Driving Business Results Through Automation

Editor's Notes

• #5: How many of you went through Digital transformation or in middle of it or discussing with your executive leadership and ready to initiate? We started our digital transformation journey in 2015. One of the key initiatives as part of the transformation is to leverage MSP to manage Global SAP Support. Little backstory on Monsanto SAP Support. Historically Monsanto had SAP Functional Analysts scattered across the globe managing regional SAP Support ranging from Direct Employees to staff augmentation as well as various vendor agreements. In this model we had: Lack of consistency for tracking issues and enhancements Single point of Tribal Knowledge and failures Inconsistent skill sets globally leading to complex logic and configuration We negotiated and ultimately signed a deal with Capgemini to deliver Global SAP Application Support after a 24 month, successful co-sourcing agreement in our EMEA region. IT Representatives globally partnered to deliver a follow-the-sun SAP application support strategy As we embarked on the execution of the contract we determined the best approach would be to take a phased approach to balance business risk – Starting by region, excluding some key functions such as US OTC, Finance, HR and Security. This allowed us to prove the process would work eventually adding all excluded areas to the scope. We are fully transitioned with all areas of SAP Application Support Globally and are in a steady run state as of November 2016 As we continued to grow and implement on our digital strategy, we partnered more with CAP to continue support of new functionality within our landscape Few key milestones are IBP Support, Data Center Modernization or (DCM) testing and test automation I will talk about the DCM testing and test automation in detail in the following slides. Coming from Missouri “the show me state” I always challenge our partners on delivering value. In our Journey a few key data points which demonstrates the success story of this transition: Total Tickets ~39k since Oct 15 – 50% WO/Inc split Ticket Reduction as scope increased MTTR Reduction by 80% Reduced P1 & P2 by 95% $4.5M Savings to the business
• #6: The key to the success in our Digital transformation journey with Capgemini has been due to collaboration and partnership rather than a client and vendor relationship. Our mutual interest on doing more with less has paved a path towards various transformational initiatives. These initiatives are some of the key indicators of our successful engagement with Capgemini. Incident and MTTR reduction driven by Capgemini’s inhouse tools Ikon and Rooca: Ikon is a Knowledge Management DB. The analyst search key words for a KA to resolve repetitive incidents. The KA ID is then used for an automated failure mode analysis with the Rooca tool, which helps discover root causes and eliminate incidents. These KA definitions and FMA analysis helped with left shift initiatives which were either resolved by helpdesk or eliminated by training end users. Test Automation: Worksoft Certify is one of the many applications within Monsanto portfolio which was a bright shiny thing for a period of time but then the excitement wore off. I have a funny story where I was introduced to certify, this was back in 2010, I was in SAP Security and Monsanto was growing at a fast pace and acquiring companies left right and center. There were so many role changes I had to make as part of various integration projects. I had a co-op who was very eager to learn and she demoed the test functionality to our team. For an individual who was updating thousands of roles manually, I was intrigued with screen scraping and how I can use the functionality to make my life easy. She helped build a few scripts which I leveraged for many years with slight changes and uploaded the templates. As an organization, we had a decent number of test scripts built and a separate team who maintained these scripts and ran every month for compatibility testing during our releases. Through a series of Organizational changes and shift in IT strategic direction, the organization maintaining these scripts assumed other responsibilities and the tool was orphaned. Post Capgemini transition, one of the challenges we observed were increase in rework on the changes promoted to our production environment and soon enough test automation was one of our transformation initiatives.
• #7: We started with Transformation and a target of executing these scripts as part of the support contract. The team was able to deliver 21% way ahead of the target of 22% by end of Fiscal 18. While executed on this transformation, we had a separate initiative as part of the overall Digital transformation, the Data Center Modernization program. We signed a separate contract with Capgemini to execute testing on the SAP Landscape and friends of SAP application testing (primarily: smoke, integration and performance testing). AS part of this initiative, we fast tracked 50% automation leveraging Worksoft certify. We have successfully executed these test scripts for all our non-prod environments. As we are wrapping the data center program, We are at a 70% automation, this is already considered higher than industry standard which is around 65%. We reinstated the compatibility testing, fixed all the legacy scripts which were failing as these were not maintained and versions changed etc. Fixing the broken scripts was an effort in it of itself and the increase in rework led to signing the contract to ensure the automated scripts are kept evergreen and to run compatibility testing for releases and high impact projects. As part of the contract we are automating 1860 additional test scripts, a few legacy scripts and leveraging Capgemini to build new scripts as part of the upcoming enhancements and projects. With this we are enabling our organization for robust automated testing which we have already recognized benefits. To quickly call out the business value provided. We saw significant reduction of testing efforts, around 80%. Already observed a reduction of 30% in rework as the defects are captured and remediated pre release. We are in a position to not only run these tests for monthly releases but also leverage them for special cutovers and as needed basis. As an enterprise we were able to recognize the ROI in 4 months.
