H&R Block combats extreme seasonal workflow fluctuations with SS&C Blue Prism digital workers on AWS
H&R Block's extreme tax-season seasonality required hiring, training, and releasing 60,000 temporary workers each year for critical back-office operations, a cycle described as heavy and inefficient that could not cost-effectively scale with an on-premise infrastructure.
How it works
Common implementation structure
How this type of workflow is generally built, generalized across documented cases — not tied to any one vendor's stack. Click any stage to read what happens there. Specific products that implement these stages appear in “Tools commonly seen” below.
Stage 1 · Tax season workload spike
Tax season demand causes H&R Block to scale its workforce to 5x to handle back-office operations.
Tools used
SS&C Blue PrismARIA CloudAWSINVOKE
Outcome
Digital workers achieved a 99.9% reduction in average handling time for lease renewals, saved over $100,000 in labor for the Income Tax Course, and eliminated a $500,000 annual outsourced accounting contract by automating over 75% of transactional processing.
What failed first
An initial on-premise deployment of digital workers managed by H&R Block's IT team on virtual machines created inconsistencies in how digital workers were onboarded, prompting a move to a fully managed cloud environment.