Read this article about HP, 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.

Enabling agility and adaptability with robotics

2015 was a milestone year for HP Inc., as the then 76-year-old HP split into two separate companies (HP Inc. and HPE). Finance and IT leadership for HP Inc. were tasked with enabling more profits and greater efficiency—a challenging mission given that the new, smaller company had reduced costs for Finance operations.

To deliver on this task, Finance and IT needed to develop a modern, cutting-edge enterprise solution that focused on rapid innovation delivery, thoughtful change management, a clear return-on-investment, business enablement, and process optimization. Using these drivers as framework would help the organization deliver a solution that would reduce costs and improve reliability for potential error-prone processes at HP.

Finance and IT determined Robotics Process Automation to be the cutting-edge solution that would deliver the enterprise’s needs. Delivering HP’s Robotics Process Automation began with a focus on implementing a culture of innovation within the organization, including certifying employees in robotics and analytics, crowdsourcing ideas through HP’s Sandbox playground, and hosting robotics immersion sessions that drove further ideation and innovation. Finance and IT also received leadership support to identify and grow robotics skillsets.

In 2016, the team achieved its first project milestone by enabling a robot in reporting—this first robot would be one of many in what would become HP’s ongoing Process Automation transformation. Since then, HP has implemented 275 robots on world-class architecture that impact every facet of HP Finance.

Process Automation is delivering value to HP by providing a holistic view of the company’s financial health, proactively driving intelligent decision-making, using machine learning for forecasting, and enabling an improved employee experience with interactive chatbots. The program is also utilizing a well-defined and robust governance framework, with an internal tool created to identify the business value of a process.

Process Automation has saved HP 239,000 working hours and generated more than $2.5M in value with simplified Finance processes that generate clear, accurate data and reduce risks to the enterprise. HP’s robotics implementation has been recognized by Hackett and COSO for its world-class achievements. The program’s efforts were also reviewed by KPMG’s 2018 Maturity Assessment—KPMG found HP’s Robotics Process Automation to be “Advanced” in all three core areas it measures.

Despite these accomplishments, the impact of Finance and IT’s achievements with Process Automation has only just begun—a pan-HP robotics council has been created to identify best practices and apply learnings across different organizations in the enterprise, and the team has more than 200 projects in the pipeline to drive further efficiency and cost reduction within HP.