EY RPA services to help fit for the future rather than be fashioned on the past?

From left: EY Sri Lanka Partner Hiranthi Fonseka, Manager – Assurance, RPA and Analytics for Reporting Johann Anderson and EY India LLP Partner - Consulting Kamalanand Nithianandan 

Ernst & Young (EY), recently hosted a webcast for its financial institution clients to discuss how to maximise the automation potential using globally-accepted best practices and frameworks. 

During this session which was facilitated by EY Sri Lanka Partner Hiranthi Fonseka, EY Sri Lanka Manager – Assurance, RPA and Analytics for Reporting Johann Anderson and EY India LLP. Partner – Consulting Kamalanand Nithianandan discussed their approach to implementing automation solutions based on EY Automation Life Cycle Framework. 

To implement automation successfully, organisations must focus on all phases within the automation journey. The webcast evolved around enlightening its participants on how EY leading practice framework allow EY clients to navigate through every key aspect of a successful implementation of Automation. 

The most important phase of the Automation journey is ‘process selection’. Only afterwards can a deep-dive analysis be performed based on identified processes through studying key process characteristics for automation e.g. percentage of exceptions, data standardisation, level of conditional/logical statements etc. Both these phases discussed would be looked at during the inception of adopting automation for the business. 

RPA would mainly work well for processes which are routine, and rule based. Thereby commencing an automation project with a proper in-depth process study will contribute to mitigating unforeseen risks such as longer implementation periods or inability to develop the solution in line with the company’s requirement.

Based on the Automation Life Cycle Framework, EY teams then performs a ‘Process Discovery Analysis’. It provides guidance to financial institutions with an already implemented RPA solution to scale up their RPA bot and help maximise full efficiency. 

Despite having implemented RPA, scaling-up the automation use cases and rolling it out successfully across the board is a constant barrier for many FIs. Fonseka explained during her session: “Using EY team’s approach, financial institutions can successfully move towards a transformed Automation led business covering a wide range of processes to be automated across all departments”.

Anderson stated: “The most important phase in the automation journey is selecting the right processes for automation by getting it right the first time.”

EY team’s approach to RPA implementation helps to re-enable businesses which even had deferred automation – to see value in the form of ROI. 

EY analysis performed comes from its globally accepted best practices and frameworks that will provide a clear path to roll out a large-scale implementation support. Based on the identified implementation plan, EY clients can decide on the number of processes they would want to incorporate in the automation journey and accordingly realise the ROI they would achieve. 

Furthermore, EY teams offer advice to first-time adaptors on prioritisation of the processes to be implemented in the best sequential order so that the business will achieve a hyper-automated implementation process (quickest solution). 

EY organisation offers Centre of Excellence (COE) services to the financial institutions that go through the entire automation life cycle as its final phrase. This means, help establish a committee within the business that will manage and carry forward the RPA automation journey once EY teams deploys the solutions. This mainly is applicable for businesses that adapt automation on a large scale. These types of businesses have multiple processes automated to run at preset timings during the day. 

EY COE experience comes with governance, leading practices and EY’s own change experience initiatives which help ensure this large-scale project is managed based on global standards with a core team identified and trained to run the COE. Nithianandan discussed in detail how a COE can be established and stated that he has been responsible for establishing over 50 COEs.

EY teams also discussed its process excellence capabilities to standardise and improve processes. Since EY teams are professional services provider having experience in multiple domains, its understanding and experience in processes brings immense value to automation. This contributes to designing the automated solution of processes using the highest process excellence with a strong foundation established to commence the automation. 

The audience was able to take home key aspects on EY Automation Life Cycle and how using frameworks and leading practices could generate accelerated success in automation. Further, guidance was provided on where best to use RPA and the types of technologies which can also be used for automation. EY teams elaborated how using its Automation Life Cycle Framework as a key solution could help transform financial businesses towards an automation-led business.

For further details on future webinars, please reach out to Hiranthi Fonseka via [email protected].