hey natasha um thank you for coming
along
and um would you maybe start with
telling us about your role
and a little bit about civica please
yep um so i'm the solutions manager at
civica
and i have a team of architects and
developers
and i'm responsible for overseeing our
digital transformation and continuous
improvement initiatives across the
business
innovation and robotic process
automation are the key
focus areas for our projects
and a little bit about civica so civica
is a market leading specialist
in business critical software
applications
digital solutions and managed services
and we help teams and organizations
around the world
transform the way they work thank you
and how did you start with your
automation journey when did it all begin
so much of civica's software already
does
automation for its customers as most
software products attempt to do
there still remain a bit of a gap in the
market though which rpa
seems to be feeling quite quickly so we
were keeping
a close eye on automation robotics
and what the market was really doing and
decided to
take the next step and look at
completing a proof of concept
so we explored a range of products
to just really look at which products
would best suit our business
and we decided to pick uipath for a
range of different reasons but
mainly it was the wide functional
capability
uh the strategic product roadmaps really
stood out as well
as well as the ease of use of the
product itself
okay like thinking about what you've
learned what advice would you give
other organizations who are just
starting out
so looking back into the early stages of
our journey
we were quite fixated on specific
processes to automate
but from the discovery work we found
that other processes we initially had
ruled out
were probably some of the best processes
to automate
so my advice would be to have an open
mind
research other use cases as well within
your industry
and rely on the experts in the field to
make recommendations
and actually listen so we first as well
looked
at automating end to end through the use
of unattended bots
but we found that some of the processes
we
had weren't actually possible to
automate end to end
you still need the skill of a human in
the loop
so the collaboration between people
and bots was quite a huge benefit for us
and some of our most improved processes
actually have
a human in the middle making decisions
so
by doing that we've been able to broaden
our automation coverage
allow people to do the work that they do
best which is validating making
decisions
problem solving it's really improved our
process efficiencies quite significantly
okay and when it comes to scaling
automation i know you've progressed
quite a bit
on your journey do you have any advice
for other organizations about the
scaling side of things
yeah so with the scaling at civica we're
really passionate about
investing in our people and we're really
excited about getting them more involved
in our automation journey so we've made
use of the uipath academy
it's been a really great resource for us
to give our teams
and employees some technical skills that
they may not be
able to get in their day-to-day jobs so
we're really interested particularly
with scaling
to start exploring things like
citizen-led development
and the idea of providing courses for
new hires
and you know giving them tools to learn
more and and be skilled in automation is
really exciting for us
um and as innovation's a strategic focus
for our business
there's been a lot of interest from
other business units
particularly because they're seeing the
waves we're making and they're getting
really excited about it as well
so we've got plans to to scope out a
broader range of processes
across the hr it functions particularly
to look at some new opportunities make
use of our automation hub that we've
just started to use to capture ideas
and really you know demonstrate roi to
the broader business as well
so for us to scale they're the things
that we're really keen to focus on in
the year ahead
natasha can you share with us some some
of your automation learnings you've made
in the last
year and a half and maybe share a couple
of tips and best practices
yeah so there's been quite a few
learnings but if i was to
think of some of the top ones one of the
first ones would be
finding the right experts if it's your
first
rpa project recruit an expert or
experienced team or work with a partner
to really learn the basics
and set up a good foundation it's really
important to have the right support
available
to get it right the first time and as
well as
if any potentials do come up you know
when you're moving from a proof of
concept into production that you've got
the support
and expertise around you the next one
is on rpa not being the answer for
everything so
when you work with automation you start
then looking as
you know automation being the answer for
everything so
really important to get the process
mining piece right
and deploy rpa where it'll be the best
tool for the job
and probably the most important one is
around communication
so people need to feel part of the
process and so do teams
you know a bot comes along and scares
people
it's part of your journey and it'll give
you new ways of doing things
um you know some scalability but it also
will scare people
so making sure that you communicate
you know talk people through make them
part of the change
um really really important so
you know over the number of projects
that we've developed and implemented
we've got a strong approach to
communication making sure that all of
our stakeholders are fully briefed
um understand the reasons um that we're
using automation
as well as the benefits associated um so
it's been really powerful for
for us to get that right um
and then probably just the last one was
um to
take time to accurately measure all the
costs associated
um and measure the benefits as well so
you know
accurately having monitoring set up
from day one is really invaluable it
creates
solid business cases for future projects
as well
and a really important point to consider
well thank you very much for sharing
these insights natasha
no worries it's been uh lovely chatting
to you axel thank you so much for having
me uipath
it's been really great
you