Published on the 26/03/2019 | Written by Heather Wright

Perpetual Guardian, ADHB and Westpac serve up lessons on automating…

When Auckland District Health Board wound down their first automation trial recently, staff held a leaving party for Velox – the little bot had, after all, been part of their team for four weeks.

Federico Herrera, Auckland District Health Board (ADHB) head of product and digital enablement, says the farewell was indicative of the positive impact the e-referrals automation pilot had on the team.

“People often get worried about whether bots are going to replace their jobs, but clearly, it wasn’t seen like that.”

Key to that was running the pilot and the bot alongside the e-referrals team and ensuring the team were part of the process.

While the pilot was successful – ADHB is now in a procurement process for automation – Herrera, who is among the speakers at the Automation for Business Conference in Auckland in May, admits it has given ADHB plenty to think about.

“A human actor can handle poor quality data efficiently whereas a bot is much more black and white.”

“One of the debates we will have moving on is whether you automate a broken process or try to fix it first – it doesn’t really matter if a process is a little bit clunky or inefficient because you can just scale up and throw more compute resources at it and it can still process high volumes.

“But if you try to fix the process while implementing automation, you are dealing with two variables.”

The pilot further exposed the importance of high-quality data.

“A human actor can handle poor quality data efficiently whereas a bot is much more black and white and if the data doesn’t come through in a particular structure or format, the bot just stops. Then you need to build additional logic in the bot to handle data quality and that is where you can spend a lot of time trying to programme in those variables.”

For ADHB the format of some data proved to be a headache for Velox (Latin for ‘swift’ or ‘rapid’). Cleaning up the source data would pave the way for faster automation, Herrera notes.

He says in hindsight, e-referrals, which comes with around 70 different services that referrals might be directed to, each with their own subtle differences, was probably not the best area to start with for RPA.

“It’s actually a very big space to tackle, where we have a lot of people here who are spending time manually moving data from one legacy system to another.

“That’s something that from a process perspective to document and understand takes two seconds and could save five hours a week for someone. There are lots of examples like this that make sense to focus on, particularly from a pilot perspective.”

He says focusing on simpler processes could have created shorter pilots and enabled the DHB to start the procurement process even sooner.

He’s also wary of the potential for RPA to be used to further sweat out-of-date infrastructure, noting governance is needed to ensure ‘we’re automating the right things and not introducing more risks’.

RPA and cognitive hybrid models
Over at Perpetual Guardian, it was the introduction of a four-day working week productivity policy that drove automation through the business.

Willem van der Steen, head of digital and IT at the Kiwi trust business, says the push for shorter working weeks drove the need for added efficiencies to enable the business to continue to grow. Perpetual Guardian has now completed two automation projects – one to handle financial reconciliations and one to harvest data from discrete systems for tax returns for trusts – and expects to complete another four or five in the next six months.

Van der Steen says the company is now looking towards cognitive technologies to further drive automation for the business.

“If you have identified a number of processes that you want to automate you probably find that it is very good for rule-based automation – ‘if this, then, if that, then’. Anything that requires a bit more, becomes a bit of a challenge, you need to hand over to humans or you need to have another level of tech that can pick up the gap,” he says.

Scaling up requires adding levels of reasoning and for companies to work out how to transition into the more complex processes without slowing the business down or completely redesigning it.

But that, he admits, is ‘a lot of work’.

“The biggest problem is not introducing the new technology but getting rid of the old technology and taking the data across that we need.

“With the state of technology nowadays you can just whip up whatever applications you need in a cloud-based environment and start running it. But you need to make sure you can take your data across,” he says noting that requiring staff to work in two separate systems in tandem for a couple of years is just not an option.

“It’s very important you have a viable alternative for all of the core business functions that integrate fully with a way forward and that you have some sort of stopgap integration with your existing legacy.”

Funding agile
Also speaking at Automation for Business is Mike Asbridge, Westpac transformation director, who will be talking about how agile working requires changes to the finance side of businesses.

Westpac’s digital and IT teams have been working in an agile manner for several years, and the company recently expanded agile more widely through the company. In doing so, Asbridge says Westpac also looked more closely at how finance could better support tribes and squads to be more agile and customer-focused.

For Westpac the changes have included moving to a quarterly business process. “It’s all about providing a direct line of sight from your high-level corporate strategy done at a board level, right through to what the actual squads and tribes have in the backlog and are working on in a day-to-day basis,” Asbridge says.

“We do that through objectives and key results, or OKRs, with objectives aligned with the company’s goals and desired outcomes and then the key results measuring how we are progressing against those.”

Teams no longer need to focus on capex versus opex spend, with Asbridge noting ‘money is just money’.

“We’re taking the accounting treatment back into finance, so they don’t even need to consider what happens to it once they’ve built something. We remove the shackles of accounting treatment so they can focus on delivering what’s most valuable to the customer.”

The Automation for Business conference will be held on May 23 in Auckland. Early bird pricing is available until Friday, March 29.