The 10 Step Roadmap to Scaling Automation Part1: Setting up success with stakeholder involvement – Economic Times

Author: Anil Bhasin, Managing Director and Vice President India and South Asia, UiPath

2020 was the year that brought sweeping changes to the way we live, work, and run businesses. In the circumstances created by the pandemic, it drove home the importance of digitization and automation to ensure smooth operations. We have had several customers significantly ramp up their adoption of automation tools across enterprise functions. They have noted transformative changes including greatly improved efficiency, back-office functions performed with minimal intervention, and advanced remote working facilities. Several organizations look forward to extending automation to other business operations and scaling it effectively.

Based on the experiences and success stories shared by our customers, we have created this two-part article to share certain best practices that we would recommend to organisations as they scale their automation journeys:

1. Paint an Inspiring Automation Vision: Defining a vision for the project can help set the tone for the automation roadmap. It helps the larger group of stakeholders, specially those not involved in the technical aspects, process the project value, and actively participate in the program and drive the mindset change. As Krishna Vemugunta of Wells Fargo puts it, Our next 12 months vision is around implementing composite capabilities and building maturity around automated process discovery and human in the loop, ultimately leading to hyper automation.

2. Develop a Robust Business Case: While automation is at the centre of board room discussions, convincing stakeholders on the need to invest in automation is often challenging. Ensuring that the investment is aligned with strategic priorities helps make quick and informed decisions. This can later, also help simplify the approval process to source budgets for expanding the program at an enterprise level.

One example of this was Cholamandalam MS General Insurance Company Ltd. The companys Sr VP & Head - IT, Digital and Operations, Anubhav Rajput, said, Our roadmap is around two tracks. The first track is to move from 2-3 department to other organizational functions where we are confident that ROI will be delivered. The second track is building capability of intelligent OCR with handwritten capabilities and exploring usability of low code in the CoE.

3. Get Sponsorship and Support from the Top: Sponsorship and support from the top management is critical. The C- Suite must be aligned with the road map and should be able to support the vision. Continuous updates and involvement at this level helps instil confidence in the program and keep it on track.

This was also the experience of Sumit Srivastav, Partner and Intelligent Automation leader, PwC India, Once our intelligent automation technology solutions were implemented, our teams have become more tech savvy. This has also come with the encouragement, support, and investment in skilling from our leadership. Our operations have become more efficient, and our ecosystem has become more resilient.

4. Involve Stakeholders from the Beginning: An automation program requires a good understanding of the process involved. It requires continuous involvement of process owners as well as the IT support team to ensure seamless structuring. Like Bobby Jutley, Digital CoE, HP Inc., says, This is an interesting debate that always comes up about: Do we bring IT along? Does IT drive automation or is it business? We decided to have a clearly aligned partnership with IT forming a two-in-a-box approach.

The organisation must also enlist the support of key stakeholders including functional or department heads, process owners, the cybersecurity team, the compliance team, etc. It is especially critical that stakeholders who will be affected by automation are identified and their roles and responsibilities during and after the transition are well-defined.

5. Get Employee Buy-in: Given the impact of automation scaling on employees, change management must be made an integral part of the plan. People strategy must work in tandem with the organisations scaling strategy.

Most companies use a top-down approach to scale automation. They begin with setting up a Centre of Excellence and deploy the first automation to help their employees. The incorporation of employee feedback and ideas as well as external developer ideas gets a flywheel moving and helps accelerate the companys digital transformation process.

In part 2, we will learn more about the best practices that will help scale automation to successfully implement digital transformation.

Disclaimer: Content Produced by UiPath

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The 10 Step Roadmap to Scaling Automation Part1: Setting up success with stakeholder involvement - Economic Times