CHICAGO–Even if it’s just a few minutes, all those tickets opened to resolve IT-related issues inside a credit union really add up—often to thousands and thousands of hours.
As one CU here made clear, process automation can significantly reduce all the man hours and dollars CUs are investing.
At Vernon Hills, Ill.-based BCU, for example, its process automation saved 3,000 hours in 2016, 4,000 hours in 2017, 5,500 hours in 2018, and 2019 is on pace to see 7,000 hours saved—and all the result of tools just about every credit union already have.
“You don’t need to buy any special tools or equipment,” said Adam Dzyacky, senior cloud operations engineer with BCU, in remarks themed “Feeding Two Birds From One Feeder” and delivered to the joint annual meeting of the CUNA O&ME/Technology Council Conference. “All are out-of-the-box Microsoft solutions, and every single one of these you own.”
In one example somewhat unique to BCU, which has offices in Puerto Rico, no one in the CU’s IT department speaks Spanish. It has linked its ticketing tool into Microsoft Azure Translation. “We stand to reduce our resolution time by three days on every ticket opened,” he said.
Another example: Dzyacky created a customized system that creates tickets within the respective credit union’s service desk. It allows the credit union to do “some really interesting things,” he said.
Five Minutes Per Ticket
BCU found its analysts spend about five minutes of time classifying things for each ticket that comes in and in doing the related paper work. Now BCU processes its tickets through Azure Machine Learning. Every asset in its environment is in its ticketing warehouse, which was uploaded to Azure where it hit the “train button,” and Azure learns from that data set. The software offers a recommendation based on as little as an email subject line.
How much time savings does Azure Machine Learning provide? Even though each ticket may be three to five minutes long, at BCU Dzyacky said it averages 1,000 tickets per month. “Who would like 1,200 hours of their life back?” asked Dzyacky. “That’s 1,200 hours you could spend resolving and doing the work. Do you really want people working 1,200 hours doing paperwork? I don’t.”
Dzyacky urged his audience to take advantage of code available on Github, including code he has placed on the site for others to use. A show of hands found approximately half the room has an account with Github.
Leveraging CUFX
In addition to his own code, Dzyacky urged CUs to take advantage of the Credit Union Financial Exchange (CUFX) standard.
“Every single person in this room can go to the CUFX on Github to look at the CUFX standard and if you want to, you can change it. You have the power to make the standard a little bit better,” said Dzyacky. “The same things goes for machine translation and Azure if you want. You can edit the coding. Even if you have zero experience, you can get up to speed relatively quickly.”
Examples of Challenges
Dzyacky said BCU has started to explore how can we better partner with its partners and vendors as it seeks greater efficiencies in its processes.
“They will typically partner with you via email or via a portal you have to log into. That’s doable if you have only one partner. You have a lot of partners, and this model doesn’t scale well,” he said. “It works well for partners and vendors, but the onus is on you to either be attached to your phone, sitting in front of your computer and at the ready if something breaks. It seems like a loss of productivity. If you have a vendor or are looking at a vendor who says this is how they integrate it’s worth it to be wary of them. It’s an uphill battle for you.”
The Good News
The good news, said Dzyacky: there is a way around that challenge.
“It all comes down to readying your IT department,” said Dzyacky, saying the resolution does not require any new coding.
- For a partner that emails about issues/changes: Take action on an email through PowerShell. “It’s fairly safe and it’s a tool you already have. It’s not really scalable, but there are some time savings.”
- For a partner that emails PDFs and other documents that you have to review: Convert the PDF to text via OCR/Cloud, perform X action based on results. “This is moderate to high risk, depending on the number of potential vendors involved.” This also applies to internal documents such as expense reports, where Azure solutions can read a document and then extract the data needed so double-entry isn’t required, he said. “Think of the value-add for your organization if you weren’t doing this kind of data entry,” Dzyacky said. “This works great—as long as it’s already digitized.”
- A partner that has a portal to log into to create tickets: Continuously poll a vendor’s site for issues, recommended Dzyacky. “This is low to moderate risk, and some vendors may not appreciate this.” Dzyacky said Windows Event Log on many vendors’ applications will update if a system has crashed at regular intervals. In those cases, it can be as simple as writing a script that instructed, “When a specific event is logged, fire up PowerShell scripts.” In one case Dzyacky used as an example, it required adding four lines of code to instruct on actions to be taken—including creating a ticket for the vendor--and an email to be sent to alert a BCU employee of a crash. In the case of one vendor, their system crashed 22 times in one night, meaning 22 tickets generated within their system. In short order, the vendor fixed the issue.