As their Automation capabilities evolve, many organizations with successful Intelligent Automation initiatives look to identify and capture further benefits by extending their Automation programs across the enterprise.
Implementing Automation at scale can present various challenges due to technical considerations such as the architecture of the target environment, managing the myriad of tools involved, support and maintenance for automation development and IT change management, among other issues.
During the webinar, guest speakers Daniel Kennedy, St. John of God’s Health Care and Abhinav Sarna, Edith Cowan University will share their practical experiences with Mohit Sharma, Mindfields about how organisations can better overcome the technical issues that can hinder the scale-up of complex Automation programs.
Join this webinar to gain new insights on:
The common technical pitfalls in scaling up an Automation program
Overcoming technical challenges
Lessons learnt
A case-study
Q & A
The Codex of Business Writing Software for Real-World Solutions 2.pptx
HOW TO OVERCOME TECHNICAL LIMITATIONS TO SCALE UP AUTOMATION
1. How To Overcome Technical
Limitations To Scale Up Automation
Webinar - 19th March 2020
Abhinav Sarna
Enterprise Performance Improvement
Manager,
Edith Cowan University HOSTED BY
Mohit Sharma,
Founder and Executive
Chairman,
Mindfields
Daniel Kennedy
Intelligent Automation Services
Manager
St. John of God Health Care
PRESENTED BY
2. SPEAKERS
Daniel Kennedy
Intelligent Automation Services Manager,
St. John of God Health Care
Daniel is a qualified Accountant, ACMA CGMA,
and Commercial Finance Professional, having
worked across all Finance functional areas to CFO,
and with non-Financial experience to General
Manager level in Sales, Operations, and
Programme Management.
Passionate about delivery of team objectives in
challenging and changing
environments. Currently, as an Intelligent
Automation Services Manager, he collaborates with
internal business leaders to develop intelligent
automation opportunities which improve process
quality, while reducing process costs for St John of
God Health Care Inc.
Abhinav Sarna
Enterprise Performance Improvement Manager,
Edith Cowan University
Abhinav is a management consultant, with experience
in large-scale business transformation, outsourcing,
ERP implementations and continuous improvement
across a wide range of industry settings and
geographies.
Abhinav’s expertise lies in bringing together solutions
that stitch business process and technology to deliver
sustainable value within an organisation; including
digital and automation solutions such as RPA.
In his current role at Edith Cowan University, he
manages a portfolio of enterprise wide projects to
improve processes by leveraging on a multitude of
platforms and methodologies.
Mohit Sharma
Founder and Executive Chairman,
Mindfields
Mohit has over 20 years of experience working
in Strategy, Corporate Finance, and Risk
Management Solutions for Deloitte, PwC, and
EY. He has authored and published one of the
first and most comprehensive research on
Robotics and Process Automation. He provides
advisory services to leading global financial
and non-financial organisations in US,
Australia, UK, and India on their journey for
Automation and Artificial Intelligence. Mohit
loves cricket and food, in that order.
3. Mindfields is a Robotics Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence (AI) advisory firm with offices in Sydney, Melbourne, and New York City. Founded in 2006,
we were the first movers in the RPA space in Australia.
We are a vendor agnostic firm and are able to help select and work on the appropriate tool that best suits our clients’ requirements. Our resources are cross trained
and certified in the major RPA tools.
Our vision is to ‘Grow for Tomorrow’ and we firmly believe that our growth is underpinned by our ability to realise positive outcomes for our clients.
We have been rated highly by both the Australian and global media. The Australian Financial Review has frequently recognised us as a thought leader in the RPA
space. Leading research firm HfS Research, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has quoted Mindfields as a leading pure play RPA advisory firm globally. We have
been ranked by Deloitte amongst the top 20 fastest growing Australian firms in the 2017 Asia Pacific Technology Fast 500TM. IDC has quoted us as one of the
implementation partners to most of the automation tools. World renowned research firm Gartner Research has also quoted Mindfields in its comprehensive ‘Market
guide for Robotic Process Automation’ report.
