas Land & Investment in five aspects:

• Optimize working methods: assign repetitive and regular basic work to RPA robots; employees perform advanced management work;

• Optimize workflow: Through RPA robots, reengineer workflows and improve standardization and automation levels;

• Improve work efficiency: Compared with manual processing speed, robot processing efficiency is increased exponentially;

• Improve data quality: The robot effectively ensures 100% data integrity and accuracy;

• Improve data timeliness: Online banking accounts in all regions across the country are connected, making it convenient to obtain data at any time, improving data timeliness and reducing communication costs.

According to specific data, UiPath RPA helps China Overseas Land & Investment save an average of 8,000 man-days per year. This not only saves a lot of company costs, but also helps the company quickly achieve management upgrades and efficient resource collaboration.

Looking to the future, realizing more possibilities
Wu Kai, director of China Overseas Technology, said: "With the help of new intelligent technologies such as RPA, the real estate industry is ushering in new opportunities for digital transformation. China Overseas Real Estate will continue to improve the management mechanism of the RPA Center of Excellence, cultivate corporate automation culture and capabilities, and combine the product capabilities of the UiPath platform to optimize business processes and improve business efficiency, thereby accelerating its own digital transformation."

Looking back, the application of RPA technology is an important exploration for China Overseas Land & Investment to carry out strategic transformation. Looking forward, China Overseas Land & Investment will expand its RPA team and will not only apply RPA technology in financial management, but also explore the application of RPA in various business lines of real estate. UiPath will also use RPA technology to help the real estate industry achieve digital transformation and enhance the core competitiveness of real estate companies.