Move into the fast lane

A guide to accelerating
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 Contents

Move into the fast lane:

A guide to accelerating automation and creating scale. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3

Choosing the right lane forward:

Streamlining automation opportunity assessment and prioritization. . . . . . . . . . . . 5

At the intersection of control, speed, and agility:

How to optimize enterprise automation at scale with a center of excellence. . . . . 9

Building for performance:

Leveraging design thinking in automation ROI strategy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 12

Going the distance:

Measuring the ROI of automation. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14

Leaning into the curves:

Automation lessons learned from the driver’s seat. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 18

Contact us . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 27

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A guide to accelerating automation and creating scale 2
Move into the fast lane:
A guide to accelerating automation
and creating scale

About this series

Are you launching your first two or three automation projects leveraging robotic process automation (RPA) or
other intelligent automation technologies? And are you looking forward to realizing the value that can come
from a digital workforce? Be prepared. Many executives are finding that if they advance automation initiatives
without an enterprise automation road map and solid governance structures in place, they’re not able to
achieve the benefits they were expecting. In fact, they are seeing longer implementation timelines and higher
costs, leading to questions about the value of automation.

That’s because achieving true digital transformation through automation takes scale and is enabled by
appropriate governance structures. To that end, business leaders should stop viewing automation as a
functional exercise and start taking an enterprise approach. They need to shift their focus from launching
the next one or two bots to building an automation “factory” that can quickly and efficiently produce tens to
hundreds of bots, creating an end-to-end automation “factory” across entire process value chains. And they
should move beyond seeing process automation technology as merely a small tactical fix so they can harness
it as an enabler of business growth.

What drives this new, strategic approach? And what’s a key to success? In a word: readiness.

Where’s the return?

Automation technologies have the potential to transform today’s workplace as dramatically as the machines of
the Industrial Revolution changed the factory floor.

To capitalize on this potential promise, many organizations are jumping into their automation journey by
experimenting with these technologies and advancing individual pilots—without planning for scale or
implementing a structure that can enable them to do so. The result? Slow, arduous implementations that don’t
yield the expected ROI.

Executives are left questioning if the effort is ultimately worth the return. And organizations may lose
confidence in automation technologies entirely—resulting in unrealized efficiencies and missed opportunities
to gain the competitive advantage that automation offers.

For many organizations, executing pilots is a logical place to start. It also provides important hands-on
experience. But organizations simply can’t allow themselves to stop short of creating structure and preparing
for scale if they want to harness the power of automation. Organizations need to start with their end goal in
sight, leveraging those initial pilots as a learning experience and using them to jump-start a program that can
rapidly scale automation across the enterprise.

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Ready, set, go
Historically, organizations often addressed the structure and governance needed to support scale after
technologies had been implemented. But when it comes to automation, these are some of the first factors
that should be considered.

By focusing on the organizational, operational, and governance readiness aspects of automation—up front—
executives can significantly increase the speed and scale of their automation projects.

Using this approach, your organization can develop enterprise automation strategies and programs that
stretch beyond initial deployment to define how automation will grow within your organization. You can
rapidly deploy automation technologies with fewer obstacles and greater ROI. Ultimately, you should be better
positioned to leverage the power of disruption to gain a competitive advantage—possibly even over other
organizations that are leveraging the same technologies.

A path to transformation
This series illustrates a path to accelerating automation and creating scale. Based on extensive experience
with automation initiatives in a wide range of organizations, Deloitte Risk and Financial Advisory has identified
several activities that have shown to drive success in automation programs, including:
• Streamlining automation opportunity assessment and prioritization
• Using the Center of Excellence as an enabler
• Leveraging design thinking to accelerate automation
• Measuring the benefits of automation
• Implementing lessons learned

Our professionals will share their perspectives on each of these topics, identifying common challenges,
offering practical advice, and providing real-world examples.

What’s next—and why now?

As the competitive advantages of automation continue to expand, and the use of automation technologies
becomes more common, the need for organizations to accelerate their automation programs and quickly
move to scale becomes more urgent. It’s time to move into the fast lane.

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Choosing the right lane forward:
Streamlining automation opportunity
assessment and prioritization

Picture this: Your organization has decided that automation can deliver big benefits—and you’re the right
person to make it happen. Your list of automation candidates is long, ideas coming from multiple parts of your
organization, and each department is sure that their processes are the best place to start. But you will need
to determine whether the proposed processes are a good “fit” for automation. Then you need to evaluate
and prioritize the processes based on the value of the benefits and their ROI, providing evidence to support
management and/or executive decisions. Where do you start?

