Interview: The automation journey of Credit Suisse and their key to success in RPA

René Konings: Credit Suisse (CS) started their journey with building an RPA factory led by an external company, luckily, this failed fast. As the business case was managed centrally quite some processes without a real business value were automated. After the company changed their strategy from ONE BANK to a federated strategy a Centre of Excellence was initiated.

Most important for this CoE is the ability to balance the need for a centralised framework with the individual needs of domains/functions, provide oversight and guidance without mandating all aspects of RPA in the bank and determine which RPA related elements should be centralised and which left in the domain.

Key in the governance is that the Business Case is owned by the divisions/functions. This improves the quality of the exploration of processes to be migrated and delivers a much better ROI than when the business case is owned centrally.

René Konings: Almost all aspects regarding RPA are governed by existing policies and standards, a specific RPA policy was developed to identify RPA as a separate discipline rather than categorize it under IT application or EUC. Additionally, an RPA governance board has been initiated to cover specific topics not covered by any of the other authorities within the bank.

René Konings: A low as possible central budget is invested to maintain the Centre of Excellence and the IT ownership of the RPA toolkit. All other funding is aligned with the business case which is owned by the divisions/corporate functions.

René Konings: Exploration is done decentralised, which puts the decision which processes are automated with the owner of the business case.

René Konings: Integrated Automation above any of the single disciplines mentioned will be key to the business value creation.

René Konings: Key is that they understand that RPA is not an isolated technology and should be used in a fit for purpose manner. They might also take away one or two practical advised how to govern RPA and Business Automation Solutions as a whole.

René Konings: My expectation would be a lively interactive forum in which experiences are shared and of which I can walk away with one or two items which can improve my organisation

René Konings:Next to Horses for Sources and my LinkedIn timeline I am mainly occupied reading articles of Professor Erik Brynjolfsson and Professor Andrew McAfee on digital transformation, their concepts like matrix of change can help organisations understand how transformation can be structured.

René Konings is speaking at Cognitive Finance 2019!

Webinar Topic: RPA as part of a bigger picture – Arguments for a holistic approach to automation at Credit Suisse

Description:

• From vision to first automation use cases – Creating the RPA Factory
• Strategic shifts and changes towards the current RPA program with a central CoC as technological enabler and decentralized implementation across different business units
• Best practice use & business cases and the respective benefits of intelligent process automation
• Measuring the overall success of RPA at Credit Suisse
• Lessons learned and further steps