Top financial service company's botathon challenge results in RPA ideas that could save $1.5M

ABOUT

As one of the world’s fastest payment processing network, this financial services corporation uses technology along with its expertise to make transactions between consumers, merchants and businesses simple and safe.

THE CHALLENGE

To help keep up with the ever-changing digital landscape, the company holds a yearly challenge, giving employees the opportunity to come up with new ideas to incorporate into the business. As part of a CEO mandate to drive Artificial Intelligence (AI), the company partnered with Automation Anywhere starting with Robotic Process Automation (RPA). Collaboration was key as Automation Anywhere aligned an approach leveraging its successful botathon offering to partner and assist with their Automation Challenge. ‍

Instead of having full two or three-day botathon events in their regional offices across three continents, Automation Anywhere helped them devise a more low-touch, “office hours” concept, providing access to the challenge globally over the course of 75 days. Automation Anywhere issued 1,500 Bot Creator licenses, providing the tools to help employees bring their RPA ideas to life.

Since the beginning of the company’s Automation Challenge, employee logins have increased tenfold (evidenced by 46 logins with a peak of 469), with more than 1,000 employees introduced to how RPA technology can be used.

Most employee developers came from Operations and Technology, Finance, Data Services, and Cyber Intelligence teams with participation ranging from US, India, and Australia.

At the end of the challenge, the company was able to rapidly accelerate its digital transformation journey through wider and deeper RPA adoption, expansion of digital change at the enterprise level, and implementation of tools for RPA enablement, continuous learning and governance. Out of over 100 ideas submitted, more than two-thirds are workable RPA solutions which will provide the company a cost savings of $1.5M once implemented.

1,200+

Employees in 13+ global offices participated

105+

Ideas submitted

1/3

Of Top submissions considered for implementation in the next year

$1.5M

Projected cost savings

28,000

Prospective hours saved

1,500

Bot Creator licenses issued

"The challenge was a smashing success!”

— Executive Vice President, AI quote

"Congratulations on a successful Automation Challenge event. It was a pleasure to partner with Automation Anywhere!”

— Vice President, Analytics & Metrics quote

"This low-touch, high transformation approach, with few logistical hurdles of travel or time investment by the company’s thousands of employees spending multiple days in botathons, accelerates their RPA journey and positions our partnership for something larger.”

— David Bakke, Strategic Account Manager at Automation Anywhere quote

CHALLENGE DETAILS

Travel and expenses were kept to a minimum across both organizations (less than $15,000). Resource investments were fractional across a dozen employees between both organizations. The ‘office hours’ were 1-2 hours, once a week, with a U.S. based session and an offshore based session.
Employees empowered to think about automation, generate new ideas, and see how easy it is to build bots in their own environment, thereby setting up the potential for transformation at scale.
Company provided an avenue to employees to upskill and integrate Digital RPA DNA into their roles while validating Automation Anywhere’s platform to scale across the enterprise.

Processes Automated