Assessing opportunity and impact

Because your organization’s time is limited, you should focus automation efforts and investments on the
opportunities with the highest potential for success and impact. Putting the right processes in place to identify,
measure, and prioritize automation candidates is critical. And because scale is important, you want to do it in a
programmatic way.

What’s needed is a standardized approach and methodology that can help your organization evaluate and
prioritize opportunities. With this approach in place, you’ll be able to quickly establish and utilize a defined
set of criteria to determine which processes are good candidates for automation. You can evaluate those
candidates to measure their potential benefits. And then you can prioritize—and justify—which processes to
tackle first.

Here are three steps to help you choose the right direction:

1. Find the fit

Not all processes are created equal, and good candidates share some common characteristics. When
identifying opportunities for automation, look for processes that:
• Require manual interaction with one or more IT systems or applications
• Are repetitive
• Occur with significant frequency
• Include activities that are logic and rules based
• Are prone to human error
• Leverage structured data and formats
• Could be performed after-hours
• Are time-consuming to perform

Measuring suitability of processes for automation up front can enable you to filter out processes that
aren’t a good fit and focus your efforts on the processes that may return the best value.

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2. Qualify the opportunities
Once you have identified the processes that are good candidates for automation, it’s time to qualify and
evaluate individual opportunities. You can do that by assessing the relative value to be achieved from
automating the process against the complexity of building the automated process.

On the complexity scale, be sure to get your arms around the scope, size, and variability of each process,
developing a view of how the process is performed and the logic required for all decision points.
Depending on the situation, you may also need to take into account more qualitative considerations related
to the “fit” of the process for automation, such as whether the automation can be deployed in the current
operating model and the functional owner’s readiness to deploy and own the automated process.

On the value scale, begin with a heavy focus on measuring time savings—determining how much time is
spent performing the process today and how much of that time could be captured through automation.
It is important, however, for the analysis to take into account several other factors, both quantitative and
qualitative. These factors may include the potential for future cost avoidance, reduction of error rates and
risk, and overall process efficiency gains (particularly in processes with multiple handoffs).

Once the analysis is complete, you can compare opportunities based on their relative value and
complexity. Then you can zero in on the highest-priority candidate processes—the ones that can provide
the greatest potential return on your investment and shortest payback period.

Sample complexity versus value process selection matrix

High

Medium priority candidates for automation Highest priority candidates for automation
Higher value, higher complexity Higher value, lower complexity
Total value score
Level of value

Lowest priority candidates for automation Medium priority candidates for automation
Lower value, higher complexity Lower value, lower complexity
Low

High Low
Total complexity score
Level of complexity

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3. Dig into the details
By now, you’ll have selected good automation candidates and established a foundational view of their
complexity versus value. But your list of high-priority candidates is still too large, and your department
heads are pushing hard to make their processes first in line. Now is the time to move from soft qualification
criteria to detailed prioritization parameters—quantifying complexity versus value at a more granular level
and providing the data needed to justify your prioritization.

Keep in mind that determining value is not just about quantifiable cost savings. During this phase, you
may want to consider a scoring system that takes into account several qualitative measures of success as
well, including:
• Increased process performance and accuracy
• Process scalability
• Improved data quality and consistency
• Enhanced governance, control, and standardization
• Increased employee engagement and morale

Having a detailed measurement of priority can result in deeper commitment to the success and scale of
the process to be automated, collective agreement on priorities and proposed outcomes, and ultimately
higher returns on your automation investments. And—because decisions can be justified and quantified—
it can also help you build organizational harmony.

Putting the machine in motion

To scale automation, you must build a “machine”—a standardized and repeatable approach to assessing,
analyzing, and prioritizing automation opportunities across the enterprise. If you don’t have this approach
nailed down (or if you’re creating or re-creating it on the fly), you’re fighting an uphill battle. Not only will it be
difficult to determine which processes are a good fit for automation and estimate what the return will be, it
can also take a significant amount of time and erode your return on automation spending.

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 CASE STUDY
Snapshot of success: Fortune 500 company
A large Fortune 500 organization was looking to gain an
advantage in a very competitive industry and decided to
explore automation to improve margins and focus more
of their workforce on strategic initiatives. The organization’s
team began by executing on a set of strategic pilots and
quickly identified a large number of automation candidates,
across numerous business units. Although there was pressure
to “get started,” the newly appointed CTO resisted this urge based on
past experience with piloting automation technologies. The CTO had experienced internal friction
around where to start, as well as disappointment as the processes chosen for pilot did not result in
significant ROI, which put the entire automation program in question.

