How WNS Document Verification Solution Leverages AWS to Power Auditor Telemetry

By Puneet Sachdev, Corporate Vice President – WNS Global Services
By Nilesh Parekh, Partner Solutions Architect – AWS

WNS Global Services

The socio-economic impact of the pandemic has been widespread and not a single industry has gone unscathed. However, one sector that has been changed forever is travel and leisure.

To ensure the safety of travelers and give them renewed confidence in flying, the air travel industry has introduced processes to obtain and validate COVID vaccination information before journey commencement at the origin airport. This is where the WNS Document Verification Solution can help streamline and accelerate document verification, significantly improving the passenger experience in the process.

In this post, we discuss how the WNS Document Verification Solution leverages Amazon Web Services (AWS) to capture auditor telemetry and increase auditor productivity.

WNS Global Services is an AWS Partner and global business process management (BPM) leader with a specialized focus on the travel and transportation industry. They are a NYSE listed company with 400+ clients and market capitalization of 3.7 billion. WNS has a presence in 14 countries and has over 50,000 employees.

Challenges

Validating a passenger’s COVID documentation is a manual and time-consuming process for airlines, with auditors having to switch between different standard operating procedures (SOPs) pages for guidance based on the passenger’s source country, destination, and nationality. Another challenge for auditors is the non-standard and disparate case management systems used by airlines.

• Different case management systems: Airlines use disparate case management systems for managing the documentation review workflow, which involve varying steps and classifications. This non-standardized and manual way of working makes it challenging to track auditors’ work due to different systems, process steps, and regulatory requirements.
• Different SOPs across countries: Auditors need to refer to various SOPs while validating. However, variance in SOPs considerably increases the average handle time (AHT) for each case.

Solution Overview

To address these challenges, WNS created a unique, non-intrusive solution to track auditors’ productivity and provide real-time assistance on SOPs. AHT is used as a metric to measure productivity and gauge the amount of time it takes for the auditor to handle one case/work item accurately.

A lower AHT results in less backlog, timely boarding clearance for passengers and, more importantly, lower cost for the airline. Implementing key metrics around AHT over a period of time also generates insights into continuous improvement through process changes and automation. This digital solution, powered by AWS, has the following key elements:

Part 1: Telemetry/Event Tracking

With different airlines using different case management systems, a non-intrusive way to keep track of cases being worked on by the auditor is required. The need for integration or changes in how cases are managed can be time-consuming and require additional cost and effort.

This might not be possible in many scenarios, as the airline may be using a third-party or a commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) product to manage the cases. Therefore, a method that enables tracking of key events without requiring any changes in the underlying application is preferred. The solution must also be highly available and fault-tolerant, with virtually zero impact on the auditor user experience (eliminating the need for additional training).

Part 2: Event Capture

COVID document verification needs to be performed by all airlines. Depending on the size of the airline and the number of passengers boarded, the verification desk may have anywhere between a few auditors to thousands. For this reason, the event capture functionality needs to be scalable to tens of thousands of events per hour, with the ability to handle large amounts of predictable and unpredictable load.

Part 3: Telemetry Analytics

As the data is collected, there is a need to generate reports and insights at set frequencies and send appropriate alerts as anomalies are detected. Typically, AHT trending is tracked by auditor, queue, case type, time, and location. Anomalies are highlighted in terms of outliers to supervisors who manage the verification process.

A sample illustration of the solution is shown in Figure 1 below:

Figure 1 – Data flow diagram.

The solution leverages AWS in the following manner:

Using an extension embedded in the Chrome browser enabled WNS to create a system that is non-intrusive and independent of the actual case management being used by the auditor. AWS serverless technologies enabled demand scalability in the architecture in a cost-efficient manner.

From a security standpoint, the setup is compliant with AWS Foundational Security Best Practices and Center for Internet Security (CIS) AWS Foundations Benchmark standards.

Results

The WNS Document Verification Solution enables airline auditors to eliminate manual tracking and drive the automated capturing of process time and metrics. In turn, this aids the timely processing of COVID-19 documentation, resulting in a superior travel experience for passengers.

In quantitative terms, the business benefits include:

• 40% increased productivity from day one of the solution going live.
• Successful handling of exponential growth in number of cases processed month on month, from under 200K in September 2021 to over 700K in March 2022.
• 100% accuracy of captured data due to complete and seamless automation in capturing of process metrics.
• Nominal operating costs as a result of serverless architecture. The solution is currently capturing and reporting on more than a million events each week. Being serverless, the cost amounts to USD 1 for every 100,000 events, which is unmatched by traditional solutions.

Conclusion

In this post, we explored how the WNS Document Verification Solution helps airlines airlines effectively and accurately capture, process, and manage passenger COVID-19 documentation for a seamless travel experience. We also examined how it helps in tracking auditor productivity and service level agreements (SLAs) without compromising the auditor experience.

Additionally, we learned how the solution leverages a Chrome browser extension and AWS serverless capabilities to capture auditor telemetry and perform analytics on the data to generate insights and alerts. The solution eliminates any manual tracking of cases to improve auditor productivity considerably.

For more details on how WNS is driving the digital recovery of travel and leisure, visit the website.

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WNS Global Services – AWS Partner Spotlight

WNS Global Services is an AWS Partner and global business process management (BPM) leader with a focus on the travel and transportation industry.

Contact WNS Global Services | Partner Overview