GSK to roll-out 250 'bots' in RPA push this year

GSK's John Johnstone explains how the pharmaceuticals giant is using robotic process automation technology to drive digital transformation

When GSK first implemented its robotic process automation (RPA) platform in January 2018, it didn't start rolling ‘bots' off the production line, so to speak, as fast as expected.

On the contrary, by the end of June 2018, the IT team could boast fewer than a handful, whereas the company's chief digital and technology officer (CDTO), Karenann Terrell, had expected more - a lot more.

"In June, we did a review and she basically said, ‘What are you guys going? We've had this platform in for six months and we've got just three bots live. You should have 300 bots live by now'," said John Johnstone, director of global applications development at GSK.

If you're serious about doing this, I don't think you can do it part-time

Johnstone was therefore asked to speed things up.

The first half of the year, he added, hadn't been wasted. It wasn't just about establishing the RPA platform in what is, after all, a large and complex multinational business. It was also about finding the right implementation model for the company, ensuring that RPA fitted-in with GSK's internal governance and processes.

But changes needed to be made.

"We kicked off with a decentralised model. That is to say, the platform is there, and the businesses [within GSK] can come and use it. In the first half of the year, we were really finding our feet. We were asking, ‘What does it take to build a robot? What is the GSK process for prioritising what should be built first going to be?'"

As that approach wasn't pulling them in, Johnstone shifted to a more centralised model. "We said, ‘business, give us your ideas. We will build the bots centrally, support them for you and you take the benefits'… Another thing we did was establish some full-time teams around this. If you're serious about doing this, I don't think you can do it part-time. You need a full-time team dedicated to doing this," Johnstone said.

Johnstone was speaking at a recent Computing IT Leaders' Forum, focusing on robotic process automation.

The company had started off with three teams: an internal team at GSK whose role was to prioritise, control and make sure the bots that were developed were congruent with GSK's business and business processes. A team was also set-up with GSK's consulting partner Tata because GSK didn't have all of the internal technical capability required to do everything itself. And then there was Genpact, the business process outsourcer that GSK uses in its financial services group.

Also helping out was Automation Anywhere, which supplied the RPA platform to GSK.

What are you guys going? We've had this platform in for six months and we've got just three bots live. You should have 300 bots live by now

"The other change we implemented was to really engage the business. We tried to sponsor this through the various groups in our corporate functions. So, finance, real estate, supply chain, and we really told them, ‘This is a fantastic opportunity for you to take some cost out of your business'.

"We said, ‘We can help fund the transformations that you want to do. You apply RPA, a bot may have a life span of, say, 18 months and, in that 18 months, the savings you make can actually fund the transformation you want to do. That really resonated with the business because at the time we were quite a capital constrained company."

In other words, the savings from implementing labour-saving bots alone ought to be able to pay for the digital transformation projects that various parts of the business might be planning. Then, once the digital transformation is completed, the bots will no longer be necessary.

Next page: Agile, plans for 2019 and 'meta bots'

GSK to roll-out 250 'bots' in RPA push this year

GSK's John Johnstone explains how the pharmaceuticals giant is using robotic process automation technology to drive digital transformation

"The other change was to adopt Agile," says Johnstone. "We took a flavour of agile called VFQ - value, flow and quality - and realised quite quickly that the three bots we had live were done in a Waterfall way. So we got the requirements, we built the requirements, tested, went live and then realised that the user didn't know what their requirements actually were whenever we gathered them.

"So we adopted an Agile-Scrum methodology, where we're building bots in small iterations because sometimes we'd give the business people a little too much credit for how much they understand the process… Adopting a high-speed iterative approach really helped us out."

In other words, how business people understand the flow of the process is one thing, but how it works out in the real world is often a different matter - an agile process can highlight this a lot quicker than an old-style Waterfall approach.

Sometimes we'd give the business people a little too much credit for how much they understand the process

As a result of these changes, three bots in June turned into 60 by the end of December, with around 250 ‘opportunities' in the pipeline. These opportunities are decided via a system of value-based prioritisation, notwithstanding the team's policy of spreading RPA throughout the business, not just concentrating them in one category, such as finance.

Indeed, more than half the bots implemented in the first year were in finance, admitted Johnstone, because that's where the low-hanging fruit with the clearest savings could be found. And, while Johnstone estimates that GSK has driven savings "probably in the millions, rather than the hundreds of thousands", the lion's share has been driven by just a couple of bots, he admits.

Nevertheless, GSK has sought to spread RPA across the business, rather than focus primarily on finance, with bots rolled-out in supply-chain (which also encompasses manufacturing), as well as human resources.

For 2019, Johnstone has a number of plans. "The first thing is to define a support model for this," he said. With 50 bots live by the end of 2018, the central ‘production' team could increasingly become overwhelmed by support tasks, sapping the number of bots they can roll-out. Now, GSK is moving from tens of bots to hundreds, staff need to be more focused.

"We are supporting the bots in production today by the team that built them. That's obviously affected capacity because we can't get the throughput of bots because they are sometimes doing support work.

With 50 bots live by the end of 2018, the central ‘production' team could increasingly become overwhelmed by support tasks

"So we're thinking about what our support model for RPA should be - don't underestimate that. We want to set-up a separate support model [to speed-up the production of bots]. That's taking time because we are having to educate the support people, who haven't been on the 12-month journey that the developers have.

"The next step will be the development of meta-bots and our internal bot library… We're a big SAP shop, so building a bot that logs-in to SAP, for example, that you only build once so that for every bot that needs to log into SAP we shouldn't have to keep building that."

The idea with metabots isn't just to speed-up the production of bots by providing discrete processes that can be taken off the shelf. It's also to improve maintenance and support so that when a common function embedded in a bot is changed it only needs to be updated once, not 50 or more times.

Also on the agenda are chatbots, with four already rolled out built on top of IBM's Watson artificial intelligence tool. "I don't think we would have been able to develop those without developing and implementing RPA earlier in the year," said Johnstone.

And in terms of labour savings, Johnstone has an official target of 40,000 hours. "Personally, I think the 40,000 hours target is conservative… my [personal] target is to smash that," he said.

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