Yes, a Smart Process Automation Center of Excellence (SPACE) is a rigorous structure of governance, management, processes and roles.
No one is saying you have to do it this way, but…
If you want to get the most out of your automation deployments throughout the enterprise and leverage your investment, the solution is SPACE. And, not for nothing, it is quite the opposite of a bottle neck.
Let’s say your corporation has 10 business units. Business unit three develops a re-usable automation for payment processing. Through a center of excellence, it is shared with the other nine business units, no one has to write a new automation routine, it’s done. Unit four having trouble with a component of automation? Unit 10 has the solution.
SPACE allows organizations to share knowledge in a structured way that brings results. You don’t just open a bridge and start talking. SPACE artifacts – governance, structure and its formal approach to documentation, communication and management of architecture standards associated with automation deployments reduces risk of automation failure and produces faster ROI. In turn, SPACE can actually fund future automation deployments and allow your corporation to be the disrupter.
Case in Point: International Insurance Company
Business Challenge – RPA Benefits Understood, Cost Prohibitive to Outsource
An International Insurance company became interested in implementing a Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Center of Excellence (COE) after proving the value of Smart Process Automation(SPA) within its environment.
This insurer had received advice from one of the largest IT consultants (their strategic advisor), as to the benefits of automation, but was not interested in engaging them to be their implementation partner, primarily due to cost.
Approach – Establishing a SPA Center of Excellence (SPACE) within Six Months
- Established the governance structure, activities, tasks, bot development guidelines, interactions between groups and roles
- Educated and trained over 200 business and IT users on RPA and Automation Anywhere in order to achieve the business case objectives forecasted.
- Drove adoption at all levels of the organization through human change management – a combination of cultural change and workforce re-assignment . Automation is a game changer, bots replace routine tasks, empowering the workforce to be more strategic and to perform at a higher level accomplishing more complex and customer facing tasks.
- Facilitated four bot-supported process automation development efforts to completion, putting a COE in place that the client could administer themselves, creating enough value to completely pay for the COE!
- Transitioned the CoE to internal team members creating a self-sufficient environment within the enterprise to drive multiple process automation initiatives, independent of automation service providers or consultants
Benefit – Funded the development of the SPACE through savings
- SPACE fully-staffed with internal team members evaluated and mentored for six months by automation experts. Evaluation identified those who were right for the job and those who needed more training – ultimately setting the client up for future success.
- Delivered business-level ownership through a series of artifacts, business roles and responsibilities that drive and manage automation initiatives in order to achieve adoption
- Reduced the anticipated software license fees associated with increased economies of scale and reductions in the number of robots
- Delivered 22-robots within six-months, and promoted 48-robots into production, within the first 12-months, resulting in over $2M of cost savings in just the first year, net of development costs!
- 24% of the robots were able to be re-used
This initiative was focused on building an Automation CoE, while facilitating a number of automation efforts in parallel. By taking this approach, the cost of effort was fully funded by the savings produced through the delivered automations.
Questions about developing a COE and an intertnal competency center to support it? Contact Silver Tree Consulting & Services.