CASE STUDY
Flobotics x eSky: luggage policy monitoring bot with Robocorp
Flobotics is an RPA development and consulting company. Their mission is to help companies across different industries automate and speed up their mundane processes, reduce operational costs, and unleash the productivity of their employees.
Flobotics provide 360-degree process automation services: from process discovery and audit, designing PoCs, and building single-process automations to full-on multi-departmental RPA bot development, implementation, and infrastructure setup.
The Client: eSky
eSky is a traveltech marketplace operating in over 50 countries and a market leader in Central and Eastern Europe. Its wide range of products consisting of flights, accommodation, city breaks, and holidays in the form of flight+hotel packages, as well as ancillary products such as insurance, car rental, airport transfers, and attractions create a comprehensive one-stop-shop in the travel and leisure category.
THE CHALLENGE
Monitoring policy changes manually, too many human mistakes
eSky monitors hundreds of various airlines' websites in real-time, looking for changes in ticket pricing or customer policies and aggregating these pieces of information on their platform. While it is quite easy to track the prices of tickets, the client had a problem with detecting changes in the luggage policy, which are often hidden on the sites, not easy to find and updated unexpectedly (especially during the night).
Not having up-to-date data on the website was leading to passing outdated information to the client which resulted in a bad customer experience, a growing number of complaints and, in some cases, compensations to misled clients.
Until now, eSky employees were monitoring the policy changes manually. The process was too time-consuming to perform daily, and the work itself was extremely mundane and prone to human mistakes (imagine: luggage policies changes rarely, so in most cases, there is no difference, and sometimes they are almost impossible to notice, e.g. changing the size of hand luggage from 45x35x20 to 45x30x20).
"Choosing the Robocorp platform allowed us to significantly limit the project's complexity. We have also managed to decrease the running costs of the deployment when compared to other public cloud solutions!"
BART TEODORCZUK
TECH LEAD, FLOBOTICS
THE SOLUTION
Flobotics developers knew that a well-written RPA bot will be perfect for solving the eSky's problem.
After collecting all the requirements from the Client during the joint workshop (2 developers from Flobotics and Process Owner from eSky) the RPA development has begun.
The idea was to create a bot that would visit all of the sites daily, seek potential changes in a matter of seconds and pass it over to the alert system.
The first draft of the bot has been written in Python, so Flobotics could quickly validate the feasibility of automation. Once they knew the automation could work, they introduced the final automation technology - Robocorp.
Thanks to the easiness of integrating Python code with the Robocorp platform, Flobotics was able to have the main automation flow described in human-readable Robocorp form, with the most complex elements (such as lining up the websites for scanning or data preprocessing) still coded in pure Python.
By combining these two technologies Flobotics managed to build a powerful and versatile bot that was simultaneously easy to run and manage even by non-technical team members.
By choosing Robocorp, they also managed to keep the project budget-friendly and made sure the eSky team wasn't exposed to additional, not necessary costs.
"I am thrilled with the collaboration so far and looking forward to expanding it in the future!"
EWA STOKOWSKA-ROGALA, PRODUCT IMPLEMENTATION SPECIALIST
eSky.com
THE OUTCOME
ROI acheived in only two months
In eight days of development, Flobotics created an RPA bot that would monitor the airlines' websites and look for luggage policy changes in real-time.
For easier surveillance, they have created a user-friendly dashboard for the client in Robocorp Control Room with historical logs and the visual charts showcasing the bot performance. Finally, they set up a system of e-mail alerts, so eSky employees can only be notified when an actual change needs to be addressed.
Prior to automation, the job (if delivered daily as it should be) would take the time of more than one full-time employee.
Within 32 hours of work, Flobotics was able to bring to life the solution that fully take over the process. Comparing the ongoing cost of employment with the cost of development, eSky achieved a full return on investment within two months.