Automation and the Top 20 Most Admired SSOs & GBS
In this blog, we summarise insights from Sanjay Patel, SVP and Global Head of Takeda Business Solutions and Maciej Piwowarczyk, Former Head of GBS at Discovery Inc, on automation from SSON’s Top 20 Most Admired SSOs & GBS at this year’s SSOW Europe 2022, to help you derive real business benefits from crunching the aggregated data of your peer set and beyond.
Naomi Secor, Global Managing Director at SSON, kicked off the panel discussion with information about the methodology behind SSON’s top 20 most admired SSOs & GBS. The extensive study collated cross-channel data from 57 SSCs and SSON’s global community of more than 180,000 members, including digital and face-to-face channels. A weighting system was then applied to the 35 metrics across eight categories captured on an SSC level. The eight categories were: Automation, Attrition, HR & Talent, Order-to-Cash, Payroll, Procure-to-Pay, Record-to-Report and Travel & Expense.
What did it take to make automation a reality?
Sanjay provided insight into Takeda’s digital journey. They use a mixture of a top-down and bottom-up approach to ensure that their digital transformation journey is linked to their purpose at every stage. The aim of their bottom-up approach is to build capability, invest in the organisation and empower employees to become self-sufficient. Whereas their top-down approach is about creating seamless end-to-end processes and how these can cut across a much larger process or subprocess area, to eliminate any fear around automation.
One of Takeda’s principles behind performing robotic process automation (RPA) was to ensure standardisation of their processes. At a task level, they are democratising technology and enabling their employees to build next-generation capabilities in an immersive, five-week Digital Champions programme. So far, they have trained 1000 employees to use RPA and built over 500 bots to automate their task-level processes, creating over half a million hours of capacity.
What happens if the bots get it wrong?
Sanjay explained that setbacks are an important part of the learning process, and to get it right you need to ensure you always have the right partnerships in place across the organisation. For example, Takeda formed a partnership with their digital and technology organisation, who were able to demonstrate that new technologies can add value and work well across the enterprise.
Maciej gave his perspective on automation and detailed that first and foremost, it is important to make an honest reflection and analysis of processes through data scalability and data integrity. In the past, they carried out pilots using RPA which failed, and now they have several bots automating their tasks. However, due to limitations with scalability and standardisation, for meaningful automations, they decided to go back to basics and leverage either enterprise resource planning (ERP) expansion or the ‘Plug and Play’ companies, which can be easily integrated into ERP.
How are the savings being reinvested to the business?
Takeda use capacity creation, which translates into their ability to absorb new work that may be coming in, according to Sanjay.
Maciej added that at Discovery Inc, with RPAs they made no significant savings but with Plug and Play solutions, for example, they have managed to deliver a significant cost savings with no impact on the quality. However, they also discovered that they have a very simple approach that does not use any spreadsheets, detailed capacity planning or any simulations, just a true budget and a profit and loss business case perspective. For example, they have a company strategy where you could say that everything was invested into digital for around 2-3 years, whereas others, including GBS, were financing this.
Are your people embracing change, or were they resistant to some areas of change?
People embraced the change and followed the journey, according to Maciej. This required a proper, true and human orientated change management approach. It was tough, especially with their High Radius project, which delivered significant savings. When it comes to RPAs, he said, his company designed a project that freed people up for less repetitive work.
Sanjay said that he experienced very similar findings. He added that there was a focus on building new capabilities within the organisation to empower people to eliminate certain repetitive tasks, so they could focus on higher-value-added and more rewarding activities. When they launched their programme around a year and a half ago, people quickly began to see the value it delivered. As a result, the programme has grown from 30 to over 500 employees, who have now all been certified as RPA developers within and outside of their organisation in global finance.
Want to learn more about how data, analytics and automation can help shape your organisation?
Join the world’s industry experts on 17 – 19 October 2022 in London, UK to discover how you can transform your GBS and position your company for success at SSOW Europe Autumn 2022.
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