Vodafone is a British multinational telecommunications company headquartered in London. It predominantly operates services in Asia, Africa, Europe, and Oceania. Read further to learn from Heath Barclay, a product owner of the automation squad for Vodafone, about RPA at the Vodafone New Zealand (VNZ) branch.
VNZ partners with Tech Mahindra at the delivery of robotic process automation and has been exceedingly successful. The real measure of success for the last financial year was to see how the automation squad could take the automation program and take it wider within the business. VNZ wanted to get away from just looking at the customer operation space and show the wider Vodafone team how the automation team could apply robotics to their business units. Heath emphasized that they really needed to understand that the biggest resistance that they have met making a robotics program wider was the people factor. People were suspicious and thinking that robotics was simply going to replace them in their roles. But in fact, it gives people the ability to do more because it takes away that low-value tasks, the thing that takes up a lot of time but really is not requiring a lot of thought from the user like, for instance, the double keying with the multiple systems.
Heath and his colleagues looked at which target group could they picked in Vodafone New Zealand, what would be a group that a lot of people wouldn’t necessarily make a connection to. And they picked HR.
To this point, there has been a huge success in working with the VNZ HR team and taking them on a journey. The philosophy they followed was “crawl, walk, run”. They started with something simple to build a lot of confidence and from there started attacking more complex opportunities. Eventually, the success generated in HR then was able to be leveraged in sales and in technology.
