At more than 3.8 million square miles, Canada is the second largest country in the world by area. And, while it is relatively sparsely populated, managing official records for land and property transactions in a space that big is a mammoth undertaking. In 1991, Teranet was founded and operates the Electronic Registration System for the Province of Ontario and the Land Titles and Personal Property registries end-to-end for the Province of Manitoba. The company is wholly owned by the infrastructure arm of OMERS, a Canadian pension fund for public employees.
Sumon Banerjee is the Director of Operational Excellence and Intelligent Automation at Teranet. Banerjee landed at Teranet after a postgrad stint at Montreal’s McGill University and operational roles at PepsiCo, Maple Leaf Foods and several consulting positions where he was exposed to intelligent automation technology.
Banerjee notes that Teranet is one of the biggest electronic land registry services provider in the world. It’s two main Canadian customers, the Provinces of Ontario and Manitoba, generate millions of forms registering property transactions in their jurisdictions. Banerjee was hired in 2018 to implement process automation wherever he could to find efficiencies in the many manual processes involved in land registry services. He has worked with SS&C Blue Prism as one of Teranet’s technology partners, since the start.
Verification across the nation
As a consultant who worked with automation in the mid-to-late 2010s, Banerjee began his automation journey at Teranet using familiar technology—SS&C Blue Prism’s RPA solution. As time progressed, more functionality became available to him and other technologies came to bear. On one of his most recent projects, Banerjee describes some of the ways process automation technology has evolved to help Teranet find more efficiencies in its operations.
“When you buy a property there needs to be a transfer of the title,” he explains in an interview with Automation Today. “There needs to be a transfer of the property title. There needs to be a new title holder. And there are forms that accompany all of these steps. Until now, a human would have to verify the information coming in on the forms.”
Teranet has leveraged SS&C Blue Prism bots to automate that verification process in their Manitoba operations. And, according to Banerjee, the complementary technologies layered in the solution have made an enormous difference.
“For Teranet’s operation in Manitoba, a smart form that we automate will mainly consist of two parts. The form is a system-generated smart PDF that will contain structured information like the name of the buyer, the lender, etc. But another form will require the client to physically sign. A declaration confirming that all the information provided is true,” he says. “The signature is classic unstructured data that cannot be stored within a relational database. What is coming into the electronic system must be the same that is coming in the signature form.”
In the Manitoba operations, an RPA bot can easily read the form with the structured data, he notes, but the signature form—often a scanned PDF—needs a system with an optical character recognition (OCR) engine running behind it. Banerjee also has integrated an intelligent document processing (IDP) solution that adds another layer of functionality. With no consultant to lean on, however, he says the support he has received from SS&C Blue Prism has been vital to Teranet’s success.
Working through challenges
“When we started off with this project integrating the IDP solution within an SS&C Blue Prism environment versus where we are now, I did not have a playbook,” he remembers. “There was a lot riding on the project. If I couldn’t automate this process end-to-end then it would have been a waste of time and resources.”
And there were some early failures. Scans of the signature page were coming back skewed, which didn’t jive with the IDP template Banerjee and his team had developed.
“If it is even skewed by 100th of a millimeter, it won’t work,” he explains. “To the human eye, that form is the exact same template as any other form, but to the IDP software it’s another different version of the form now. Potentially I was looking at an infinite number of combinations of these form types. Because I didn’t have a playbook, I didn’t know better. We actually went that route and very quickly we realized that this is not going to happen.”
But Banerjee cites several factors as being instrumental in his ability to move past the problems and implement the integrated technology in a way that produced exceptional results for the automated process. First, the latitude he was given by Teranet’s executive leadership to fail, learn and improve was vital.
“Yes, there were safeguards,” he says. “Yes, there were expectations. But when things didn’t work immediately, there was no finger pointing. There was no fear that temporary failure was going to cost you. I can’t stress enough how important the support of leadership was.”
He also focused on a lean process development philosophy first championed in Japan called Kanban. He says that taught him to always look to eliminate waste from processes and live the mantra “stop starting start finishing.”
Finally, he has been able to lean on SS&C Blue Prism for support since he chose to go with the company as his automation technology provider six years ago—in fact, the company honored Banerjee and the Teranet automation team last Spring as the Americas All-Star in its Customer Excellence Awards 2023.
“One thing stood out about SS&C Blue Prism and it stands out, even today,” he says. “I work with multiple vendors supplying different platforms, and they definitely have been one that stands out in terms of their customer outreach and support.”
‘Huge win’
By relying on those advantages, Banerjee was able to deliver an end-to-end automated process that hit some very significant milestones. He reports Teranet has achieved a technical exception rate of less than five percent and a business exception rate of between seven and nine percent.
The automated process is able to handle 40 percent of the signed verification forms submitted for land and property transactions in Manitoba with minimal human intervention. Since its inception, Banerjee notes that SS&C Blue Prism automation has verified more than 25,000 in-scope documents which, on average, equates to about 5,000 equivalent worker hours.
“We have hit our exception targets and I would say more than 85 percent of the most complex documents are in scope now,” he says. “It’s a huge win.”
Banerjee says he always keeps the fact that Teranet is owned by a public pension fund in mind when he is searching for ways to make his company and the processes they perform more efficient.
“I don’t consider myself to be a cost center,” he says. “I would consider myself cost saving. It’s my responsibility to constantly look for operational excellence, to improve current processes from an efficiency standpoint, from a throughput standpoint, and to innovate. At the end of the day, we contribute to pensions for public servants of Ontario.” he notes. “Our profitability, which is directly tied to operational excellence, impacts our ability to help OMERS provide quality pensions to their members and I feel a lot of responsibility to them.”
