What I learned at the RPA 2017 Conference in Sydney this week...

My employer EY was the proud premier sponsor of the Robotic Process Automation 2017 conference in Sydney over the last two days.   There was a great cross-sector turnout with Government, FMCG, Universities, Consumer Goods and Services, Airlines, Power and Utilities and Financial Institutions and Insurers all attending. It is clear that intelligent automation is going to be a major factor in operational excellence for years to come globally within Oceania and Globally .

The following are my personal takeaways (these represent my personal perspectives and not EY’s) from the two days I spent listening, meeting delegates participating and leading conference sessions:

Globally we can consider Robotic Process Automation moving towards the post-early adoption phase with some major organisations across Utilities, Healthcare, Telecom’s and Financial Services deploying hundreds or in some case thousands of robots to augment their work-force.  In this context some of the key challenges facing global organisations as outlined by Frank Casale (founder of the Institute for Robotic Process Automation) include:

-         People and internal politics often drive the pace of adoption and deployment of  automation programs

-         How to effectively scale robotics quickly and efficiently and ‘bake automation’ into their business DNA?

-         Benefits can be significant, but robotics alone may not deliver it all.  E.g. Frank mentioned examples where robotics alone can drive savings in the region of ~30%, but when coupled with as part of a wider Digital Operations and Lean programs savings have been observed up to 70% - with greater process velocity and completion accuracy driving revenue, cost, customer and employee experience benefits

-         Commercial models are emerging and evolving – indeed there is some variance on how to pay for robotic capability across the vendor set e.g. per bot, per user, scaling licenceses for peak load volumes etc. We expect this evolution to continue. Frank's key point in this context was the ‘the buyer makes the rules’!

In Oceania I think we’re very much still in early adoption stage – whilst there have been some notable scaled examples of robotic enabled automation at major telecoms businesses and some of the major banking and insurance institutions it is clear that the majority of Australian and New Zealand private and government sectors organisations are getting their heads around the potential and capabilities that robotic process automation will bring to their business. We’re at early stages in the journey but consensus from the various panel speakers was that this will become part of the ‘business as usual’ automation toolkit within 5 years in almost every sector.

Indeed it was notable that not one of the speakers or participants professed to be an expert, or to have the answers, or in many cases a scaled ‘solution’. Instead the emphasis was upon ‘test and learn’, ‘start small, learn fast’ and the importance of beginning to think about the most effective ways to govern and scale deployments.

Its about wider Digital Operations, not just RPA..

Despite the hype and noise, RPA is just one toolset. Value is ultimately maximised when its considered in the frame of process optimisation (e.g. through lean six sigma), business process management, and appropriate use of enabling technology such as e-forms and OCR. This will extend overtime to greater adoption of machine learning and cognitive computing to augment rules based robots.  Many of the organisations present highlighted the importance of optimising processes (often using lean techniques) before automating, and refining them once automated. 

Its not just about FTE capacity release… service extension/improvement and risk mitigation are equally if not more important

The easiest RPA business case to write is based upon FTE release to make the case for RPA. We’re seeing organisations taking a wider view, exploring the service, revenue and employee satisfaction opportunities that can and will be addressed with RPA. 

One part really resonated for me, namely when one of the conference speakers talked about differing ways to assess and prioritise RPA opportunities. They highlighted that the classic process scan approach (looking for cost efficiencies or areas where humans act like robots across back/middle office processes) leads to certain outcomes. They highlighted that this could be augmented by looking across customer pathways ‘front to back across an organisation’. Doing this may lead to alternative automation priorities and decisions being made to improve a customer’s journey and satisfaction. This is consistent with my personal hypothesis that most organisations may actually get more benefit from RPA through automating core operational and enhanced customer service processes as opposed to purely focusing on back office automation. 

Who owns robots in the organisation?                   

The answer is clearly varied! with a variety of different functional, operations or business service leaders possible.  Some of the speakers covered the merits of decentralised, centralised and federated automation / digital operations centres of excellence – with some speakers highlighting their choice of the federated model. But a couple of insights I found relevant to the overall question were the following:

-         One major Australian business has decided that the HR function will oversee the virtual or digital (robot) workforce. This is because they felt that going forward HR has a major role to play in workforce planning. I personally haven’t come across this model with other clients yet, but given many in the market talking about the virtual and human workforce ‘co-existing’ and factoring into the same strategic workforce plans I thought it was inspired. And they also gave their robots human names…

-         The same organisation also highlighted that each robot has a robot owner responsible for its performance, efficiency and effectiveness. I was taken with the clarity this brings to roles and responsibilities in an organisation – in the same way that clear process ownership does.

