THE WHOLE STORY
As Cynthia Holmecki, Stanley Black & Decker’s Intelligent Automation Solutions Global Leader, put it, the company “decided to eat the elephant all at once” when it came to automation. The Center of Excellence was set up immediately as the company tried to do the federated model, train other groups and set them out to automate. There wasn’t a good core governance set up yet, and things didn’t work out so well. Individuals who had trained and were interested in automation were only doing that job part time, and some ended up leaving for full-time jobs in automation elsewhere.
Currently the company is trying to re-establish the federated model, training people to do things they were not able to do before and help expand their careers.
The Center of Excellence lives in the Finance Department, with partners in IT who handle the technical aspects and environments. To date there have not been any security or other issues.
During Day 1 and 2 of close, automation runs on 7 or 8 Runners at a time. Prior to RPA, the Finance team was staying until late at night. Now, the process runs much faster and employees can go home at the end of the regular business day. Employees have given feedback this gives them better job satisfaction.
"For 2018, the goals for my team was to reach $800,000 with a stretch goal of $1M. By the end of 2018 we had achieved $3.4 million in savings. Of course, that did set us up to have incredible goals for 2019, but we are well on our way because many of those automations will continue to provide those savings year over year.”
— Cynthia Holmecki, Global Leader Intelligent Automation Solutions, Stanley Black & Decker