Not wanting to repeat that experience, the team decided that it shouldn’t simply move forward
with whatever automation candidates were on the table. Instead, the team took the time and effort
to develop a programmatic approach to identify, measure, and prioritize candidates based on the
organization’s long-term business strategy. Working with Deloitte Risk and Financial Advisory, the
team first developed guidelines around what qualifies as a good candidate for automation as well
as a methodology for measuring complexity vs. value. The team then engaged a cross-section of
people from business, IT, risk, and strategy to align on these methodologies and to bring in the
qualitative measures of success unique to the organization.

The result
By aligning the company around methodologies for measuring and prioritizing automation
candidates, the team was able to avoid internal friction around the pilot choices. And, by applying
those methods to the candidates on the table, the team was able to pilot automations that resulted
in true value to the organization. In the end, the team not only delivered a winning set of pilots, it set
their organization up for automation at scale and continued success.

So what’s the bottom line?

Putting a structured automation assessment and prioritization process in place can enhance the success of
your early automation deployments—a critical component to building a strong and successful automation
program. It can also provide a road map for you to expand and accelerate automation across the enterprise.
In the long term, organizations that use this approach should be better positioned to leverage automation
to create disruption and achieve transformative change—providing a significant advantage in an increasingly
competitive market.

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 At the intersection of control, speed, and agility:
How to optimize enterprise automation
at scale with a center of excellence

Think the robots are coming? They’re already here. In fact, robots or some form of automation are expected to
complete more than half the work that’s done on Earth by 2025.1

Clearly, process automation is no longer a novelty. There are tremendous, demonstrated returns in efficiency
and human capacity to be gained—making automation a fundamental expectation for an organization’s
management, customers, vendors, employees, and shareholders alike.

Given automation’s power and potential, what could go wrong? If automation initiatives careen across your
organization, you could end up with a massive traffic jam. A way to avoid backups and maintain control is by
implementing a center of excellence (CoE)—a traffic cop of sorts that’s essential to speeding and scaling your
enterprise automation efforts.

Welcome to rush hour

As organizations race to harness the promise of automation technologies, they introduce new risks to the
enterprise. And absent proper governance and ongoing education, this can result in a massive snarl-up with:
• Overwhelmed technology resources who can’t keep up with requests to scope, build, and maintain
automation initiatives
• Tangled software vendor contracts, each with its own licensing terms, costs, and skill sets required
for development
• Lack of visibility into automation results, which slows opportunities to optimize similar processes and
realize return on investment (ROI)
• Fragmented training and education, which makes standardization nearly impossible

After a few failures, many organizations begin to lose confidence in automation technologies. A general sense
of discouragement may start to permeate the organization and momentum slows. What typically happens
next? Gridlock. No results, no return.

Who’s at the wheel?

Despite the risks associated with automation, many organizations aren’t necessarily building the right
structures, processes, and automation road maps to govern and manage their enterprise-wide
automation efforts.

During Deloitte’s April 2018 Dbriefs webcast, more than 1,500 finance professionals responded to a poll noting
that the responsibility for owning and governing digital technologies, including automation, is localized within
information technology (IT) departments (38.9 percent) or fragmented across each department that uses the
digital technology (15 percent).

1
World Economic Forum, "Future of Jobs Report 2018," September 2018, [Link]

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That’s an issue for several reasons. Giving ownership solely to IT erodes the effectiveness of automation as a
tool designed for and used by non-developer business professionals. Conversely, fragmented ownership
across departments prevents organizations from managing and monitoring value capture. And it impedes
efforts to consolidate data and lessons learned—impacting the ability to leverage this information to inform
and speed future endeavors.

The case for command and control

A more strategic approach can help organizations manage the risks associated with enterprise automation.
We believe the key to success is implementing a CoE that can enhance control while increasing automation ROI
and protecting value.

Creating a CoE can assist executives in defining ownership of activities across all automation avenues. It can
also help structure the governance of automation, increase the benefits of automation, and empower a risk-
controlled environment.

