Rossum frees up to 70% of business managers' time at Cushman & Wakefield

Cushman & Wakefield (NYSE: CWK) is a leading global real estate services firm that delivers exceptional value for real estate occupiers and owners. In the United Kingdom, their Business Rates Management (BRM) Area provides a service to clients with large national real estate portfolios that includes management and payment of business rates payable to local councils.

The Challenge

The annual rates demanded documents that were predominantly paper-based, resulting in the C&W’s Ratings Team processing over 10,000 demands from 400 different Government Departments and Councils over a two-month period. The demands were opened, sorted, manually reviewed, compared to estimates in the Riverlake Rates Management system, and either rejected or approved and paid. Once processed, the paper demands were filed away, making them difficult to quickly retrieve  should queries arise later in the year.

The Solution

Partnering with OpenBox, Rossum’s solution engineering team provided consulting sessions to iron out the data capture workflow, identify the fields containing data that Cushman & Wakefield needed to capture, and confirm that the semi-structured documents were a good fit for Rossum’s Al engine. Platform setup simply required the team to configure it to capture data in fields defined during consultation.

Installment-related data was identified as an exception not natively supported by the Al engine. But platform’s extension environment allowed Rossum’s solution experts to develop a seamless plugin to handle these requirements and contained the necessary business rules to post-process the installment list and generates the required output data. That processed data was then presented for human validation within the platform.

Since Rossum’s cognitive data capture solution is training-based, there was no need for an expert-driven setup of data capture rules or templates for specific layouts. Once the solution was trained with the proper materials, Rossum then handled all subsequent steps of data accuracy verification, extraction model customization, and training. Rossum then built a Cushman & Wakefield-specific model deployment within the platform and the associated configuration. 

The Benefit

Once Rossum’s solution was implemented, Cushman & Wakefield’s system was up and running within a few short weeks. The impact was immediate: the Rates Management team was able to immediately access digitized files for client review, allowing them to be accessible within 20 minutes – a far cry from sifting through paper copies. Furthermore, managers are now only required to review demands with genuine issues (roughly 10%), ensuring the majority of the clerical corrections can be handled by the administrative team. 

“We chose Rossum’s platform for its user-friendly interface and flexibility, which enabled us to capture data from the unique layout of UK council rates demand documents.”

Justin Strydom, Director of Automation Services at Open Box