RPA at Uber

Uber is an American mobility-as-a-service provider with 101 million monthly active users and operations in over 900 metropolitan areas worldwide. Its services include ride-hailing, food delivery, package delivery, couriers, freight transportation, electric bicycle & motorized scooter rental via a partnership with Lime, and ferry transport in partnership with local operators. In the United States, Uber has a 68% market share for ride-sharing and a 26% market share for food delivery.

Uber has been so prominent in the sharing economy that commoditization of service industries using computing platforms has been referred to as Uberization, and several startups have described their offerings as “Uber for X” which means If X is an industry, then a company being the “Uber of X” is considered to be a disruptor of that industry.

MOTIVATION
The company has been experiencing exponential growth across the globe and one of the biggest challenges for such rapidly growing companies is containing costs, especially staffing. Uber needed automation to reduce the need for additional hiring and normalize global operations. For example, invoice processing in the United States requires different procedures than in other regions such as the UK or China.

VENDOR
For the last three years, Uber has been working with Accenture to automate business processes. With help from Accenture, Uber has developed a global strategy built around UiPath RPA to keep operations in sync.

CHALLENGE
One of the challenges Accenture faced in automating Uber’s operations was the company’s internal structure. Uber is still a young and dynamic organization with a very flat organizational structure, so there are multiple autonomous decision-makers.

AUTOMATION JOURNEY
Like most companies starting their RPA journey, Uber started automating financial processes. In fact, the Accenture team still reports to the CFO. After three years, Uber has more than 100 automations in production, which saves Uber an estimated $10 million per year.

As part of bot deployment, Uber has implemented rigorous security and governance protocols. They also have created dashboards and advanced automation to provide senior management with access to data for ROI analytics.

RPA at Uber continues to grow thanks to three pillars of success:

Executive sponsorship early in the process.
Having a dedicated intake team to manage processes across all geographies and show Uber what they didn’t know about RPA processes.
Uber has a large team that applies three pillars to RPA development-intake, depth testing, and support.

BENEFITS