On Tuesday 10th September we held the third meeting of the Digital Network of the Shared Services Forum. Once again our focus returned to RPA which continues to be a subject of keen interest to our membership and, this time out, we were hosted by Michelle Thorpe and her team at the Co-op who have been implementing robotics across a number or processes in recent months. We had strong interest in this session, having to turn people away because of overbooking, and, despite some inevitable late call-offs, we had really good representation to hear what Michelle and her team had to say.
The focus of the session was very strongly based around ‘the real story of RPA implementation’ as the core RPA team at Co-op (Dave Fidler, Alyson McIntee and Paul Wilkins) took us through their experiences both good and bad. We learned about how they had used third parties to help them educate and train their team, but always with the intention that the expertise would sit longer term within the Coop. We learned about the relationships they had to build both with their business stakeholders and also their IT colleagues to ensure success. We learned about how they identified and selected processes – or parts of processes – suitable for automation (and occasionally how they came to the realisation that processes were not as suitable as they first thought) and we learned about what they needed to do to sustain their robots once implemented. These practical insights and experiences absolutely reflect everything we want this network to be about – real stories with real learnings that we can all take something from.
After lunch Michelle rounded off with some lessons learnt and we had an open forum to share some RPA experiences before thoughts turned to the annual conference and possible topics for both that day and into 2020. We have some good ideas around this and over the next couple of weeks will be planning that out and will shared more with all the network members. Once again, thank you to Michelle and her team for a fantastic day and Anne Charlotte.
Great feedback from the event, including the following:
"Huge thankyou to Michelle Thorpe, Dave Fidler and the rest of the Co-op team for hosting an RPA session today , as part of the Shared Services Forum UK. Very impressed with what you guys have managed to do in such a short space of time." Dan Balshaw - Legacy & Future Technologies Solution Owner at Sainsbury's Supermarket
"At the Co-op today with Shared Services Forum. Really interesting hearing about their transformation journey and applying Robotics to HR and Payroll processes". Michelle Harding MCIPP - Payroll Control Manager at Sodexo.
Please visit the resources section to download the all the attached documents:
Our next digital network meeting will take place on the 20th of November, day 1 of our annual conference at Aintree Racecourse. Details on agenda and registration to follow.
