The first IBM Build-A-Bot Challenge brought out some great creativity and innovation from the IBM Automation Community. This article focuses on one of the winners, the team from Cedrus Digital that won the category “Best IBM RPA Solution to Improve A Workplace Problem.”

Anyone who has ever traveled on business understands the tedium of organizing, digitizing and uploading your receipts for reimbursement. If you travel often, as many people do at Cedrus Digital, a leading IBM Business Partner, it can often seem like a part time job.

When the team heard about the IBM Build-A-Bot Challenge in June, they saw a chance to show what they can do using IBM RPA in tandem with other elements of the IBM Cloud Pak for Business Automation.  A brief survey concluded that automating the expense reporting and receipt submission could be a winner.

It turns out that it was.

The five members of Cedrus Digital who participated – Justin Irazabal, David Kaufman, Paul Hofle, Maksim Chepel, and Nathaniel Watkins – pulled together a workstream and assigned tasks to each member. Juston Irazabal was the team member with the most experience with Robotic Process Automation, having learned Blue Prism. “I found IBM RPA to be easier to master than Blue Prism,” he recalls. “And you can do more with it.”

Maksim Chepel, one of the world’s foremost experts on IBM Datacap capture software, handled the intelligent capture component. “We needed the ability to capture, classify, and extract key data from expense documents,” he said. “And we knew that Datacap could handle it.”

 Other team members provided key contributions, including product management. They came up with a name for their creation, “ReceiptIA,” and built a professional demo video that walks the viewer through each step of their automation solution.

The winners recently sat down for a Q&A on how they created a winning solution. It’s a fascinating conversation. You can watch it here.