RPA hype, both positive and negative, continues to pervade the marketplace, making it very difficult for enterprises to discern viable execution and management strategies. To go beyond the hype, HFS, with support from Blue Prism, is showcasing real-life enterprise journeys with RPA. This report spotlights MetLife, a leading global provider of insurance, annuities, employee benefits, and asset management that has successfully scaled Blue Prism connected-RPA as a facet of its broader digital transformation journey.

RPA, AI, and smart analytics—HFS’ Triple-A Trifecta—are not magic; they are software tools. Enterprises that are achieving results with intelligent automation (IA) are not starting with the technology. They are starting with compelling business needs—a firm grasp on WHY they are investing or should invest in IA. They follow this with clear plans on WHAT the enablers and objectives are. With that in firm check, they move on to determining the HOW, which is all about integrated execution between people, process, and technology.

The WHY: One MetLife strategy to digitally transform and simplify its business

MetLife is a US-based, global provider of insurance, annuities, employee benefits, and asset management that was founded in 1868. In 2016, MetLife announced a refreshed enterprise strategy, encapsulated as One MetLife (see Exhibit 1), to reinvent how it does business as a company with digital transformation and simplicity as its central themes. Its approach serves as a real-life example of an enterprise striving for HFS’ Digital OneOffice concept. As part of the reinvention, MetLife has made a public commitment to invest $1 billion by 2020 to generate $800 million in pre-tax run-rate annual savings. The refreshed strategy is the firm’s WHY—a compelling and unifying business reason for embracing digital transformation, inclusive of RPA.

Exhibit 1: One MetLife—MetLife’s enterprise strategy framework for digital transformation

^{Source: MetLife, 2019}

The WHAT: RPA is a vibrant component of digital transformation, but it is not the only one

A gigantic objective like driving $800 million in savings through technology-enabled efficiency gains cannot and will never have a single decisive enabler. Digital transformation is a team sport of cross-silo collaboration that requires business and IT to work together.

MetLife was introduced to enterprise RPA in 2015 through its external service partners and decided to learn more. Through a competitive process, it selected Blue Prism. Key decision criteria included the enterprise-grade nature of Blue Prism’s software and its business-friendly configurability. The original focus for RPA was to drive process excellence and standardization, with business operations initially supporting policy administration and claims. After MetLife announced its refreshed strategy in 2016, it set up a digitally focused program as an enabling organizational construct. This program brought together existing capabilities such as automation, mobility, applications, and analytics in a hybrid business and IT structure to help enable the achievement of the strategy.

“The job and focus are not about RPA—they are about digital transformation. We identified transformative capabilities within MetLife and aligned them with a common purpose centered around our customer. Our integrated approach to digital is critical to our success.”
Eoin O’Reilly, Head of Digital Automation at MetLife

The Digital Automation business, led by Eoin O’Reilly, is one of four capabilities within MetLife’s Digital organization, and RPA is currently a vibrant component of that capability. According to O’Reilly, “The job and focus are not about RPA—they are about digital transformation. We identified transformative capabilities within MetLife and aligned them with a common purpose centered around our customer. Our integrated approach to digital is critical to our success.” The Digital organization within MetLife is responsible for defining the WHAT—the enabling technologies and approaches that support MetLife’s refreshed strategy, including RPA.

The HOW: Achieving integrated automation with people, process, and technology

O’Reilly and his Digital Automation team’s ability to bring together and balance the critical elements of people, process, and technology have helped MetLife define HOW to effectively execute its RPA strategy and broader approach to digital transformation. O’Reilly points out that “We were trying to make RPA into a glass box, rather than a black box—ensuring transparency for all.”

“We were trying to make RPA into a glass box, rather than a black box—ensuring transparency for all.”
Eoin O’Reilly, Head of Digital Automation at MetLife

O’Reilly cited several execution principles that have been critical to his organization’s success with RPA:

• Learn it first. Before trying to scale and before bringing in any external service partners, MetLife opted to build an internal RPA capability. This included both technology due diligence and cultivating internal technical talent and working with subject matter experts within business functions to identify problems to build an initial pipeline. This approach helped MetLife know what “good” looks like.
• Be transparent. O’Reilly and his team realized they needed both support and great ideas from MetLife employees; thus, they were very open with communication and education at inception and on an ongoing basis. This “glass box” approach has thus far included hundreds of demos on RPA, the creation of dashboards and metrics for transparent benefit and performance tracking, and the creation of an internal RPA training track to enable the reskilling of employees impacted by the changes and staff interested in professional development. More than 500 employees have been provided RPA training today, and that number continues to rise. MetLife has been open about its plans to reskill its employees, and the company even announced a $10 million Workforce of the Future development fund in 2018.
• Create a support and governance model that enables a broad focus. MetLife created a Digital Automation center of excellence (CoE) for centralized best practices with a federated roll-out model to enable its business units to identify use cases that matter to them and effectively roll out and manage their digital workforce. This approach has enabled broad adoption across geographies and functions such as new business and underwriting, policy administration, claims, and finance. For the past 18 months, the Digital Automation team has delivered roughly 5 to 10 processes per quarter with an eye toward optimizing utilization.
• Change is ongoing. MetLife is now working on layering technologies that extend the capabilities of its digital workers, essentially upskilling its digital workforce in the same fashion that it is upskilling its human workforce. This includes layering in technologies such as machine-learning-powered intelligent OCR to “read” and understand unstructured data and natural language processing to understand language. MetLife acknowledged there is a lot to learn with artificial intelligence but is actively embracing elements of AI to broaden its capabilities and impact.

The Bottom Line: Automation success requires a balance of people, process, and technology.

MetLife has set forth an aggressive objective of achieving its own Digital OneOffice through its refreshed strategy and driving $800 million in savings by 2020. This is an all-hands-on-deck, massively unifying strategic objective that requires the entire company to define ways to contribute to the result. Intelligent automation, including RPA, is one of the levers MetLife is using to support its goals. For its IA program to be as effective as possible, it is essential that its approach to execution, the HOW, strikes a balance across people, process, and technology. IA alone cannot achieve MetLife’s objectives, but a well-executed program that emphasizes transparency with its human workforce, a strong interplay between IT and business, and continuous refinement and extension of enabling technology fosters an integrated approach to automation.