C‑suite buy-in: automation isn’t an automatic success

For years, there has been a lot of talk about robot­ic process automa­tion (RPA), but this talk is slow­ly trans­lat­ing into sub­stance. So, as boards begin to take the tech seri­ous­ly, what oppor­tu­ni­ties and obsta­cles do C‑level exec­u­tives face when it comes to adop­tion?

Chief executive officer

Ulti­mate­ly, it is the CEO who will decide how far and wide RPA can go in a busi­ness, and there are plen­ty of oppor­tu­ni­ties to make a big dif­fer­ence for the organ­i­sa­tion.

Accord­ing to Dani­lo McGar­ry, automa­tion and trans­for­ma­tion exec­u­tive, a suc­cess­ful RPA pro­gramme can cut oper­at­ing costs sig­nif­i­cant­ly, improve oper­a­tional effi­cien­cy, increase the vol­ume of work the com­pa­ny can take on and improve the work-life bal­ance for employ­ees.

“The CEO can utilise RPA as a fun­da­men­tal trans­for­ma­tion­al tool which could give them a sig­nif­i­cant com­peti­tor advan­tage,” says Mr McGar­ry, who cur­rent­ly man­ages the advanced automa­tion pro­gramme at Unit­ed­Health Group.

But there are also obsta­cles asso­ci­at­ed with automa­tion adop­tion for CEOs, par­tic­u­lar­ly as it can change what teams fun­da­men­tal­ly do and how they work.

“CEOs face the dif­fi­cult chal­lenge of know­ing how to set the right expec­ta­tions at board lev­el in terms of tar­gets for sav­ings for the year; a sig­nif­i­cant RPA pro­gramme can affect the share price of a com­pa­ny,” says Mr McGar­ry.

“They also have to make aggres­sive enough deci­sions in terms of pro­vid­ing big enough bud­gets for RPA pro­grammes while also being cau­tious that it is a rel­a­tive­ly new type of pro­gramme; get­ting the bal­ance of risk ver­sus reward is cru­cial.”

Howard Williams, direc­tor at Park­er Soft­ware, believes CEOs have the chal­lenge of ensur­ing the use of robots in busi­ness is not just to bal­ance the books.

“Find­ing the automa­tion sweet spot of increas­ing pro­duc­tiv­i­ty and effi­cien­cy, with­out los­ing eth­i­cal ground will be a chal­lenge in the years to come,” he says.

Chief financial officer

The share of finance pro­fes­sion­als adopt­ing RPA is expect­ed to surge from 38 per cent to 86 per cent in the next one to two years, accord­ing to The Hack­ett Group. And yet,  it may seem unclear what the exact ben­e­fits of automa­tion are for the func­tion.

Vanes­sa Keat­ing, direc­to­ry of finance advi­so­ry at The Hack­ett Group, says the indi­rect ben­e­fits of automa­tion are not described wide­ly enough for finance, which can neg­a­tive­ly impact adop­tion, and many face the obsta­cle of not know­ing where to start.

“It can seem over­whelm­ing and many have to prove cost-sav­ings from day one, which can impact their way of approach­ing automa­tion strate­gi­cal­ly,” she says.

For exam­ple, select­ing an eas­i­er automa­tion imple­men­ta­tion could help the team to learn how to go through the automa­tion life cycle, but it may not deliv­er the high return on invest­ment a more com­plex process would, influ­enc­ing their pri­ori­ti­sa­tion and roadmap devel­op­ment.

But there are plen­ty of oppor­tu­ni­ties for CFOs when it comes to adop­tion. Ray­mon van Viegen, CFO at Onguard, says the time saved on man­u­al activ­i­ties, such as chas­ing up debts, means CFOs are “able to focus more close­ly on the big­ger-pic­ture issues, as well as those accounts that are in greater need of their atten­tion”.

Ms Keat­ing says organ­i­sa­tions will need to opti­mise their invest­ment: “This means co-ordi­nat­ing across dig­i­tal and human work­ers to make the most of both, which is the most impor­tant fac­tor to con­sid­er with­in the smart automa­tion frame­work. Finance is in a great posi­tion to be a leader in this space.”

