Robotic Process Automation | Accenture

Accenture’s global IT organization’s
intelligent automation journey expands
the use of robotics in business processes
to deliver efficiencies
ACCENTURE’S
GLOBAL IT
ROBOTIC PROCESS
AUTOMATION
Copyright © 2020 Accenture. All rights reserved

A major objective our global IT organization faces
is the transformation of our internal operations to
achieve more operational efficiency.
Repetitive tasks, inefficient processes and manual efforts were hindering the
ability of our global IT operations teams to keep pace with business
demands. Our challenge was to simplify and automate key business and
operational processes in the midst of rapidly expanding business capabilities
while keeping the business running. A response required building intelligent
automation capabilities and assets at scale with speed and agility. A defined
intelligent automation journey with multiple focused programs and an
“eliminate before automate” approach were needed.
CHALLENGE

Processes suitable for RPA
include:
• Repetitive
with high volumes
• Rule-based
with low human discretion
• Standardized
with few exceptions
• Structured, electronically
available data
• Use of at least two systems
To address these objectives, our global IT
organization established an Automation Center
of Excellence (COE) to define and build
automation solutions. These solutions needed
to work across a wide spectrum of business
and operational capabilities, catering to more
than half a million users, across multiple
geographies.
Exploring possibilities, our global IT team
found that automation with robots is a powerful
option for business processes with high
volumes, round-the-clock usage, and
structured and unstructured data spanning
several applications. Within the Automation
COE, a robotic process automation (RPA)
team was formed to collaborate with business
stakeholders to identify automation
opportunities and build assets.
WHAT
ACCENTURE DID
The RPA team collaborates with teams from
Accenture’s business functions to assess and
select processes that are suitable for RPA.
Through shared learning and experience, the
RPA team has created a set of criteria to
evaluate a business process that is submitted
as a candidate for RPA. These criteria allow
the RPA team to effectively determine a go/no
go decision. From there, they design,
implement and support solutions.
The RPA team uses a robotics monitoring tool
that provides visibility across all bot
transactions, status of bot executions and
alerts when problems arise. It is a live,
interactive dashboard with advanced
visualizations and real-time consumption logs
for data analysis. It is key to monitoring bots
functioning effectively, aiding an average
success rate of 93 percent. A dedicated
support team uses this tool, among others, to
provide all levels of support.

WHAT ACCENTURE DID
Alert Digital Assistants for Incident Prevention
RPA SOLUTION IN USE
Monitoring tools are vital to enabling high
performance of Accenture applications and
the servers they run on. Alerts help
administrators react to a server running out
of disk space, a website that has gone down
and other issues. The IT operations team
receives approximately 500 alerts a day
from key applications. They typically need to
analyze the situation, refer to standard
operating procedures and decide on the
action to take.
This area of IT operations with its high
number of repetitive tasks was an
opportunity for RPA. The RPA team
developed and continues to develop a set of
bots that automatically monitors each type
of alert generated and responds. Alerts are
automatically escalated to one of three
actions—restore, prevent or ignore—and the
appropriate action automatically performed.
The Alert Digital Assistants focus on
prevention, enabling minimum application
downtime and avoiding the investment of
people time on alert reviews. Today,
around 50 percent of alerts are responded
to automatically, alleviating the workloads
of team resources. The bots developed to
date can scale to handle an increase in
the volume of alerts, operate at high
quality and consistency, and monitor and
act on alerts 24/7.

WHAT ACCENTURE DID
“The Airline Invoice Tax Credit
Extraction RPA recoups tax
credit for Accenture in timely
way with no loss of credit,
enabling the team to focus on
providing
value-added service.
ARGHYA P DAS
Managing Director – Finance,
Controllership, Accenture
Airline Invoice Tax Credit Extraction Solution
RPA SOLUTION IN USE
More than 40 percent of Accenture’s global
workforce is based out of India. Many
employees travel, domestically and
internationally, amounting to more than several
hundred thousand airline tickets booked
a year across major carriers in the country.
When an airline ticket is purchased in India, a
Goods & Services Tax (GST) is assessed. A
company has the option to claim that tax back
through a detailed online process.
For a company the size of Accenture, the
amount of credit accrual is significant. The
process, however, is manually intensive,
tedious and varies from airline site to airline
site. Every invoice must be downloaded
individually to capture the necessary
information, and invoice and file formats vary.
Accenture Finance reached out to the RPA
team for a solution.
The RPA team created a robotic bot that extracts
tax credit information from invoices and
processes the claim benefits. The process starts
when an airline company uploads a tax invoice
on its portal. The RPA bot logs into an airline’s
portal using secure credentials, navigates to the
proper section and downloads invoices. The bot
then uploads the invoices to a cloud storage
location. Next, it executes a custom-developed
data extractor process that reads files in the
multiple formats and converts the necessary
data into an Excel spreadsheet. Accenture users
log into the application and download the data
for Accenture’s accounting purposes.
The GST credit process is now fast and efficient.
The data captured is 99 percent accurate,
resulting in a high GST credit accrual. Moreover,
the solution can be implemented for other
manual billing processes. Accenture resources
previously needed to perform the tax credit tasks
are able to work on other, higher-valuer
activities. With the development of the Goods &
Services Tax Credit Extraction RPA, Accenture
Finance recoups tax credit in timely way with no
loss of credit.

