INTERVIEW OF THE MONTH

INTERVIEW WITH MR MACIEJ OBUCHOWSKI,
RPA Expert & Manager, Arla Foods

What do you believe are the critical success factors to maximize returns from RPA for any organization?

I believe there are three major success factors.

First, it is treating RPA implementation as a strategic direction the organization wants to take and not simply as another project or an additional function.

The second success factor is proper Business Change Management within the organization while going for any RPA project. It should have a very high priority when scaling the RPA implementation as not doing so can have major repercussions.

According to a Gartner report I read, only 3% of organizations using RPA can actually scale it past 50 robots. So, change management, therefore, is important and should not be considered as a side task as fear of losing a job to a robot is something that a lot of employees have to deal with.

Automation brings in rapid transformation within the company and employees should help rather than prove to be impediments to the cause of automation. We in Arla Foods treated change management as a high priority so the employees know they have nothing to fear. Our employees like automation, understand its capabilities and they are helping rather than stopping us to automate processes.

The third factor is understanding the technology behind the RPA tools.

A lot of companies are unaware of possibilities their RPA tool is capable of, resulting in using only a small percent of it’s features, mostly automating through the user interface of applications.

When automating end to end business processes in a stable way, companies should look to utilize more functionalities of an RPA solution that it provides like connecting to databases, API’s, .net libraries.

In order to do that, the RPA developers have to be skilled in these technologies, otherwise, they will always use only one way of automation and i.e., through interfaces and that can result in a lot of stability issues.

What does the future of RPA hold with respect to technologies like AI, ML, NLP, Process Analytics, etc? How will these technologies align to meet the needs of business users?

I believe all of these are great tools, and RPA fits perfectly in this stack as a connector to all of them.
So, organizations need to have proper technology stack to approach the business problems effectively, and then go in for cognitive services, machine learning, etc. Even user interfaces, when organizations automate business processes, they need to interact with users. Sure, you can automate the processes as they are, e.g. process consisting of working on excel files, but you could also move the data to share point for the user interface. So instead of getting the unstructured data (you can use NLP for the same), you could get the structured data which is a lot easier to process. Companies should have something for the interfaces preferably forms (we at Arla Foods use SharePoint forms and PowerApps).

Also, at Arla Foods we have RPA working behind the chatbot for better customer experience. Organizations should also have data integration platforms like MS Flow, Zapier, etc because while there are somethings that could be done in RPA, they shouldn’t be like approval workflows that MS flow has already built-in, it works out of the box so why use a robot for that.

To answer the question of technology alignment to meet the need of business users, there are tools to do that. I wouldn’t say if you implement cognitive services it will completely transform your company but if you get a capable team and provide them with proper technological stack, they can work wonders for you. All of these tools have specific purposes and if you can combine them with a stack that you have a process around and you can quickly develop that, it will transform your company.

How do you go about handling challenges like change management and ensure effective change management and what are good practices around that?

I can speak for ourselves; we do not plan to eliminate any employee rather we want to give them more value-added tasks. During our initial automation days, our Vice President publicly announced that we are just starting with Robotics, for the next year, there will be no elimination. That incentivized people to work with robotics and we automated the mundane tasks, giving higher value-added tasks to employees. Initially, there was resistance related to RPA Adoption, but now employees treat RPA as colleagues.

Now, we are a centralized COE team of 13 members which supports the entire organization to analyse the processes and automate them. Our approach has been to train employees within the organization to use RPA for mundane tasks and also help employees become more skilled. In or experience, we see business involvement is also a must while executing any RPA project. When we analyse the processes and deliver RPA bots to automate them, our colleagues from business help us automate the processes. We teach them how to utilize the recommendation, what things we are looking at effective process automation, how can they improve the processes, etc. During the process, they actually get extensively trained, and even though they are personally not implementing any robots they actually come to understand what to look for during the automation process. After training, business employees are now able to understand recommendations, analyse processes, document them and also send us the documents on their own.

