Read this article about VMware, one of our finalists, in the category Best Achievement in Technology Enabled Process Automation, selected by the independent judging panel, for the 2019 Business Transformation & Operational Excellence Industry Awards program. Click here to read articles on other finalists.

VMware, a global leader in cloud infrastructure and digital workspace technology, accelerates digital transformation by enabling unprecedented freedom and flexibility in how our customers build and evolve IT environments. As a part of its long-term digitization strategy, maturing the process and operational excellence, VMware embarked on RPA journey in 2017 to automate repetitive and manual tasks. Multiple processes across business functions have been automated since then. One of the critical areas where RPA was effectively leveraged was to update contracts due to Partner Merger.

VMware’s partners and distributors are a critical part of the company’s ecosystem, creating opportunities through their relationships, reach, expertise and technology value. Mergers and Acquisitions between Distributors or Partners of VMware has a major impact on VMware’s transactional data, leading to delay in renewal of Support & Service Contracts and inflow of Revenue. One such merger in 2016 required manually updating 250,000 contracts in VMware’s ERP which was time-consuming.

The Corporate System Operations (CSO) team in VMware ensures updates to ERP systems when there are any changes at the partner’s end.  Updating the ERP was manual, takes 10 minutes per record and estimated to take 5 years to update all contracts. To address this problem, RPA was used which eliminated manual update, improved process productivity, and scalability leading to customer satisfaction.

RPA is an automation script that interacts with applications & systems like humans with no hard-coded integration. The project was implemented in 8 phases: Concept, Initiate, Define, Design, Build, Test, Launch, Close, spanning across 6 weeks.

Before automating the process, detailed process analysis and value analysis was performed in collaboration with SMEs to standardize and optimize the process. Post optimization, stakeholder approvals were secured, and the solution was designed, tested and deployed in eight phases. A few minor issues identified during testing were fixed before deploying to the production environment. Post-deployment, the project was handed over for performance monitoring and ongoing support to RPA operations team.

A total of 40% of the productive time per employee was freed to perform value-added activities as a result of this implementation. The processing time reduced by 85% - from 10 min per update to 90seconds, 41,667 manhours saved with a net saving of $293K. Additionally, the bot is being governed by a central command center that provides a secure environment, role-based authentication, success/failure alerts, and schedule-based runs without any human intervention.

Key wins:

• 80K contracts updates in 5 months with an average accuracy of 98%
• 24X7 intermittent operations without manual supervision
• Provisioning of bot takes less than 48 hours
• Elimination of dependencies on case management tools
• Owing to the scalability of this solution, the bot can be leveraged to all the future M&As of VMware’s partners and distributors
  

To expedite the contract updates, the CSO team has provisioned 3 additional BOTs which will run 24X5 and complete the task in ~3 months.

Team Member Names

Ashok Faujdar     
Emilie Ly
Partha Baral
Sohan Naik
Sudha Gandrapu
Vijay Khambra