Chief technology officer

Per­haps sur­pris­ing­ly, there was a low­er share (24 per cent) of IT respon­dents to the Hack­ett sur­vey who said their depart­ment had adopt­ed RPA com­pared with finance func­tion. But this is set to tre­ble in the next one to two years to 75 per cent.

The CTO will inevitably be involved in help­ing to imple­ment automa­tion into the busi­ness, as it requires a cer­tain infra­struc­ture for it to scale.

Mr McGar­ry at Unit­ed­Health Group believes it is a great oppor­tu­ni­ty for CTOs to begin to under­stand what every ele­ment of an organ­i­sa­tion does: “Nev­er before would the com­pa­ny have embarked on such a detailed analy­sis of what process­es the dif­fer­ent teams and employ­ees are per­form­ing. This gives the CTOs more data, in an organ­ised fash­ion, and with data comes
the priv­i­lege of knowl­edge so they can bet­ter steer the com­pa­ny to become more effi­cient,” he says.

Mark Rid­ley, direc­tor of CTO advi­so­ry firm Rid­ley Indus­tries, says automat­ing exist­ing process­es makes them more repeat­able, reduces man­u­al errors, low­ers costs and improves speed in a busi­ness.

“A major obsta­cle for CTOs is hav­ing a lega­cy IT envi­ron­ment or an old­er busi­ness where there is a wide vari­ety of sys­tems and depart­ments involved in process­es,” he adds.

Oth­er chal­lenges include find­ing the right tech­nolo­gies nec­es­sary and ensur­ing it makes finan­cial sense to imple­ment them.

Mr McGar­ry believes that even after work­ing this out, find­ing the right peo­ple to run the pro­gramme and ensur­ing the rest of the work­force is prop­er­ly trained to sup­port an RPA pro­gramme remain dif­fi­cul­ties CTOs would have to over­come.

Human resources director

BNY Mellon’s head of dig­i­tal Roman Regel­man believes the human resources direc­tor (HRD) is the first per­son who can real­ly ben­e­fit from automa­tion as it can help them to car­ry out low-vari­ance work.

“It allows them to auto­mate the more menial, paper inten­sive, repet­i­tive tasks, enabling them to focus on high-qual­i­ty work,” he says.

RPA adop­tion is slow in HR. Only 11 per cent of HR depart­ments have adopt­ed the tech­nol­o­gy, but this is expect­ed to rise to 28 per cent in the next one to two years, which is still con­sid­er­ably less than expect­ed in finance and IT. This is per­haps because some of the ben­e­fits of RPA remain unknown.

Unit­ed­Health Group’s Mr McGar­ry says RPA could help HR when it comes to mak­ing key deci­sions dur­ing dis­ci­pli­nary actions against employ­ees, as HR could hold more infor­ma­tion on what the employ­ee does and has done over time.

“In addi­tion, I believe HR will be able to bet­ter under­stand the company’s needs in terms of skillsets and devise more accu­rate job descrip­tions, and then it can use automa­tion to screen can­di­dates more effi­cient­ly,” he says.

But to get these ben­e­fits, HRDs are faced with a num­ber of obsta­cles, includ­ing employ­ees poten­tial­ly believ­ing ana­lyt­ics that show how long they work and which appli­ca­tions they use the most could be an inva­sion of pri­va­cy.

In addi­tion, Mr McGar­ry believes HRDs have the dif­fi­cult task of ensur­ing employ­ees are retrained, and that these employ­ees main­tain pos­i­tiv­i­ty and are kept moti­vat­ed, as oth­er­wise RPA can be seen as neg­a­tive­ly dis­rupt­ing exist­ing com­pa­ny struc­tures.

It’s clear that each role has its own obsta­cles and oppor­tu­ni­ties when it comes to automa­tion. For a busi­ness to make RPA work most effec­tive­ly, the C‑suite should work on a co-ordi­nat­ed plan to imple­ment automa­tion. This is the only way RPA tools and oth­er automa­tion tech­nolo­gies will be able to pro­vide the ben­e­fits exec­u­tives are seek­ing. If only organ­i­sa­tions could auto­mate imple­ment­ing automa­tion.

Chief executive officer

Chief financial officer