WHAT ACCENTURE DID
“The Legal Proposal Check
RPA technology helps
Accenture Legal users quickly
detect and replace risky words
and phrases in proposal
reviews. This automation
makes the broader proposal
review process a lot faster and
easier.
Legal Proposal Check RPA bot
RPA SOLUTION IN USE
Accenture’s Legal team uses the Legal
Proposal Check bot to perform the initial
legal review of a request for proposal faster
and easier through automation. The bot runs
in unattended mode, 24/7, thus increasing
the speed at which request for proposals are
reviewed. The solution uses RPA, powered
by artificial intelligence, to detect and replace
words and phrases potentially posing higher-
than-desired risk to Accenture to reduce
Accenture’s exposure to over-commitment at
the proposal stage.
Legal users send the request for proposal
documents, whether in Microsoft Word,
PowerPoint or PDF, as attachments to a
dedicated email address. When received,
the Legal Proposal Check bot rapidly scans
the text in the attachments to identify words
and phrases deemed to be potentially of risk
to Accenture—replacing them with more
suitable language. All changes made to the
document are highlighted for the user to
further assess and evaluate.
The Legal Proposal Check does not
substitute a legal review process; its purpose
is to support the manual review process
during the proposal stage of contracting.
However, by automating a large portion of
the repetitive activities, Legal Proposal
Check reduces the time Accenture Legal
professionals need to review request for
proposal documents. Fifty percent of
Accenture English language proposals
reviews are done via the Legal Proposal
Check RPA bot. In addition, the bot reduces
the legal review effort by half, enabling Legal
professionals to perform more value-added
work. Plans are to continue rolling out the
solution in other languages for other, non-
English-speaking countries Accenture does
business in.
CHIN CHING CHAN
Managing Director – Legal, Global Legal Network,
Accenture

Our Intelligent Automation teams work in an agile way, iterating
and improving new and existing solutions. Robotic and other
automation solutions deployed are helping our internal operations
people to focus on the best use of their skills rather than on
repetitive tasks. To cultivate an automation-first mindset, our
teams took up reskilling, retooling and empowering of our
workforce across all internal business operational areas. To date,
20 percent of our internal IT operations resources are automation
trained and certified. Human-centric, change-management
programs helped to ensure disruption was a means to grow new
and specialized skills.
PEOPLE
AND
CULTURE

Accenture’s intelligent automation program overall has delivered 35
percent cumulative savings across all our automation programs,
including RPA. RPA solutions, spanning more than 70 bots in
production operating at a 98 percent success rate, are making a
business impact by accelerating end-to-end processing, reducing
errors, improving consistency and generating operational savings.
Bots in various business processes such as service operations,
invoicing, tax, proposal legal reviews, sales quotes, identity and access
management, and timesheet reconciliation are producing operational
efficiencies, helping Accenture internal operations deliver value.
RPA programs continue to expand as Accenture’s business grows,
platform solutions mature, and teams look to further combine hyper-
automation technologies with optimized operational processes.
RPA program highlights include:
VALUE
DELIVERED
50%
Infrastructure and
critical application
alerts are actioned by
automation
98%
Bot success rate
in processing data
accurately
70+
Bots in production
across different
business functions

RAHUL MAHESHWARI
Managing Director – Global IT, Intelligent Technology Operations
LinkedIn
BALAJI POONKUNDRAN
Senior Manager – Global IT, Intelligent Automation Program
Delivery Lead
LinkedIn
MEET
THE TEAM
RELATED CAPABILITIES
How Accenture does IT
Our global IT organization is driving technology-powered business
transformation across Accenture.
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change.

Robotic Process Automation | Accenture

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