• #8: ITPA and RPA the buzz words in the industry these days… Let me quickly go through ITPA and RPA: ITPA: IT process automation (ITPA) is the solution IT professionals have leveraged towards automating tasks that don’t need to be done manually. ITPA refers to the set of activities involved in combining people, tools and processes through automated IT workflows. ITPA works as a trigger/reaction system I was reading a business insider article published back in 2015: A programmer automated any task which took greater than 90 seconds for him to perform. He created a script to send email to his boss for “work from home”. He called this script the “Hangover script”. This had pre defined rules of him not logging from his office work station at a certain time. He had a script which sent notifications to his wife “late at work” with a predefined list of reasons. RPA: The image above is a good metaphor for RPA. Though most people are looking forward to seeing intelligent humanoid robotic companions, they are still years away. However, the software is already capable of using our keyboards and mouse’s just like we do. And that opens a wide range of possibilities RPA has to be stable, mature, optimized, rules-based, repetitive, and usually high-volume. Start with a controlled experiment on a visible bottleneck or pain point Software robots can open email attachments, complete e-forms, record and re-key data, and perform other tasks that mimic human action. We are working on expanding RPA for both IT processes and Business processes. I will talk through one of the IT processes we picked in the following slides:
• #9: One of the Support Transformation items is WO Turn around time reduction, as part of this Capgemini is working on creating Standard operating procedures (SOPs) to ensure even junior resources can process some of the standard, less complex configurations. Another initiative is leveraging automation; a hybrid of ITP automation and RP automation. While we were visiting India to meet Capgemini leadership and the team working on Monsanto they demoed what they did for one of their other clients with IDOC monitoring and other BASIS functions. This triggered us to identify use cases for Monsanto.
• #10: If we fast forward 3 months after the trip, We initiated the first Monsanto automation pilot: One of the key business units within Monsanto onboards sales team. As part of this process: We create SAP Plants which are used to record transactions. The challenge we had with the existing process is there were a lot of handoffs, approvals, configuration, data maintenance, On a average the plant create process took around 6 days. We have a separate plant create team monitoring for these tickets and working on them and defined a separate KPI specifically to this ensuring strategic business advantage. All of these repetitive mundane manual tasks were perfect candidates for automation. We partnered with the Capgemini RPA team to explain the existing process and various handoffs happening between teams and various approval steps. We leveraged Capgemini’s infrastructure, architecture and BOTs. They have a very robust automation factory: The first step was to gain ISO approval through Monsanto allowing Capgemini's AWS environment to connect securely into Monsanto’s network. This took some time and review of several leaders in the organization particularly as this is a newer technology requiring a governance process to be originated. Once connectivity was established the following design and build phase went smoothly. In the end this one process being automated is projected to save 2880 man hours per year, reduce turn around time for these sales man plant creates by 83%, eliminate human error and rework resulting in a reduced risk of delayed sign on bonuses.
• #11: As a result of the successful pilot in partnership with Capgemini we have developed a roadmap of additional repetitive configuration items to be automated and look forward to the added benefit to come.
• #12: Thanks, Raghav! I am the client partner for this relationship. I will try to tell you more about what went behind the scenes to make this happen and how we at Capgemini see Artificial Intelligence. Today, we have access to a great number of tools, processes and technologies in the space of Intelligent automation. The right combination from this portfolio creates the Artificial Intelligence. We run it as a 5-senses model for Artificial Intelligence that goes from sensing, analyzing, applying the knowledge to taking timely action…
• #13: There are 3 key roles/ groups to make it successful… 1. Account team who brings in prioritized list of candidate processes based on the ticket data and the client context. 2. The Automation lead that acts as a bridge between the CoE and account team to draw from available pool of Automations in different IT and Business processes or create new ones, 3. The CoE that actually creates and maintains the Automations The questions this team asks are around What can drive real value; through consistent quality, reduction in Turn-around time and freeing up time for valuable resources
• #14: Essentially the Robot logs into the client network just as any other remote user would do, thru a VPN tunnel. All this is achieved thru a 4-tier architecture. And the tiers are 1. The client environment where the Robot does the actual work, the remaining 3 layers are within Capgemini platform that resides on AWS; namely the Client specific implementation that houses, scales the robots and keeps audit trail of robot activities, and the bigger orchestration cluster that is separated with a firewall and the overall monitoring and administrative layer to monitor the health of the platform.
• #15: Behind all this is the Automation factory that seeds reusable ones and creates new ones for a specific client. We are working with many partners to bring in automation in this space too… This is a ever-increasing pool of automations that we bring to our clients along with our Automation platform that you can use on pay-per-use basis. Please talk to us offline if you have more specific questions on the technical aspects… Thanks a lot for attending this session…
• #16: If you want to reach us, here is our contact information. And now we will open the floor for Q&A.