Cineplex Company is a leading media and entertainment company that welcomes millions of guests through its 170+ cinemas and entertainment venues. Cineplex operates in three main sectors: Film Entertainment and Content, Amusement and Leisure, and Media. In this story, you’ll learn how Cineplex has begun to digitally transform their business using Power Automate, beginning from one department to becoming an enterprise-wide initiative, achieving:
Actuals savings of over 2,600 hours of manual work from 7 automations in production over a 4-month period (over 8,000 hours of annualized savings)
40+ automation opportunities identified and under development with an additional 7,000 hours of potential time savings
Increased process efficiency by 92%
Meet the Cineplex team
Bo Wang is the Vice President of Tax & Treasury in the Treasury department at Cineplex. As a CPA and CFA, he has worked in finance related roles throughout his career but has always leveraged technology to be more effective. As an early adopter of Power Automate RPA, he self-taught himself the tool and was able to quickly build flows that achieved time savings for his team, epitomizing the power and ease of use that Power Automate RPA provides. Since then, Bo has led the push for widespread adoption of Power Automate across the entire organization through the creation of the Automation Center of Excellence while transforming the Treasury department to meet the needs of tomorrow through automating processes, embracing new technology, and upskilling their team members.
Karwan Abdulkhalegh is a Treasury Manager at Cineplex. He has held several Treasury positions at the company over the course of 6 years. As a CPA his experience and educational background has always been focused on Accounting & Finance up until he was introduced to a virtual beginner coding course about 2 years ago. This was the first real exposure he had to IT. He was then introduced to Power Automate for desktop. This was the first time he had any interaction with an RPA platform, and building off of the exposure from the beginner coding course he was able to quickly start using the available features to automate repetitive and mundane tasks. The more success he had automating different processes, the more he was interested in learning additional skills, utilizing any resource he could to automate more difficult processes.
Cineplex’s journey adopting Power Automate
Like many other businesses, Cineplex was significantly impacted as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, experiencing widespread government mandated closures over the course of two years. That said, the company used that time as also an opportunity to find ways to simplify processes and look for ways to become more efficient for when it reopened. It was during this time that Bo discovered Microsoft’s Robotic Process Automation (RPA) via Power Automate desktop flows and began to explore its capabilities. He started with basic flows that grabbed information from a website and copied it into Excel, but with each use case, he quickly realized the potential value and looked at introducing it to his team.
He paired up team members and had each pair pick an actual manual process in their role to automate. Weekly cadences were then set up to work with each pair to provide guidance on how to use Power Automate Desktop to replace manual steps and assist with any blockers and issues. With each passing week as they started seeing the automation steps they built running without errors and making tangible progress, the enthusiasm and engagement picked up dramatically as the team could see the value and how it could be applied to other processes. They found that people who were more advanced users of Excel took only 2-3 weeks to ramp up and build their own automations, and even with those who did not have any coding exposure could still pick up and build automations within 1-2 months with the appropriate training.
Having seen the benefits associated with incorporating Power Automate and RPA for his own team, Bo wanted to leverage this on a larger scale, so he reached out to Nasir Khan and his team from the Digital & Technology (D&T) department to collaborate and bring the tool to the broader organization.
“We started exploring Power Automate for desktop in the early stages when it was first released and as our team started to use it more, we immediately saw the value as we could rapidly build, test and deploy flows. The key that isn’t talked about enough is the ease at which people can pick up and start building automations with its visual UI experience, while still being powerful enough to handle complex use cases as our users became more experienced.”
– Bo Wang, Vice President of Taxation & Treasury, Cineplex
After the Treasury team engaged with the D&T team, Cineplex started exploring the various RPA vendors by going through a proof of concept (POC) and undertaking the software selection process. After seeing the alternatives in the market, and a thorough procurement evaluation, they decided to go forward with Power Automate. The reason beyond the fact that Cineplex was already using another feature of Power Automate—cloud flows—and Power Automate being the most cost-effective, was how easy it was for non-IT professionals like the finance team to just pick up and start automating while still delivering robust functionality using advanced features such as unattended bots.
“Honestly, my team was biased towards other RPA vendors that had already been on the market, as they had done a lot of work in previous experiences with them. However, we were surprised at where Microsoft fit into the equation. We did not realize how mature that RPA solution was already – especially around unattended RPA bots. It was even better than the other solutions. It was surprising how Power Automate could stack up against two main competitors defined by Gartner.”
– Nasir Khan, Vice President, Enterprise Technology, Cineplex
Cineplex has a philosophy of “The Guest is Why” which guides their actions and decisions to ensure that the guest experience is at the forefront of their decisions and actions. With the digital transformation that is taking place through automation, the entire organization, including the Treasury and Finance functions could now improve and enhance the guest experience by automating manual processes like the ones discussed below.
Let’s take a deeper look at how Cineplex addressed some of their business challenges using Power Automate RPA.
Business scenario and challenge – gift card activation
One of the first business processes that Cineplex attempted as part of their POC was automating the activation of physical gift card orders purchased online. Cineplex sells physical gift cards through their online store that people can use at Cineplex locations across the country.
Behind the scenes, gift card activations were a manual process. Gift card orders are managed through the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system, but loading and activating the gift card was a separate system. Because of this missing integration, each morning the fulfilment team would go into the CRM system to compile the list of gift card orders that were ready to be shipped and activated. Then they would log in to another 3rd-party system to manually enter the serial number and the amount to activate on the gift card before shipment.
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