Quotes every automation leader needs to know about CoEs

Whether you’re an aspiring automation leader or a skilled veteran, we all hope to achieve one common goal: a truly innovative center of excellence (CoE).

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We put together a list of quotes from industry leaders to inspire you while building or growing your own automation CoE. Pick your favorites (or all of them, we won't tell), and try implementing them into your automation strategy.

An automation operating model is critical

The automation operating model [AOM] was laid out so we could propel ourselves. We’re at 40 automations right now, we’re in the works of creating 80 more automations in this next year. We’ll be at 120 really quickly. The AOM is critical…It is the living document of how you go and go fast. It’s also allowed us to have immense quality…We’re at 98% up time on all our automations, meaning they don’t go down, and that’s because of the AOM we set up. And the natural progression is going to be how you take it to citizen developers.

Cristina Secrest, Process Artificial Intelligence & Automation - GPS Automation Leader, EY

Watch the full interview with Secrest:

Key takeaway for leaders

If you want to play the long game, then you need a game plan. Your AOM will act as your blueprint for success, especially if you want to scale quickly and successfully.

Create a culture around automation

We didn’t have that fear of being replaced by automation. I think our change management plan really helped drive that. We included some fun things like any time a bot went live, you got almost like a birth certificate of, ‘Here’s how the process changed for you. Here’s how it’s grown over 6 months, 12 months, 18 months…’

Lauren Joyce, Global Automation Lead, Whirlpool Corporation

Watch the full interview with Joyce:

Key takeaway for leaders

The unknown can be scary. That goes for automation, too. Create a culture around understanding and celebrating automation and its purpose, so your employees can learn to embrace it rather than fear it.

Let your people identify the best automation opportunities

We had to create some awareness that we have UiPath, there’s something called bots, something called automation. We created a presentation with small demos inside it and circulated it within the company, different departments, and tried to explain what we can achieve. And based off of that, we came up with a laundry list of all the automations the different departments needed. Out of that, we started doing the business case, the value, trying to come up with complexity, effort. We did a full estimation matrix and based off of that we came up with the top 20 automations we should build first. And as soon as we built those top 20, we saw a skyrocket in growth.

Devika Saharya, Director of ERP & RPA, MongoDB

Watch the full interview with Saharya:

Key takeaway for leaders

Find out what needs automating from the ground floor. After all, no one knows boring, repetitive work more than the people doing it. Empower employees by having them help identify which tasks they want to delegate to software robots.

Maximize benefits by combining automation and AI

One of the things we’ve started to play around with quite well is the convergence of machine learning, AI [artificial intelligence], and RPA [robotic process automation]. You’ll find that a lot of research will tell you this is the future of automation, and for us, we’re actually living it. We’ve realized that RPA in and of itself is almost like unlimited hands-on keyboards. Machine learning and AI are like unlimited brains. When you combine them, you have this strong technology that can revolutionize how we operate and service our customers.

Ati Ngubevana, Group Executive, Vodacom

Watch the full interview with Ngubevana:

Key takeaway for leaders

Avoid headaches—for you and your customers—by building a self-healing CoE. Machine learning and AI can help you pick up on anomalies that UiPath robots can then fix, before the problem even exists. The UiPath Business Automation Platform makes it easier than ever to integrate these technologies with prebuilt models, AI capabilities, and more. Anyone can do it—no data science background necessary.

What's next for your automation CoE?

You can apply insights from these automation leaders to your own automation program. And get inspiration from the UiPath CoE!

Hear from UiPath CoE leaders as they share lessons learned, explore our CoE’s encyclopedia of automations, and follow along as we scale our internal citizen developer program: How an automation company automates itself.