Gartner’s latest research report titled ‘Competitive Landscape: Consulting and System Integration Providers for Robotic Process Automation – August 2018’ profiles
us among the leading global Robotic Process Automation consulting and service providers.
HFS’ latest ranking on the Top 10 RPA Service Providers, has positioned Mindfields #2 on the Voice of Customer segment.
About Mindfields
4. Mindfields conducts a
process scan for
potential automation
candidates, shortlisting
processes in
consideration for
automation.
Identify potential
processes
As the automation
program ramps up,
we help you embed
the automation
assets as part of your
BAU whilst also
continually improving
the program.
Embed
The wider organisation
is encouraged to
actively participate in
the Automation
program thereby
enabling large-scale
adoption across the
whole business.
Scale
A select number of
process candidates are
selected to initiate the
automation program as
part of the Production
pilot.
Prioritise &
Select processes
The selected business
processes are designed
and developed by
leveraging the selected
automation tool.
Design & Develop
The automated processes
are implemented and
demonstrated to the
stakeholder groups to
showcase the capabilities
and benefits of
automation.
Implement Pilot
Our approach to scaling up Automation programs
5. Particulars Time
Webinar Context Setting and Speakers’ Introduction (Mohit Sharma) 5 minutes
Session 1 : St. John of God’s Health Care Journey in Intelligent Automation (Daniel
Kennedy)
15 mins
• Challenges
• Overcoming of Challenges
• Lessons Learned
Session 2: Edith Cowan University’s Journey in Intelligent Automation (Abhinav
Sarna)
15 mins
• Challenges
• Overcoming of Challenges
• Lessons Learned
Question and Answers 5 mins
Polls during the Webinar 5 mins
Closing Statements
2 mins
Agenda
6. Session:1 - St. John of God’s Health
Care Journey in Intelligent
Automation
- Presented by Daniel Kennedy
7. 1. Horizontal or Vertical increase in number of tasks performed by RPA
2. Ability for static number of tasks performed by RPA to scale up or down
dynamically according to volume / demand
3. Ability to dynamically scale for business process changes and or environmental
volatility
ASSET
Growth
ASSET
Utilisation
ASSET
Maintenance &
Sustenance
Scaling Can be Thought of in Three
Ways
8. With ASSET Growth, most organisations will follow a phased project approach:
Each phase typically exhibits different challenges or barriers:
DRIVERS FOR
• Repeatable benefit
outcomes (time, cost,
quality etc.)
• Relative merits over
human / other
interoperability
• Relevance /
Applicability
Challenges / Barriers
• Change motivation maybe
low/no
• Technology preferences / fit
with Strategy
• Infrastructure scaling
• Data Security restrictions
• RPA Design & Dev cost
• RPA maintenance & support
overhead
Initiation Planning Execution
Monitorin
& Control Closure
Asset Growth
9. Challenges / Barriers
• Schedule slippage because planned
resources are unavailable
• Schedule slippage against resource
estimates
• Technical difficulties not
apparent/expected during Initiation /
Planning (in-scope + OOS)
• Other (see next slide)
Asset Growth
With ASSET Growth, most organisations will follow a phased project approach:
Each phase typically exhibits different challenges or barriers:
Initiation Planning Execution
Monitoring
& Control Closure
10. • The answer isn’t always to change the script
• The UI isn’t always the optimal path to data processing
• Test environments unavailable, or dissimilar to Prod
• Resourcing across technical specialties, eg. RPA Dev, Enterprise, Networks, and Security
• RPA developer relative effectiveness
• Modularity and re-usability of tasks/ components
• Managing changes in parallel, but managing development, testing, production sequentially
• RPA susceptibility to patching, and other maintenance activities
• RPA vulnerability to environmental aberrations
• User expectations – “I’ll only accept 100% success” *
"People just do not forgive machines for making errors," George Laurer, inventor of the barcode/UPC
Asset Growth: Other in-Execution Technical
Challenges
11. Asset Growth
With ASSET Growth, most organisations will follow a phased project approach:
Each phase typically exhibits different challenges or barriers:
Challenges / Barriers
• Business Process variations which
become apparent post-execution
• Technical difficulties not
apparent/expected during Initiation /
Planning (in-scope + OOS)
• Unrealistic Expectations and/or
negative feedback
Initiation Planning Execution
Monitoring &
Control
Closure
12. 1= Ability for static number of
tasks performed by RPA to scale
up or down dynamically according
to volume / demand
ASSET
Growth
ASSET
Utilisation
ASSET
Maintenance &
Sustenance
1= Ability to dynamically scale for
business process changes and or
environmental volatility
Horizontal or Vertical increase in number of tasks performed by RPA
The Route to Scaling (Growth) May Require Pre-
Conditions
13. Business Confidence Assurance:
• Ensure everyone agrees that RPA is an asset, not a liability
• Demonstrable Scripting Standards & technical support documentation
• Ensure there are asset management /sustenance resources available
Overcoming Technical Challenges – Our Lessons Learned
14. Asset Growth
• Question: Is RPA looking for a business problem to solve ?
