Intelligent Automation for Financial Management

Challenge

The U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) was found noncompliant in financial management for four consecutive years, with grant liability issues caused by problems, such as lack of relevant data, incomplete documentation, and misinformation. HUD needed to develop and implement solutions that would help them better gather and validate data, as well as streamline the grants management process.

Approach

Our team produced and implemented a Mission Action Plan, which included current and future state process flows and identified areas for improvement. We standardized training materials, reconciled grant data for consistency, automated the analysis of millions of records of HUD program disbursement data using robotic process automation (RPA) and open-source tools, and developed a standard operating procedure for further support.  

Impact

Guidehouse’s automation implementation support proved to be a key initiative of the overall financial process improvement and core business optimization services provided at HUD. We helped address the robotics program’s mission of reducing manual labor hours and increased productivity by automating over 30 financial business processes across the department. Each automation project implemented specific business process improvements unique to the process owner, providing customized solutions to multiple offices and stakeholders. With these custom improvement packages, Guidehouse was also able to remediate numerous audit findings for several stakeholders. 

Our work helped HUD get a handle on their current state grants management inefficiencies and areas for improvement. Additionally, our team created an intelligent automation solution that reduced processing time by 97%, from 2,100 hours in over six-and-a-half months to 65 hours in over three to four weeks. By the end of this engagement, the Guidehouse team will have saved HUD over 60,000 hours in a three-year period and deployed over 30 RPA bots, solidifying the case for widespread automation implementation.