So my name is Jani Rahja.
I work at Posti Finland so Finnish Post and I'm head of intelligent automation.
Actually.
I'm not an ICT guy at all.
I'm actually have a I have a business background.
I'm an economists and I just recently moved to ICT.
Starting from beginning of this year but we started RPA Journey last year February so
it's going to be like a year and three months now.
Well we are a company we have a history of 380 years so one of the oldest companies in
Finland which means we have a lot a lot of history.
Both in the good and the bad sides.
That's a and I we have a quite a bit of Legacy systems and Legacy processes lots of manual
steps and we wanted to start automating those manual steps so we could get our employees
to do the actual important stuff such as interacting with the customer and developing our processes.
So we are kind of using RPA to to automate all the boring and mundane and repetitive
stuff.
So the people can do the actual fun and creative stuff.
So we started a bit more than a year ago.
So when we implemented our first robots last year's summer and at the moment, we have four
robot instances and about twenty three use cases in production.
We started with a partner with CGI and we started with them building this COE so Center
of Excellence, they help us to to implement the technical robotics environment and the
first use cases and all the governance and process models and and after the implementation
project which took about three to four months.
We've been more or less independently working towards the next level.
Well, honestly, Feeling that the market is more or less the shared between two players
UiPath and the other one and it was kind of like comparing apples and pears that's that's
how do we do I want the blue one or do I want the red one and and then we decided with made
some calls to some other companies that will which would be they recommend and in the end
we found that UiPath would be the best option for us.
So we have automated processes for HR, finance, sales support, and currently we are looking
into Logistics or as well, so the first bit let's say business.
We started with the back office processes.
That's what we do to avoid the first year and now we're also starting to automate business
processes, which is much more exciting in a way that there's a large amount much larger
volume and more benefits to be to be achieved.
I think RPA is in itself it's quite simple.
It's not easy doesn't you don't have to be a rocket scientist to be able to automate
with RPA so I think in that sense it's fine of course you need to do a lot of change management
with the teams and the business owner so they understand what is RPA why do you want to
implement it at what kind of consequences will it have while it's implemented.
So I think it's still a like a maturity curve that's you're going to follow and it gets
easier the more the further away you are on your process.
We are quite maybe number focused company in the sense.
So we are actually calculating the time saved with with RPA.
So the time you have given back to the business how much they have been able to improve the
efficiency in their processes.
We started mostly with smaller use cases because we didn't start really want to start with
the biggest and the most difficult one.
That's something we learned from the companies who have who had been doing RPA longer than
us.
So we decided to start with the back office simple processes from finance and HR and in
those cases the let's say the benefit the time saved has been something of between 1/2
and 1 FTE’s.
Is but then the next bigger ones that we did after that.
We're already like two or three FTEs and at the moment we are doing automation for four
and five FTE’s.
So it's all the time.
It's getting bigger and bigger and that's something we want to do also in the future.
I seen many companies that we have so much history a long history of no implementing
heavy ERPs that take one and a half years to implement and still they're not perfect.
So we're kind of cautious like, when can we do we trust technology enough but RPA and
AI are kind of Technologies where it when you implement the nothing gets broken.
So it's easy to try and even to decide.
Okay.
This is not going to work so we can leave it a move to the next one.
So I think in that sense automation is a very interesting IT area.
Well, the first of all would be Benchmark other companies with more experience because
we did that and we learned a lot and I think we were able to avoid some of the most common
pitfalls in that sense because the first companies who started doing RPA that it took them maybe.
Let's say a year year and a half to get to the let's say normal mode and for us it took
only six months because we had these learnings from other companies.
The second would be don't be afraid.
Like I said RPA is is nothing to be afraid of you cannot break anything and it's probably
more interesting than you already can imagine there are more possibilities.
It's something also in a in a sense that automation.
It's not only about technology and IT it's all about changing like transforming the working
culture and knowledge base at the company.
So it's a lot of interesting things.
Not only for IT people for also for HR people and business people.