• Ensure that RPA is an option considered during feasibility (initiation)
• Ensure that RPA is the best tool for the business problem
• Know your baseline in terms of success/error rates with the current process (maybe use LEAN to
to guide your evaluation)
• Understand and agree whether your project is waterfall (go heavy on discovery and scoping OR have
have large contingency) or agile
(have scalable targets for fixed project budget/timeline)
• Commit to an aligned view of what success looks like
• Utilise/ Leverage existing assets
• Integrate and align with business process and systems roadmap
• Build to cope with dynamic volumes and variables
• Build for potential environmental aberrations = continuity / error handling
• Provide for asset maintenance / sustenance
Overcoming Technical Challenges – Our Lessons Learned
15. Other
• Automation Anywhere legacy product support, and move from technical approved to forum-
forum-based.
• Functionality limitations – eg. Case statements
Overcoming Technical Challenges – Our Lessons Learned
16. Session 2: Edith Cowan
University’s Journey in Intelligent
Automation
– Presented by Abhinav Sarna
17. ECU’s RPA Journey
• Commenced in 2018, with the following key driver:
• How to improve performance in an
environment of increasing competition in
Higher Education.
• Leveraging automation to incorporate
information and insights into better
decision making.
• Today, ECU is closing on 50 digital workers in a
Production environment, covering core processes
in close to all of its major business units and schools
(front-end and back-end processes.
• We have a centralized governance model with in-
house developers and BAU Support provided by
Mindfields.
18. • Limitations to RPA at Scale is often limited to
discussions on people, process and
technology; however from ECU’s experience,
limitations to scale RPA onwards come down
to misinformation and myths.
• In summary, our lessons learnt has been that
a team across hierarchical layers of dedicated
“MythBusters” with an appetite to challenge
misconceptions with data driven insights is
necessary to scale RPA in an organization.
To ‘Scale’ RPA, means,
100s of Bots scurrying
through your
ecosystem, unfettered
and left to their own
devices
RPA is ‘the’ solution to
a business problem
within an
organisation.
Scaling up in
technology simply
means additional
VMs, costs of capacity
and maintenance
Scaling RPA requires
decentralised
development and
governance
1 2
34
RPA at Scale
20. Q: Which RPA toolset is best ?
A: Based on our experience, the technical challenges aren’t toolset choice dependent
Q: How does RPA compare with other technology options ?
A: A lot of the technical challenges faced by RPA are the same ones any other technology will face. Some more
more specific examples include……
Q: How are you scaling up/down for demand ?
A: As capacity has become a constraint, we’ve incremented our bot-farm with additional VMs, including additional
additional licenses; we have not scaled down…
Q: What have your most successful strategies been for introducing new RPA tasks ?
A: The only strategy that we’ve employed so far is to come in with strong business sponsorship for cost savings
savings
Potential Q&A