Center of excellence responsibilities

Here are some common CoE command and control responsibilities:

Plan and align

• Deploy ongoing opportunity analysis processes, standards, and guidelines for determining potential ROI
• Perform ongoing risk assessments
• Create and maintain an organizational design strategy and operating model
• Maintain and run CoE functions

Enable processes and controls

• Manage design of processes around automation
• Ensure security and controls standards are established and followed
• Create policies and procedures that direct automation development
• Integrate a robust testing program for unit, integration, and user acceptance testing
• Create and organize training and knowledge sharing programs
• Define a change management process for automation

Protect and monitor

• Develop action plans for issue identification and resolution
• Enable supervision and compliance teams through tools and dashboards
• Align automation software vendor contracts
• Rationalize frameworks, data extraction, and digitizing the testing of controls
• Assess potential impacts of changes to IT systems to automation
• Maintain business continuity and IT disaster recovery plans
• Monitor the performance of automation and define processes for ongoing refinement
• Establish key performance indicators (KPIs) to measure the success of the CoE, including:
– Redeployment of resources
– Purchasing power regarding software licensing fees
– Number of training hours hosted and/or available
– Web hits to internal website
– Implementation cycle times
– Cost savings/hours resulting from automation
– Cost to automate per process
– Retirement of manual detective controls in favor of preventive automated controls
– Cyber protections unique to automation technology

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Something to keep in mind:
Giving complete control to a CoE is essential to identifying large-scale automation use cases across business
lines and geographies. But multinational organizations may need to take a more “think global, act local”
approach. By adhering to the documentation, internal control, and development methodologies established
and governed by the CoE, business lines and markets can explore and pilot automation initiatives locally
through innovation “cells.” The result? Standardization and oversight without bottlenecks.

Acceleration in action
Governing and managing automation efforts
Creating a CoE was critical to helping one of our aerospace and defense clients govern and manage its
automation efforts:
• As cost pressures continued to mount, the client realized that it needed to become more efficient and
ramp up production significantly—and so it began to implement automation across the enterprise.
• In tandem, the client implemented a CoE at the core of its business to manage its automation journey
across operations, engineering, HR, and finance.
• By centrally controlling and managing automation using a CoE, the client is able to drive standardization,
provide guidelines and governance, and ensure business and operational readiness.

Grappling with post-merger integration challenges

A global client was grappling with post-merger integration challenges:
• While the organization was keen to reap the benefits of automation, it recognized early on that the
only way to gain funding for automation projects was to show its global CFO that it could operate as an
integrated business.
• To that end, the client implemented a CoE to build structure and process around how automation
technologies are deployed and scaled across the business.
• As a result, the client is better able to respond to automation priorities and leverage a process and
structure that objectively ranks priority candidate processes. Funding decisions can be made more
confidently knowing the relative value and complexity has been analyzed and only those automation
projects with the greatest potential return on investment and shortest payback period are elevated for
executive funding approval.

Put the pedal to the metal

Some executives may be concerned that a CoE will slow down their automation progress. In fact, it’s just the
opposite: A CoE can be an accelerant.

A CoE can enable rapid transformation while controlling associated risks, helping you to manage your
automation investments wisely and enabling you to operate and monitor your initiatives efficiently.

Companies that don’t organize their automation efforts around a CoE can still move forward. But they can’t do
it as efficiently or at scale—and they may be bypassed by speedier, more streamlined competitors.

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Building for performance:
Leveraging design thinking in
automation ROI strategy

Does this sound familiar? Last quarter, you were able to execute on your top 25 automation candidates,
based on your established criteria. These automated processes provided significant benefits, from freeing
up 25 percent of a critical employee’s time to significantly reducing the need for a vendor that costs your
organization thousands of dollars a year.

These are certainly success stories, and you plan to continue your automation journey. But collectively across
the automations, you’re not seeing the operational transformation you know is possible. Many organizations
that have implemented automation at scale are in the same position. They have realized significant returns
but are left wanting more: more value, more ROI, more impact. So how can you uncover new opportunities
or larger-scale transformation? And how can you position your automation programs for greater value—
right from the starting line?

The answer may lie in the use of design thinking—the discipline that consumer-focused companies have long
used to develop new products and services.

Learning from experience

Think about your favorite experiences as a consumer. Maybe it’s hailing a car using a ridesharing app or
renting a fabulous condo for your next vacation. It’s very likely that design thinking techniques went into
creating that experience. Simply put, design thinking (aka human-centered design is an immersive process
that helps organizations build leading products and services by looking beyond individual tasks (requesting a
car on your phone to the larger intended outcome (arriving at your destination.

Applied to automation, design thinking shifts the focus from individual business actions that accomplish
specific tasks to broader strategies that accomplish entire outcomes, resulting in more comprehensive
transformation and higher returns .

Let’s take a look at some design thinking techniques that can help you move from small-scale success to large-
scale transformation .

Bring people together

In the same way a consumer company might study its customers as they try to meet a need (like getting a
ride to a concert, companies can engage their employees to understand the actions they take to accomplish
business outcomes.

