Arla Foods is the largest producer of dairy products in Scandinavia. After three years of using Blue Prism’s connected-RPA, Arla had a revelation. The Digital Workers that delivered the most value to the company were not those that reduced manual workload, but those that strategically and creatively solved a business problem. The company adopted a Problem-Solving Framework to identify new opportunities and accelerate the value of RPA throughout the organization. Steps in the framework included: determining the value of the robot (judged by increasing sales or manual work reduction), down the line value (adding value beyond the prescribed process), and value triggers (like frequency or response time). Most important was the problem-oriented thinking step which encourages employees to approach Arla’s Center of Excellence (CoE) with a problem to solve—instead of a pre-determined process they want automated—which allows the CoE to use all of the tools at its disposal (Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Optical Character Recognition) to come up with a solution. Arla is empowered to create new processes which can solve problems humans could not have solved due to the scope.
“Redesigning existing processes is a good practice, but we found that in some cases it is best to create an entirely new function, which was never operated by a person.” – Marciej Obuchowski, Process Automation Manager, Arla Foods
