Case Study – Automation COE
From Concept to Reality: Setting up an Automation COE
Overview
A multinational personal finance company embarked on the automation journey in its finance department.
While their IT infrastructure was fairly modern, yet they had significant amount of manual process across its function due to data silos, lack of integration between some of the non-critical applications, and use of spreadsheets.
Although they used one of the top automation platforms, they saw very little success in the first year of its operation.
Industry
Financial Services
Processes Automated
Setting up the Automation COE
Current Challenges
- Identifying the right opportunities: The team struggled with clearly establishing the costs and benefits of automation use cases, and getting support from the leadership.
- Resource allocation: Allocating the necessary resources (e.g. staff, time, budget) to the COE was a big challenge, especially due to competing priorities and limited resource availability.
- Complexity: Integrating automation technology and tools with existing systems and processes was complex and required significant technical expertise, training and support for employees.
Automation Objectives
- Define the scope and purpose of the COE: Clearly articulate the goals and objectives of the COE and how it will benefit the organization.
- Establish governance: Determine the governance model for the COE, including how decisions will be made, who will be involved in decision-making, and how the COE will be funded.
- Define roles and responsibilities: Identify the roles and responsibilities of the individuals who will be part of the COE, including the COE lead, subject matter experts, and any other staff.
- Establish metrics for measuring success: Identify key metrics that will be used to measure the success of the COE and the automation efforts it supports.
- Communicate the value of the COE: Clearly communicate the value of the COE to the organization, including how it will benefit the business and drive innovation.
Solution Summary
Xalta team worked closely with the client organization to understand its needs and objectives, and provided expertise and guidance to help set up and operate the COE effectively.
This involved conducting assessments, providing training and support, and helping the client team overcome any challenges or obstacles that arose as part of the initial execution.
The goal of the engagement was to help the organization establish a successful COE that is aligned with its business goals and drives innovation and best practices in the area of automation.
Outcomes
- The team was able to implement a well-defined governance structure to identify, ingest, evaluate, execute and manage automation use cases.
- Standards and Best practices in design and coding were implemented which aligned with the security requirements of the larger organization.
- 10+ complex to medium sized automations were implemented across different teams within the Finance function that helped create awareness and encouraged teams to submit new ideas.
- A healthy backlog of 30+ use cases were identified and prioritized, along with verified savings.
- ~$800K in savings were realized in labor cost saving and other expenses.
