How To Make Robots A Part Of The Finance Family?

This article is co-written by Mark Smith and Anders Liu-Lindberg

Automation in the finance function is a given. It’s inevitable. It will come. Likely it will take away someone’s job. Likely it will have a negative emotional impact on the finance team despite the benefits it brings along. The question is how do we overcome all this and make robots a part of the finance family? This is particularly important when the robots span across multiple teams who might have different views on welcoming the robot. We’ll discuss this theme in a new mini-series on RPA (Robotics Process Automation). The series is a co-creation with Mark Smith who’s the Chief Accountant at Atlas Copco, Mark has over 15 years’ experience in the finance department with a strong footing in Shared Service environments. He's interested in technology and how it can drive the finance industry forward.

When change is coming what’s the best you can do? 

When there’s no way around the change that’s coming the best thing, you can do is to embrace it but it’s of course important to understand this change. Some people might be more receptible to it than others which means just because you had a few initial successes it doesn’t mean everyone will just accept it and embrace it. Let’s consider one scenario. 

One team has successfully rolled out a robot that now executes a part of a process. However, to gain scale it needs to cover the end to end (e2e) process which also comes with a few process redesigns. That means that other teams will have to follow the new process and abandon their own for the robot to be successful.

We all know that implementing best practices is hard let alone implementing a process that someone else forces upon you. So, in this case what can be done to successfully roll out the robot across the e2e process? 

• Participation – involving all relevant employees in the discussions and brainstorming sessions makes getting “buy in” to the changes much easier i.e. involve people from the beginning rather than when all design choices have been made.
• Deliver on promises – missing milestones in RPA implementation projects will make the change management process much tougher! Of course, if the robot doesn’t appear successful you’ll have a challenging time convincing anyone else that they should use it too.
• Keep It Simple – don’t over complicate meetings and presentations when introducing RPA to your staff. Be clear, concise and emphasize the benefits the audience can expect. RPA at the core is quite simple and if you communicate that it will also remove some of the irrational fears associated with RPA.
• Hyper care support – successful change management doesn’t end on implementation, there will be bugs and issues to solve. Make sure there are resources to help employees after changes have been delivered. The worst thing you can do is simply to let go at the end of implementation. The skeptics only need a small breakdown to tear the whole project apart. You need to be able to jump on every little issue that occurs to carry the changes all the way through.

The worst you can do is simply to ignore the emotional response that’s bound to come from an RPA implementation on an e2e process. Everyone goes through the change curve and just because you’re ahead on it doesn’t mean that everyone else will go through it at the same speed as you.

It’s time to welcome the robots 

Change IS coming as it always has been now just at a greater speed. You will get an emotional response to it and you will face challenges when trying to take the change to others who have not experienced it yet. However, by taking an inclusive approach where you listen to people’s concerns and make them a part of the process you’ll face much less resistance. You will then find that people will soon welcome the robots to the family and become excited about all the things they now have time to do. Isn’t that great? We would love to hear about your experiences with RPA so leave a comment or send us a message, so we can also learn from your examples. 

This is the first article in a mini-series about RPA and next week we’ll tackle the issue of RPA standardization. You can read previous articles about robotics and other stories about finance transformation below.

Blip. Blop. Accounting Robot. Are You Ready?

Are You Ready For Robotics Process Automation?

Have You Met Your Robot Accountant Yet?

Robots Are The Future Of Analytics

Your Robot Accountant Has A Name, It's Dixie

What Defines A Finance Master?

The CFOs Roadmap To Transforming Finance

How Finance People Can Be More Successful

The New Career Path For Finance Professionals

I also encourage you to take a tour of my past articles on finance transformation, finance business partnering and not least “Introducing The Finance Transformation Nine Box” which is really the starting point for the transformation. You should join our Finance Business Partner Forum which is part of the Business Partnering Institute's online community where we will continue to discuss this topic and you can click here to follow me on Twitter.

Anders Liu-Lindberg is a Senior Finance Business Partner at Maersk supporting our largest product and I have more than 10 years of experience working with Finance at Maersk both in Denmark and abroad. I am also the co-founder of the Business Partnering Institute and owner of the largest group dedicated to Finance Business Partnering on LinkedIn with close to 7,000 members. My main goal at Maersk is to show how to be successful with business partnering and drive value creation as a trusted partner. I am the co-author of the book “Create Value as a Finance Business Partner” and a long-time Finance Blogger with 26.000+ followers.