Take your accounts receivable team. To focus on a major outcome, say processing invoices for the month,
you should engage the people involved in the individual tasks leading to the outcome—from the employee
responsible for generating invoices to the teams responsible for following up on outstanding receivables, as
well as the managers and executives who oversee the entire process.

By bringing together a representative sample of these players, you can better understand the meaning behind
their actions, see the connections among their roles, and uncover opportunities for deeper automation.

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See the similarities
To achieve true transformation through automation, you should look beyond individual actions, to all of the
actions that make up a major outcome of a department. Only then can you identify what it could take to
automate a significant portion of that outcome.

Affinity clustering is a design thinking technique that sorts items according to similarity. Applied to automation,
this means identifying the actions that lead to a desired outcome.

Here’s how it works: Start with a prioritized list of automation candidates. Then, in a working session with a
cross-functional team, create clusters of automation candidates by desired end outcome or large business
goal. As trends emerge, prompt teams to discuss and rearrange their clusters, looking for connections.

As teams work through this process, they start to see clusters and groupings with a greater percentage of
high-value automation candidates. They may also find situations where including a seemingly low-value task
allows them to connect clusters of tasks and create end-to-end automations. By creating groupings of tasks
with the same intended outcome, teams can create combined automations with values much greater than
those of the same number of individual automated tasks.

Make a map
Once you’ve moved beyond a prioritized list of individual automation candidates—and settled on a set of
connected groups of tasks—it’s time to look across these processes and understand the who and why behind
the actions.

Journey mapping is a design thinking technique that can work well here. It’s a way to document and visualize
the people involved in the actions that make up the larger workflow—and uncover the meaning, desired
outcome, and pain points behind those people’s actions.

Applying this technique to automation, as you move from one person to the next in the journey, you
can deepen your understanding of what’s really happening within a process and why. The result? You may
be able to uncover additional opportunities for automation and process improvement both within and
between processes.

See the forest, not the trees

With a deep understanding of the journey toward a larger business goal, you can then work to identify the
true value of the individual processes within that journey.

This is where the whole can truly be greater than the sum of the parts. Previously, you may have automated
10 high-priority automation candidates that resulted in 10 individual success stories and 10 individual ROIs.

But by applying design thinking, you may find that a mix of six high-priority, three medium-priority, and one
low-priority candidate can drive individual returns and enable a business unit to reorganize. Bingo. You just
found a way to deliver a much higher net return.

So what’s the takeaway?

Design thinking can turbocharge automation value. By applying design thinking techniques across your
automation program, you can be better positioned to drive ROI exponentially, not incrementally. You can shift
your focus from reducing defects and cycle times to reimagining business outcomes. And that’s how you’ll get
out in front of your competitors.

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Going the distance:
Measuring the ROI of automation

Which sounds like a better approach?

Option A: You present your proposal for an enterprise automation program to your leadership team, focusing
on the ability to lower costs and potentially headcount.

Option B: You present your proposal for an enterprise automation program to your leadership team,
focusing on both the multiple benefits and opportunities saving employee time will create and also a host of
other benefits of automation, including the ability to:
• Gain better insights from data and processes
• Achieve process excellence and consistency
• Improve confidence in decision making, process auditability, and governance
• Better deploy your skilled workforce and boost engagement and morale
• Create true transformative change

It’s an easy choice—and one that’s increasingly critical for several reasons.

As the automation market matures, leadership teams are realizing that digital arbitrage and cost savings
achieved through automation are just the tip of the iceberg of value realization.

As a result, business leaders are looking beyond just tangible and quantifiable ROI and are making decisions
to approve and fund automation initiatives based on more holistic business cases that include additional
qualitative measures of success. They are looking to automation to increase the capacity and enrich
the careers of their highly skilled human capital (e.g., credentialed professionals, such as certified public
accountants, or others with advanced degrees). They are also keenly aware that having employees work in
concert with automation allows them to achieve greater process excellence and derive more insight and
value into the organization.

Automation at scale can turn leadership vision into a reality.

How can you capture ROI to maximize the mileage of your automation initiatives?

ROI = (Gain from investment – cost of investment) / cost of investment

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Simple? Not really. It’s important to understand what the “gain” really is and evaluate it across several
quantitative and qualitative measures:

Cost savings
Of course, cost savings is one logical place to start. Most organizations start by viewing automation as a pure
cost reduction initiative that can achieve significant savings by reducing time spent on highly transactional and
manual tasks.