What’s the best way to manage security risks with respect to RPA and manage bots and any kind of cyber-attacks?
We have a pretty standard infrastructure and our security function is the way we handle credentials. We have people come and say whether their built-in RPA credentials manager is safe. Also, in terms of access management for applications like SAP, we make sure that we always use accounts specifically for robots. We never have robots that work for the credentials of an employee. For example, in SAP we could have only one role that has access to everything the robots are using, but in case of breaching that account, the account has lot of conflicting accesses, so the way we do this is split this into many smaller accounts that bots utilize depending on what thing they need access for. This is set up by the security team and it is a good practice to involve the IT Team in this.

Can you detail some of the experiences that you have had at ARLA foods with respect to your own RPA journey. What kind of business benefits you have realized from various automation projects?

In 2016 when we hired redwood (an external vendor) to come and automate some of the robots. It was one of the first experiences ARLA had with RPA and decided that as an organization they want to create an internal team. That’s when they called me up as I had previous experience in automation and RPA, to create bots, select vendors and do the whole implementation. We hired 8 employees and started with F&A Automation and decided if this goes well, we will scale it in the whole organization.

In the first phase, our target was to automate the workload of 15 FTEs but actually it took us 5 months with things like infrastructure, governance, etc. We chose BLUE PRISM as the vendor, we trained the employees where a partner came and trained for 3 months. RPA was still growing, and we decided to experiment with our process of delivering bots in order to improve it. We analysed why things are being done in a particular way, we changed the documentation for the processes in a major way as they just didn’t fit well with ARLA. We custom-tailored the automation process with respect to what we were doing with our organization.

We chose Blue Prism but we decided we needed additional components and we coded our own components in dot net as blue prism has a nice extensibility feature that allowed us to do so. Our route was not completely out of the box and we did spend a long time in developing these components but when you could reuse these components, the process of development was faster. In fact, the speed of development of our team is 30% faster than other teams. We actually have only one employee maintaining 134 bots now. So, what we did was an experiment, we figured out new processes, new technology stacks, new components, etc.

After 1^st year we moved to the IT function from F&A, and eventually started doing robotics for all of the organization. We did robotics in supply chain, IT, HR, Finance, Marketing & Sales etc.

We executed processes that were done weekly and after automation, they were done daily. We automate processes that had not been performed previously. We started creating processes and building bots for those processes. We automated the workload of 75 FTEs but the value is actually 150 FTE workload as bots perform new process and automated ones are often performed more frequently than when it was manual process. Also, the way we count bots is different, we calculate it in terms of estimated savings. So right now our yearly estimated savings is 2.1 million euros.

I would also like to add a point with respect to your earlier question as to how to get big benefits from RPA. So, when organizations start with automation, they would want to automate manual workloads which are low hanging fruits, but the biggest savings are when they do problem-solving. For example, one of our problems was truck drivers waiting a long time in their dairies doing nothing, and we understood that this idle time could be better utilized.

So, we analysed that when they pass the border and they get milk from their partner dairy. In order to get back through the border they need to have documents from Danish Government. After loading the cargo on the truck, the dairy contacted the logistics dept of the company via email and the logistics dept used a semi-automated document to approve and sent it back to the dairy. The issue was the response time from logistic department, not the amount of time it took to perform the task. This whole process took several minutes, the truck drivers did not know when they will get the documents via email. Truck drivers on average waited 60 hrs/week doing nothing but waiting for the email from the logistics dept because of this simple process mistake. We created a robot which basically triggered when the email comes in from the dairy, performs the simple process and sends back the documents. In action, as soon as the dairy sends the email, they get a response. Here the benefit was that the response time was significantly reduced. So, this is a case of accruing big benefits from RPA automation.

Awards won by Arla Foods:

• Arla Foods got the Blue Prism award 2019 Innovation Excellence.
• Arla Foods won the first RPA hackathon conducted in Poland by Rhenus Data Office Polska .
• “IT manager of tomorrow” award by Let’s Manage IT for RPA implementation in Arla.