Executive Summary

Telefónica started on a process automation journey in 2010 to address cost challenges in its back office. Then O2, was handling around 1.2 million transactions every month through more than 400 processes. The business processes had been outsourced and offshored to India in 2004/5 with significant scale added to the operations after the initial offshoring. Change became necessary when costs started to increase. Wayne Butterfield was in charge of the transformation and turned to robotic process automation to address cost and budgetary pressures.

Sarah Burnett, Everest Group, Vice President, interviewed Wayne to learn more about the company’s automation journey.

In this edition of Everest Group’s Practitioner Perspectives, Wayne shares his insights and experience of deploying RPA:

• The drivers for change including rising costs and volumes of transactions
• The challenges, including overcoming negative perceptions about RPA in the organization and dealing with operational issues stemming from the virtualized run-time environment
• Lessons learnt, including choosing processes for the initial proof of concept and optimizing the IT infrastructure for RPA

The automation started with 20 robots and has since grown in scale to 150. Around 10 processes are today automated with significant benefits realized.