At Pegaworld, Enterprise Times spoke to Melissa Harris, IT delivery director at Unum. Harris was tasked with deploying, or rather re-deploying RPA at the benefits provider Unum. She selected Pega for the second time in her career. She acknowledges though that different RPA solutions will suit different companies.
Unum first looked at RPA to deliver operational efficiencies with the processes that interacted with their mainframes. She talks about how the shared services department found the ideal use case to reinvent RPA deployment at Unum. It started with an investigation on the suitability of automation in the relevant processes. They looked at IBM, Appian, Salesforce Velocity as well as Pega. They ultimately chose the Pega platform to solve their issues.
Harris does not believe that selecting technology before looking at the problem. Her approach is to keep an open mind and to consider whether RPA is the right tool in the first place, as well as which tool. She says “you need to make the right technology decision based on the business problem in front of you”.
Harris also advocates the use of service design, rather than assuming the current process works. She also talks about the metrics that people should consider when applying RPA. In their initial project it changed turnaround times from a week to 24 hours and has significantly reduced training time.
She describes her ideal project team that can deliver the micro journey approach that Pega advocate. We also spoke about the pitfalls in RPA implementation. Her first is that no RPA platform has a silver bullet. She also talks about what the significant announcements were for Unum.
To hear what else Harris had to say listen to the podcast.
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