Cost savings doesn’t just always mean a FTE reduction. There are tangible advantages to use automation in
processes to:
• Replace and improve the efficiencies of current technologies deployed, and
• Reduce reliance on contractors, contingent workforce, and insourcing work—currently outsourced—
by automating that work.

Because a license for automation technology typically costs less than the salary for an employee, the
commercial attractiveness of this approach is self-evident. In fact, the Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu Limited Third
Annual Global RPA survey, which attracted more than 400 responses from organizations around the world,
shows that 61 percent of respondents reported their expectations of cost reduction being met or exceeded
through RPA.

Consider episodic, seasonal, or incident-related work that is either hard to predict or difficult to resource.
Shifting work such as claim handling, processing, and billing from contingent workers to automated processes
can help organizations gain capacity and keep down costs.

Decreased cycle times and improved throughput and productivity

Automation technologies are designed to perform tasks faster than a person can, and they don’t require
sleep, breaks, or lunch—making 24/7 operations possible. Obviously, this means that by changing the nature
of when and how work is performed, automation enables organizations to do more in less time. But it also
delivers additional benefits in terms of human productivity and capacity.

An employee comes to work in the morning and spends the first four hours of her day aggregating
information and producing a report. Then she spends the last four hours analyzing the report and defining
the results. Using automation technology, the aggregation step of this process could be performed at 3:00
a.m. That way, the employee can begin analyzing the report as soon as she arrives, allowing for near-real-time
interpretation of results and enabling this skilled professional to serve as a business partner and strategic
advisor versus an administrator .

The result? Shorter cycle times, improved throughput, and a more strategic use of human capital.

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Scalability
Automation can also provide value through scalability of processes. Once a process is automated, it can
be replicated across the enterprise to other areas that perform the same or similar process with minimal
additional effort and cost. This can provide a tremendous benefit for largely decentralized organizations.

For example, one of our clients was performing thousands of manual journal entries per month. We helped
them build a pilot automation for an initial selection of those journal entries. Because the process and
activities for producing the first journal entry shared 80 percent of the same characteristics of the remaining
entries (including logging in to a reporting database, downloading data, producing a journal upload template,
and loading that template to the ERP), we were able to scale the automation across the rest of the population
of journal entries.

Looking beyond the individual pilot—to each of the additional processes that the automation could be
leveraged for to achieve broader scale—enabled the client to realize exponential ROI.

Improved quality
Unless there is a flaw in the program (a real risk that needs to be managed), well-designed automated
processes are programmed to follow rules and don’t make mistakes. Said another way, because there are
no humans involved in executing the process, there’s no risk of human error. And that makes for improved
quality, consistency, and reliability.

Case in point: One of our clients had a team that compared and reconciled financial statements to produce
reports for three audiences: one for investors, one for regulators, and one for the market. This manual
process took place 7 to 10 times per quarter, with the team comparing information line by line for accuracy.

Today, the client has automated this process. It happens more efficiently, of course. But it’s also more reliable
because there’s no risk of human error factored into the output.

Improved employee satisfaction and retention

The tasks and processes most suitable for automation are typically the ones employees enjoy least.
Employees relieved of these tasks can be refocused on more rewarding and higher value activities.

Many of our clients employ very smart people with advanced degrees and high-demand skill sets. When these
types of companies introduce automation, they are looking to leverage their employees’ capabilities to work
in concert with automation, driving process enhancements, better operational insights, and ultimately greater
value. They view automation as a way to help maximize the return on investment in their human capital. That’s
a win-win for employees and organizations alike.

Enhanced process insights

The tasks performed by automation can be monitored and recorded at each step, producing valuable data
and an audit trail that can guide further process improvement and also help with regulatory compliance.

For example, we recently helped a Fortune 500 company automate their credit and collection processes. The
company expected—and achieved—tangible savings. The automation enabled the team to identify then follow
up on 100 percent of its outstanding receivables in one day.

But the company also further transformed its operations by harnessing the data captured by the automation.
They found that they had access to new data generated by the automated process that could be analyzed

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and utilized to provide better insight into their customers—such as which customers had a propensity to
pay late, which customers’ master data needed updating, and which customers required more proactive
communication.

Now, the company is using data generated by the automated process to identify patterns and apply machine
learning to make better business decisions and drive sustainable working capital improvements.

Governance and control

Automation brings challenges and opportunities for governance and control. Automation can introduce
new risks into the organization and, absent proper governance and controls, can result in significant costs
and diminished ROI. However, automating a process can also create better governance and controls using
thoughtful and risk aware design.

