How the New South Wales Government Makes Unstructured Data Useable with Intelligent Automation

Logos of NSW Government and FlowBuilders

This is Part Three of our series with FlowBuilders, a Workato partner based in Australia. You can also read Part One on intelligently routing citizen complaints and Part Two on speeding up the distribution of drought aid.

New South Wales (NSW) is Australia’s largest state and home to more than 7.9 million people with the city of Sydney as its capital. The NSW state government is made up of several different departments and agencies that carry out the activities of government. 

One of Workato’s Australian partners, FlowBuilders, helps these departments and agencies make Salesforce-based processes faster and less labor-intensive. When an agency was facing the prospect of manual data entry for business cards, they turned to FlowBuilders for automation assistance. 

Apps

Challenges

Maintaining strategic relationships with investors required too much manual data entry.

Impact

  • Key contact information is automatically added to Salesforce with no errors
  • Agency employees can focus on building quality relationships with potential investors instead of manual data entry

Keeping Track of Contacts and the Choice Between Manual Work or Dirty Salesforce Data

“This agency’s role is to bring investors into New South Wales,” Robi George, FlowBuilder’s co-founder and Director of Consulting notes. “As you can imagine, that involves a lot of networking at conferences and other industry events.”

During these events, staff collected a large number of business cards. To follow up with new connections efficiently, they had to take the information on those cards and manually input the data into Salesforce, to create a new lead for each person.

“There are many tools on the market that can do this without manual effort,” George explains. “But the issue here is the need to abide by the rules of Salesforce—and its specific conventions within the agency’s governance framework.”

This means ensuring that mandatory fields are filled out and that certain logic is applied to the data. The agency wanted to be able to do this without having to manage the deployment of new apps across a large number of staff devices. Instead, they preferred a centralized cloud solution.

“Using Workato, FlowBuilders built an automated workflow that began with staff snapping a picture of each new business card,” George says.

“They then email it to a dedicated inbox. Workato automatically picks up that email, grabs the photo, and puts it through an OCR (optical character recognition) engine called Abbyy to grab the data from the card in the photo.”

From there, Workato creates a lead in Salesforce and perfectly fills out those fields according to Salesforce customizations, using the email address of the sender to look up properties of that user in Salesforce. Workato also uploads a copy of the image to Google Drive and adds the folder link to the Salesforce lead for future reference. 

A workflow that's run by Workato and that works across apps like Abbyy, Salesforce, and Google Drive.

With this Workato workflow in place, staff no longer need to manually input and correct lead data individually after events, and can instead focus on other aspects of their work.

According to George, this use case exemplifies his favorite aspect of Workato:

“The nice thing about the Workato platform is that it’s really only limited by your own imagination!”

Using Workato, FlowBuilders orchestrated multiple innovative workflows across systems used by NSW Government agencies that are designed to reduce errors (which led to delays) and eliminate tedious manual work.

For the NSW Government, this means enhanced data accuracy, response speed and agility when it comes to serving the people of NSW!

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