Wipro began partnering with Automation Anywhere in 2014. Here I examine the partnership, looking at examples of RPA deployments across joint clients, at how the momentum behind the partnership has continued to strengthen, and at how the partners are now going beyond rule-based RPA to build new digital business process models.

Partnership Already has 44 Joint Clients

Wipro initially selected Automation Anywhere based on the flexibility and speed of deployment of the product and the company’s flexibility in terms of support. The two companies also have a joint go-to-market, targeting named accounts with whom Wipro already has an existing relationship, plus key target accounts for both companies. 

To date, Wipro has worked with 44 clients on automation initiatives using the Automation Anywhere platform, representing ~70% of its RPA client base. Of these, 17 are organizations where Wipro was already providing BPS services, 27 are clients where Wipro has assisted in-house operations or provided support in applying RPA to processes already outsourced to another vendor.

In terms of geographies, Wipro’s partnership with Automation Anywhere is currently strongest in the Americas and Australia. However, Automation Anywhere has recently been investing in a European presence, including the establishment of a services and support team in the U.K., and the two companies are now focusing on breaking into the major non-English-speaking markets in Continental Europe.

So let’s look at a few examples of deployments.

For an Australian telco, where Wipro is one of three vendors supporting the order management lifecycle, Wipro had ~330 FTEs supporting order entry to order provisioning. Wipro first applied RPA to these process areas, deploying 45 bots, replacing 143 FTEs. The next stage looked across the order management lifecycle. Since the three BPS vendors were handling different parts of the lifecycle, an error or missing information at one stage would result in the transaction being rejected further downstream. In order to eliminate, as far as possible, exceptions from the downstream BPS vendors, Wipro implemented "checker" bots which carry out validation checks on each transaction before it is released to the next stage in the process, sending failed transactions and the reasons for failure back to the processing bots for reprocessing and, where appropriate, the collection of missing information. This reduced the number of kick-backs by 73%.

Other clients where Wipro has used Automation Anywhere in RPA implementations include:

• A U.S. bank, automating bank account statement reconciliation (~94% time-saving), the bounce-back process (~60% time-saving), and account activation and day 2 check (~50% time-saving)
• A U.S.-based clothing manufacturer, automating journal processing: auto-selecting the template, auto data entry into the document, auto emails with offer, and auto data entry into ERP. Led to a 38% FTE reduction
• A steel manufacturing company, automating invoice processing. Led to 50% FTE reduction
• A European network equipment provider: order management (supporting CDR creation, invoice, OD creation, order entry, & order entry changes), achieving a 41% productivity improvement; also procurement across P2P and MDM processes, a 40% productivity improvement
• A U.K. based telco, automating order management; achieved a £1.4m cost reduction and an 80% reduction in wait time
• A multi-national medical devices company: automating 10 processes within P2P; replaced 61 FTEs and produced a ~13% productivity benefit.

Using The Partnership to Enhance Speed-to-Benefit within Rule-Based Processes

The momentum behind the partnership has continued to strengthen, with Wipro achieving a number of significant wins in conjunction with Automation Anywhere over the past three months, including a contract which will result in the deployment of in excess of 100 bots within a single process area over the next 6 months. In the last quarter, as organizations begin to scale their RPA roll-outs, Wipro has seen average RPA deal sizes increase from 25-40 bots to 75-100 bots.

Key targets for Wipro and Automation Anywhere are banking, global media & telecoms, F&A, and increasingly healthcare and Wipro has recently been involved in discussions with new organizations across the manufacturing, retail, and consumer finance sectors in areas such F&A, order management, and industry-specific processing.

Out of its team of ~450 technical and functional RPA FTEs (~600 FTEs if we include cognitive), Wipro has ~200 FTEs dedicated to Automation Anywhere implementations. This concentration of expertise is assisting Wipro in enhancing speed-to-benefit for clients, particularly in areas where Wipro has conducted multiple assignments, for example in:

• Banking: payments, new account opening, and account maintenance
• Insurance: accounts reconciliation and policy servicing
• Capital markets: payable charges, reporting trading, verifications, trade settlements, static data maintenance.

Overall, Wipro has ~400 curated and non-curated bots in its library. This has assisted in halving implementation cycle times in these areas, to around four weeks.

Wipro also perceives the ease of deployment and ease of debugging of Automation Anywhere, facilitated by the structuring of its platform into separate orchestration and task execution bots, is another factor that has helped enhance speed-to-benefit.

Wipro’s creation of a sizeable team of Automation Anywhere specialists means it has the bandwidth to respond rapidly to new opportunities and to initiate new projects within 1-2 weeks.

Speed of support to architecture queries is another important factor both in architecting in the right way and in speed-to-market. Around a third (~100) of Automation Anywhere personnel are within its support and services organization, providing 24X7 support by phone and email, and ensuring a two-day resolution time. This is of particular importance to Wipro in support of its multi-geography RPA projects.

Extending the Partnership: Tightening Integration between Automation Anywhere & Wipro Platforms to Build New Digital Business Process Models

In addition to standard rule-based RPA deployments of Automation Anywhere, Wipro is also increasingly:

• Using Automation Anywhere bots to handle unstructured data (currently deployed with ~25% of clients), and to provide process analytics
• Integrating Automation Anywhere with Wipro platforms such as Base))), its BPM process interaction design and execution platform, via the API functionality within Automation Anywhere’s metabots. To date, Wipro has eight clients where it is using Automation Anywhere bots combined with its Base))) platform, in processes such as A/P, order management, A/R, and GL.

In an ongoing development of the partnership, Wipro will use Automation Anywhere cognitive bots to complement Wipro HOLMES, using Automation Anywhere for rapid deployments, probably linked to OCR, and HOLMES to support more demanding cognitive requirements using a range of customized statistical techniques for more complicated extraction and understanding of data and for predictive analytics.

Accordingly, Wipro is strengthening its partnership with Automation Anywhere both to deliver tighter execution of rule-based RPA implementations and as a key platform component in the creation of future digital business process models.