Implementing well-designed processes to govern and manage enterprise-wide automation efforts can provide
big benefits. To achieve the benefits and manage the risk, a leading practice is to establish an automation
center of excellence (CoE) responsible for the overall governance of the automation journey, which is an
important step.

By building structure and process around how automation technologies are selected, designed, and deployed
across the enterprise, a CoE can manage not only the identification of processes to automate, but also the
quality and structure surrounding development and testing efforts, and the overall communication and
coordination of efforts with the various stakeholder groups involved (including functional process owners, IT,
audit, procurement, and business leadership).

As a result, standardized and defined processes can have built-in governance and controls checks to help
improve compliance, demonstrate auditability, and produce documentation to support a variety of uses.

The bottom line

Taking a strategic, holistic approach to identifying important value drivers for the organization can build a
more robust business case. Elevating the qualitative benefits brings increased cost savings, productivity,
scalability, quality, employee satisfaction and retention, process insights, and governance and controls.

After all, demonstrating how you’ll reduce costs through automation will certainly get you an audience with the
leadership team. But showing how automation can drive value and enable true transformational change will
get you the funding and support you’re after.

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 Leaning into the curves:
Automation lessons learned
from the driver’s seat

The demand for automation shows no signs of stopping. In fact, Gartner has found that global spending on
RPA software is estimated to reach $680 million in 2018 and is on pace to total to $2.4 billion in 2022.2 As
organizations rush to capitalize on the promise of automation, they may hit obstacles in the road that
prevent them from implementing automation with speed and at scale.

Based on our experience and projects completed with hundreds of automation initiatives across a wide range
of organizations, we’ve compiled a set of operating instructions that organizations can use to achieve speed,
scale, and safeguard the ROI based on a clear understanding of automation risks and returns.

Here’s a look at some of these lessons learned—including success stories of automation done well and
cautionary tales that foretell what can go wrong.

2
Gartner Press Release, "Gartner Says Worldwide Spending on Robotic Process Automation Software to Reach $680 Million in 2018," November 13, 2018,
[Link]

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Start at the top

Does your organization have a chief digital officer? If not, is there someone who has been identified as the
digital lead for your automation initiatives? What is his or her position and reporting relationship among other
executives? In our experience, having someone in this role is a good indicator that an organization is serious
about automation and has secured senior leadership support.

You can’t just allocate a couple of people and a few hundred thousand dollars and expect to realize significant
value from automation. Without senior leadership support and a digital lead, you may find yourself toiling
away on skunkworks projects behind closed doors. And that raises the risk of your budget being slashed and
your projects getting scuttled.

Conversely, with solid leadership and visibility in place, you can have more confidence that your automation
projects are tied to your organization’s strategic direction. You may be better positioned to secure appropriate
funding while setting defined targets for value capture and ROI. And you can gain the support of your peers
and reports, knowing its importance to the top brass and to business performance.

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Stop committing random acts of digital

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Get everybody ready to roll

Imagine this: Your company is implementing automations for a certain business area. And you’re pretty far
down the path—the roadmap is in place and the timeline is set. Then, someone on your team realizes that you
can’t complete your project because its success is dependent on a different IT project that hasn’t even begun.
So the whole thing gets scrapped.

Situations like this aren’t as rare as you might think. In our experience, many organizations often begin
automation initiatives in a vacuum—without a full appreciation for how automations will impact various
elements and infrastructure of your organization. Do yourself a favor: Take the time to identify and engage
all stakeholders that may be impacted by your automation initiative, up front. If you don’t, you could end up
wasting an exorbitant amount of time and energy.

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Avoid potholes

What if you built a bot in one part of the organization—and then found out that someone else built the
exact same bot in another pocket of the enterprise? That’s exactly what we see happening in some
companies, right now.

Without centralized governance, you run the risk of building the same bot elements in two places—or in five
or even 20 places. You also open yourself to new risks that go beyond just time and effort lost. Automations
that are developed and implemented without proper controls and monitoring could result in poor data that
impacts strategic decisions. And that can have disastrous consequences for the business.

To roll automation projects out at scale, organizations should consider a contained, controlled approach to
governing and managing them. We’ve found that implementing a center of excellence (CoE) is an important
factor to help achieve this success.

With a CoE in place, automation efforts belong to the organization instead of the individuals who built them,
enabling you to share leading practices and enhance control while increasing speed and ROI. This approach
works even if the organization chooses a decentralized approach to opportunity identification or works with
multiple partners for automation development—a centralized governance model maintains oversight, agility,
and consistency across the enterprise, helping save time and effort—resulting in new ways of doing business.
There is an opportunity to reduce the overall risk profile within your organization if the automation effort is
done correctly; otherwise you may end up with the elevated levels of risk caused by automation efforts.

