Up to 30% of repetitive office work can be easily automated. The tools are there. RPA, AI, low code, no code are maturing fast and are being installed across most big organizations. So why would we have to have people doing work that a machine can do today?  What's holding us back from automation? Do CIOs and CFOs can work together hand in hand to accelerate this process?

On Wednesday, January 19, CIONET brought together more than 700 digital leaders from all around the world to discuss these urging questions. The event sponsored by UiPath and moderated by Hendrik Deckers and Armand Angeli, director of DFCG - CFOAX, featured a panel of  distinguished speakers who shared their valuable insights on the automation journey they have already taken:

Xavier Baraton, Head of Finance & Administration at Carrefour France,

Gwen van Berne, former CFO, Member of the Global Board of Directors at IMA | Institute of Management Accountants,

Christa Koenen, Chief Information Officer & Chief Digital Officer and Member of the Board of Management at DB Schenker,

Eulàlia Nadal, Chief Corporate Officer & CIO at Gbfoods,

Hitesh Ramani, CAO at UiPath,

Agostino Scornajenchi, Chief Financial Officer at Terna SpA Group.

Towards the fully automated enterprise

Roger Camrass, director of research at CIONET, started the conference by running through a list of conclusions of the recently published report „Towards the fully automated enterprise”.  He highlighted that the COVID pandemic has compressed the digital developments from a 20-year cycle down to probably no more than just two years. The way we work, the way we shop, and the way we live our lives have changed dramatically. Incumbents have to cope with that while being challenged by aggressive fast moving new-comers and start-ups.   

As to Roger, traditional efforts to modernize legacy cultures, processes, and systems have not delivered the necessary leap forward. Intelligent automation may be the only way forward. In this context CFOs and CIOs can collaborate more effectively to drive this change by financing Centers of Excellence; introducing common standards and platforms to enable full scale industrialisation of RPA; and educating the business in the use of RPA and AI, including low code and no code approaches.

We're in a relatively embryonic stage of a new phase of automation. But we are being called upon as digital leaders to accelerate this: the CFO and the CIO have to work hand in hand to essentially invest, to govern, to educate and support, he said.

Where are we now and what are the drivers of change

Our speakers pointed out that the major drivers of change are their customers and employees. The first ones have become much more demanding; they look for a frictionless experience in everything they do. On the other hand, hybrid working has become the norm that sets a whole range of new tasks. The so-called “great resignation” has also had an effect on the war for talent within large corporations as well as the shortage of digital skills.

And there are other drivers of change, just to mention the growing focus on the carbon neutral agenda or rising inflation as well as shortages of products such as cars and white goods.

These factors combined with an uncertain economic environment call for organizational agility and higher levels of automation. Yet, most companies are in the middle of the process of maturing and improving it.

Early deployment of RPA has been in back-office functions such as accounting and finance. For example, Carrefour has 220 robots within its finance function. There are examples of deployment in the front office such as Chatbots in customer call centers. Gbfood, a Spanish multinational company in the food processing industry, is building a Competence Center to expand the use of automation to other areas like operations. However, few companies have yet industrialized RPA on a scale reaching 100% penetration of robots and employees. 

There is a large potential for automation, said Christa Koenen, Chief Information Officer & Chief Digital Officer and Member of the Board of Management at DB Schenker during the panel discussion. In many roles, people are so bogged down with all these processes, with all this manual and repetitive work, that they're not actually doing the analysis, the work that was actually intended for their roles. So, I think there's a huge potential for automation, probably larger than 30%.

Challenges for adoption

The tools are there. Yet, the real challenge is to accelerate their adoption. The main question is how to do this? 

For Hitesh Ramani, CAO at UiPath one of the biggest barriers to automation is the fact that companies often don't know exactly what to automate and how to automate it. 

Corporations have to use assistance from several technologies, such as task mining and task capture process mining, but they also need to use their employee base to identify automation opportunities, Mr. Ramani said.

Building on that, Xavier Baraton, Head of Finance & Administration at Carrefour France, emphasized the need to involve employees in the process, especially when we facing a „great resignation”. 

We need to show people that there is an interest for them in automation, that they will not be outside of the company [once it happens]. And [show them] that we need to bring each competency together in order to accelerate, Mr. Barton said.

Many companies are also encountering deployment barriers such as insufficient investment funds and legacy issues (processes, applications and systems).  Executives are under pressure to deliver rapid results or what we call the ‘quick fix’ versus end-to-end process redesign that can take 2-3 years.

Another important factor, emphasized by Eulàlia Nadal, Chief Corporate Officer & CIO at Gbfoods,  is to educate the business. 

There is still a lot of work to be done on training or educating our business colleagues on what is required to make automation efficient, because not all the processes can be automated unless you set certain rules of the game, Ms. Nadal said.

How can CIOs and CFOs work together?

In response to the leading question of the conference, Christa Koenen answered that CIOs and CFO together have a very broad view of the company, as they look at it from two different perspectives. If they join forces, they will be able to solve many problems.

This was confirmed by Agostino Scornajenchi, Chief Financial Officer at Terna SpA Group 

Both sides have to be open and proactive, and should not build walls between different functions, he said.

Important is as well to invest within the businesses in automation pilots, and to create centers of excellence, where new tools and techniques can be exploited and demonstrated. As to Eulàlia Nadal and Agostino Scornajenchi monitoring and measuring projects' outcomes at all stages remains key. 

From time to time we hear that CFOs are controllers and CIOs are innovators, but I don't believe it at all. I think that if a CIO is not a controller of the flow of data, we are dead. And if the CFO is not trying to innovate, to reinvent, to change our processes in order to protect the results, then we are dead as well, concluded Xavier Baraton.

WATCH the recording of the CIONEXT: