Workforce Automation with RPA - Laying the Groundwork for AI

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RPA and AI aren't just buzzwords; they're game-changers, especially when your team is under pressure. At VMware, our ops team was drowning in work, especially in the last week of each quarter, when we closed up to 50% of our business, leading to endless fire drills and working around the clock. We needed a solution that didn't require extra funds, just more efficiency.

I was tasked with leading an RPA/automation project to alleviate the pressure. We established a Center of Excellence (CoE) within my Strategy and Transformation team, and I quickly partnered with our developer team to address the problem.  

​Our approach was methodical: we relied on desk automation tools like UiPath and ABBYY (OCR) to streamline workflows without heavy coding or engineering. 

We targeted high-impact automations, such as one with our Global License Management team that reconciled software usage versus contracts—a process that previously took 1-2 days per customer, but now only took 1-2 minutes.

The results were remarkable: we saved over 50,000 annual hours, the equivalent of 25 people's annual work. We subsequently introduced this automation framework to our partner team, Deal Management, resulting in 168,000 annual hours saved using a similar approach—that's 84 people's work. 

With RPA and AI, we turned chaos into opportunity, giving our teams the bandwidth to focus on what matters most. Check out this article on How RPA and AI work together - Benefits & Use Cases to discover how you can achieve similar results.