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Go deep to find synergies

When clients are looking at their first set of automations, it’s common for them to say, “Let’s start by building
five small bots—one in each of five different departments.” Although executing multiple pilots is a logical place
to gain an initial support for automation across the organization, it’s not focused on scaling your efforts—and
likely won’t drive the full ROI the organization is after.

Consider focusing on a limited number of processes and then build for scale, then automating that sample
process across the organization. Using this approach can mean the difference between incremental and
exponential ROI.

For example, one client we worked with built a bot that turned a 13-minute process into a 20-second
process. While this is a significant time reduction, from an ROI perspective it may not have been worth the
time and effort it took to build the bot in the first place. But when the client applied this bot to the same
process across the organization, it was able to save 500 hours—every month. How’s that for exponential ROI?

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Remember the humans

As automation permeates the workplace, some companies lose sight of the human workforce. In fact, as
automation explodes, people skills such as critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving are more important
than ever .

While some organizations are increasingly using technology to automate existing processes, true pioneers
are radically rethinking work architecture to increase the value of both humans and machines—creating new
opportunities to organize work more effectively and redefine the human workforce’s skills and careers.

In our work with clients, we encourage them to think about how the work, the workplace, and the workforce
will change as a result of automation. By visualizing what a day in the life of workers will be like in this brave
new world, organizations can shift their focus to creating value for customers and meaningful work for people.

In many cases, we’ve found that automation, done and communicated correctly, actually improves morale.
The tasks and processes most suitable for automation are typically the ones employees find most mundane
and least satisfying. Employees relieved of these tasks can focus on more rewarding and higher value
activities that involve intuition, judgment, creativity, persuasion, and problem-solving—the type of work that
makes for happier human beings.

Clearly stated automation ambitions give people

the opportunity to understand where they can
push boundaries to drive innovation.

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Think beyond one automation technology at a time

Have you heard of the law of the instrument? That’s the one that says, “If the only tool is a hammer, everything
starts to look like a nail.” This law is especially true when it comes to automation technologies.

Because robotic process automation (RPA) is “hot” right now, some organizations see RPA as the cure for all
their ailments—and they want to start building RPA bots as soon as possible. We think a better approach
is to identify processes that need to be improved and then decide which technology can be best utilized to
improve them.

For example, we recently worked with a client where we discovered that, instead of RPA, a small piece of
natural language generation (NLG) could do wonders. On another engagement, we found that through
machine learning, the company was able to improve predictability and operations based on data they receive
over time, enabling the organization to identify trends that inform strategic decisions.

Although RPA is the most common automation technology, there are many technologies on the tool belt. So
start with a focus on the process itself and be sure to consider all the technology options from the get-go. A
mix-and-match approach may be the right solution—it should be an element of your overall digital strategy.

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Avoid analysis paralysis

After reading about the pitfalls and missteps chronicled above, you might be inclined to pause your
automation program. Our perspective: not tackling automation can be just as risky as approaching it the
wrong way.

Many companies, even those that have successfully scaled automation programs and built internal
capabilities to run their own programs, realize the benefits of consulting with a trusted adviser. Leveraging
the knowledge and experience of your adviser can help you achieve transformation, accelerate
performance, and shift your organization onto the automation autobahn.

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Contact us

Is your organization ready to begin automation? Not tackling automation can be just as risky as approaching
it the wrong way. With Deloitte’s knowledge and experience, you can achieve transformation, accelerate
performance, and shift your organization onto the automation autobahn.

Valeriy Dokshukin
Partner | Digital Risk Management Solutions Leader
Deloitte Risk and Financial Advisory
Deloitte & Touche LLP
vdokshukin@[Link]

Contributing authors
Michael Koppelmann
Senior Manager
Deloitte Risk and Financial Advisory
Deloitte & Touche LLP
mkoppelmann@[Link]

AJ Maxwell
Senior Manager
Deloitte Risk and Financial Advisory
Deloitte & Touche LLP
amaxwell@[Link]

Nathan Newell
Senior Manager
Deloitte Risk and Financial Advisory
Deloitte & Touche LLP
natnewell@[Link]

Tom Densevich
Senior Manager
Deloitte Risk and Financial Advisory
Deloitte & Touche LLP
tdensevich@[Link]

Coleman Rowland
Partner
Deloitte Risk and Financial Advisory
Deloitte & Touche LLP
corowland@[Link]

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