People engagement and Change Management are crucial to effective automation programs:

Effectively leading and managing change for organisations where robotics could result in fewer jobs will be critical.  Whilst this is true for all change management and transformation programs, ‘automation anxiety’ and the sheer speed of automation available (think processes implemented from scoping to go live within 8 weeks) make early consideration and consistent messaging essential.   Change management in organisations that are growing and using robotics to help the organisation scale without bloating headcount may be slightly easier, but clear messaging and visioning remain essential to success. 

One of my quotes of the day was from yesterday, and is to a degree interlinked with this topic. “RPA and automation has the capability to remove human effort from time consuming tasks and enable people to focus upon ‘mind consuming’ activities”.

Its still clear from the discussion and debate at the conference that the wider societal impacts of this 4th industrial resolution (which RPA is part of) could be significant - particularly at a micro level within a certain town, sector or work-team.  The conference didn’t come up with all the answers… but clearly this is going to discussed and debated time and time again.

Governance and Risk Management should be thought and in place throughout your automation journey:

Regardless of scale, effective governance of automation is critical. Indeed it was interesting to hear one of the RPA vendors in the room highlight that their customer who has the most evolved governance model had a relatively small robot fleet vis-a-vis their other customers.  Governance has many roles, not least ensure risks are managed (as part of the classic three lines of defence risk management model), the right processes are automated in the right way using the right tools, change control and testing are appropriate to what you are trying to achieve and ultimately ensuring that targeted benefits are delivered etc.  

Should organisations ‘go it alone’ in automating or leverage existing BPO relationships or external expertise

[Note I clearly work as a BPO advisor and RPA implementation advisor – I’ve tried to be true to the debate/discussion yesterday as possible and present an unbiased view].

The panel of which I was part of debated this to a degree.  We all agreed that having in-house automation oversight, some configuration capability and process and robot ownership was critical. However, many of the speakers during that session and the wider conference talked about the benefits of utilising external expertise to ensure their team a) learned automation lessons from previous implementations, and b) helped them scale automation quickly. 

Another point being made was simply just the access to talented data and computer science graduates in Australia versus China and India. In a world where automation talent is prized this may be an important factor.

We also talked about the impact that automation is having on existing and new BPO deals – with experiences in the market highlighting the impact that automation is having on BPO’s and the commercial balances of deals moving forward. I’m personally seeing more effort placed into up front ‘solutioning’ with vendors, to ensure automation opportunities are ‘on the table’ to bid against pre-contract and an increasing trend away from historic FTE pricing models to outcome or value based models. For a number of reasons I personally feel that BPO buyers have to drive and continue to drive the process optimisation agenda, even when they have engaged a BPO partner. In many cases we are seeing organisations build automation capability within their own Centre of Excellence to ensure it can be deployed across end-to-end and core processes that haven’t been exposed to BPO support. 

Other miscellaneous points that I found interesting, and made me think!  

‘You don’t buy automation, you create it!’…

‘Organisations that have successfully scaled RPA have had strong executive leadership buy-in’

‘Automation anxiety’ as a concept resonated with the conference participants. Indeed a lot of the discussion was around whether thinking about ‘robots’ was actually a good thing – how you talk about automation and the toolkit matters in managing the message and exciting passion for operational excellence within the organisation. In many cases the term virtual or digital workers seems more appropriate.

‘True Digital Organisations combine Digital Customer Experiences and Digital Operational Experiences’ - clearly a role for a wide range of digital applications across end-to-end value chains and integration of differing digital offerings.  I'm especially excited about the prospects of using robots plus machine learning and various forms of AI over the coming years.

“RPA is a toolset that helps us as an organisation think about how we make the most of our non-utilised talent!”

In Conclusion

All-in-all it was a great two days and I learned a lot from clients, vendors and other global experts. It remains a fast moving area where we are all striving to learn and deploy rapidly.  Please reach out to me if you’d like to find out more or have an opinion on the above.