RPA Enables AstraZeneca To Deliver Rapid Business Insights

We often hear the question of “where to start” or “what’s a solid use case” for RPA. One place common across all organizations and industries is in reporting. For reports, a lot of data has to be collected from multiple sources, validated and checked, and presented in varying visualizations to many destinations. All of the elements, however, are typically rules-based and the faster they can be completed, the more value there is in the report to the end user. Data consolidation, accuracy, and speed are all outcomes of incorporating RPA successfully into reporting.

As another example of progressing on RPA, we recently spoke with AstraZeneca’s Head of Commercial Management Reporting, Petri Uola, who is finding value with Cognizant’s proactive approach to automation in this challenging world of global reporting. 

Challenges of Reporting Pave the Path for RPA Business Case

All corporate professionals are by now, to some degree, accustomed to leveraging management information systems, reports, and data in their day-to-day activities and planning processes. While most enterprises want to become more data-driven to improve operational and strategic decision making, the process of collecting, analyzing, producing and distributing reports and data remains a significant execution challenge. The typical global reporting function struggles with increasing burdens of regulatory compliance, disparate technology landscape and data formats, limited resources, and overworked staff. On the flipside, their internal customers have growing expectations of the accuracy, insightfulness and most importantly, the speed of delivery of management reports.

With this background, it is easy to see why reporting processes make a great use case for robotic process automation (RPA). RPA is particularly useful when your process deals with transactional-based activities that are repetitive and high-volume in nature. That sounds like a great description for the reporting function’s most cumbersome tasks in data extraction, report distribution etc. on a daily, weekly, quarterly basis.

Over the last five years, AstraZeneca has been working on globally consolidating its management information and reporting functions and transitioning to a single platform for reporting. It is now exploring how to make its centralized processes more efficient by using RPA. It works with Cognizant as an execution partner for reporting, and about two and a half years ago, Petri Uola started a conversation with the service provider around RPA, going beyond traditional macros. While AstraZeneca was the first customer with this use case, it found an enthusiastic partner in Cognizant.

RPA Is Helping In The Race Against The Clock To Deliver Accurate Insights

Petri explains that over the last 12 months in particular, AstraZeneca and Cognizant have rolled out RPA projects with success, “We went into looking at various elements of service that Cognizant provides, in the area of making individual high-level reports, consolidating them, and creating localized and centralized views for individual area teams, regional teams, etc. Bots could take on some of these report running and distributing activities. We found the use cases and went live with a desktop RPA tool.” The tasks that the RPA bots have taken on initially include running macros to consolidate data. This was a time-consuming task and created bottlenecks for the downstream data quality check. Once the reports are created, the bots are also being used to schedule delivery to end users.

The key benefits from using RPA thus far revolve around accuracy, speed and cost – all crucial components of AstraZeneca’s reporting objectives. Petri explains, “The key element for us is ensuring the quality of data to business, most importantly, removing human errors. Our accuracy percentage, which was already high at 98% is now consistently hitting 100% by embedding RPA. Our speed also went up. Any reporting can’t be provided quick enough to business, so this ensures that we hit customer expectations better than before. And if we find ourselves in a reporting cycle with last minute changes and corrections, we can do that quicker today.” There is of course a potential cost benefit as well. The effort reduced 9 FTEs from a team of 25 with Cognizant, which Cognizant reassigned to other projects. “That had a significant impact on our financials, said Petri, “Cognizant wasn’t concerned about this direct loss of revenue, and wanted us to use the latest technology in our engagement.”

Steep Learning Curve On Building Internal Controls

AstraZeneca’s reporting team – now including bots – handles highly sensitive data including sales and revenue on worldwide commercial operations. As a result, the RPA project stalled slightly when we needed to work with the IT and Compliance departments through internal controls on “who is watching the information that the bot is processing”. According to Petri, their biggest learning is not to underestimate the time to go through this case-by-case review of controls for each RPA implementation. He shares, “Sometimes the technical setup for everything is simple, but building end-to-end process and controls is something that might, depending on the organization and its complexity, take longer than you would think!” Petri’s team plans to continue to expand its RPA use cases in financial reporting. It is also internally reviewing opportunities to introduce advanced analytics and machine learning in its processes.

Bottom line: RPA delivers results with the right mindset and approach

While moving forward with RPA is not “easy,” it is becoming more straightforward as enterprises and their service provider partners gain experience. Working through the challenges does, in fact, lead to greater partnership collaboration, higher accuracy and speed, and lower cost for transaction processing. The macros that are fairly standard in reporting today can be used in conjunction with RPA to accelerate your process with higher quality.