A holistic process view is the key to Philips’ automation success with Infosys BPM

• Award Recipient

  A holistic process view is the key to Philips’ automation success with Infosys BPM

• Accolade

  

  Finalist

• Category

  

  Native Automation

• What put this entry on the shortlist

  Royal Philips’ approach to change management is commendable. Creating scorecards and ensuring projects achieved metrics helped Royal Philips and Infosys BPM complete a successful journey. We appreciate how Infosys BPM and Royal Philips collaborated to plan and execute this huge automation project. Understanding the end business goal, adopting the right technologies, and collaborating with the right partner were the keys to the successful Infosys BPM-Philips’ finance transformation journey.

The Situation: Since 2007, Infosys BPM has managed the finance and accounting process and procurement business operations of Royal Philips, a Europe-headquartered global leader in healthcare technology. Combined, Infosys BPM and Philips have 1,900 full-time equivalent (FTE) employees within the Philip’s finance and accounting function.

In 2017, sensing the huge scope of automation in finance and accounting (F&A) processes, Philips partnered with Infosys BPM and its subsidiary EdgeVerve to commence its enterprise-wide automation journey. The goals were to increase productivity by 30% and save and automate one million hours of manual work. The plan included large-scale automation, covering nine SAP instances, more than 400 reporting units, 65 countries, and 6 locations.

As a part of the Joint Operational Excellence agenda, the transformation journey aimed to centralize operations, increase automation adoption throughout the finance functions, reduce manual errors, and enable value-added activities for operations executives.

We nominated Infosys BPM, in partnership with Philips, for the HFS OneOffice™ Award in the Native Automation category for the successful collaborative planning and execution of a huge automation journey.

The Solution: Combining Philips’s strategic business goals with Infosys BPM’s mission productivity goals; determined the right path to the success of this journey

Early on its automation journey, Philips approached solving particular use cases with technology. With this technology-first approach, it achieved the metrics it expected, but not its strategic goals. Later, the team realized the correct path to address the issue was not a technology and robotic process automation (RPA) initiative but an end-to-end transformation of the entire finance function.

Technology can only be an enabler; transformation initiative was the key driver for this project.

Collaborating with the Infosys BPM team rather than working on smaller projects for technology implementation, Philips took a step toward its transformation journey. Infosys BPM later leveraged the ESSA (eliminate, simplify, standardize, and automate) framework to approach this transformation holistically. Many unnecessary processes and subprocesses were eliminated. A few processes were simplified and standardized, then later automated. Automating the finance processes involved RPA bots, integrated native automation with SAP and other enterprise solutions, and later tied all the automated processes to the main pipeline. The project achieved cost savings of 51% from eliminating unnecessary steps and 49% from RPA.

Philips’s initiative consolidating many different work methods from different geographies into fewer processes and adopting cloud infrastructure helped Infosys BPM focus on the transformation. Throughout the process, Infosys BPM developed reusable generic models that it later used in many other use cases. It set up a robotic operations command center to govern 24x5 operations, providing predictive and pre-emptive management.

The Results: Taking an enterprise and end-to-end process view was the secret sauce for automation rollout success

Together, Philips and Infosys BPM achieved savings equivalent to nearly 513 FTE through the entire RPA program. They achieved touchless automation for posting payroll, globally eliminating 15,000 personnel hours per year with a 72% reduction in average handling time (AHT). Using bots to manage SAP and BCS (business consolidation) reconciliation eliminated about 21,000 personnel hours annually. The project achieved better controllership through standardization and automation, helping Philips run enterprise-level balance reconciliations easily; RPA bots identified errors in journal entries.

Nearly three-fourths (73%) of all F&A functional processes were standardized. This large scope of automation across the financial functions helped Philips increase its productivity by 30%, saving up to 1 million personnel hours.

The Bottom Line: Rather than solving a problem with technology, take a big picture view to determine the final business goal

Transformation is not just marketing noise these days; it’s a mandatory process all enterprises must endure to remain competent and competitive in any industry. Transformation is a long-term journey requiring a proper path and solid leadership for adopting technologies. To create a profitable ecosystem, enterprises should figure out their goal and work with their service providers to attain it.

Royal Philips’ approach to change management is commendable. Creating scorecards and ensuring projects achieved metrics helped Royal Philips and Infosys BPM complete a successful journey. We appreciate how Infosys BPM and Royal Philips collaborated to plan and execute this huge automation project. Understanding the end business goal, adopting the right technologies, and collaborating with the right partner were the keys to the successful Infosys BPM-Philips’ finance transformation journey.