Siemens Mobility scales RPA by empowering employees
Within two years, RPA evolved into a full corporate unit under the CFO at Siemens Mobility.
“We’re outside the IT function by purpose,” Bock explains.
Within two years, RPA evolved into a full corporate unit under the CFO at Siemens Mobility.
“We’re outside the IT function by purpose,” Bock explains. “We’re very close and in a good relationship with our IT colleagues, but what we really noticed is that the acceptance of employees when you’re a business function yourself is much higher than coming from the IT perspective.”
That employee acceptance was critical to the success of RPA because of the approach the company adopted to scale automation: giving employees to power to automate their own processes.
“Our main aim is to enable, motivate, and engage our colleagues within the organization to apply RPA themselves,” he says. “We don’t want it to be a black box where we robotized processes for them.”
A strategy for autonomy
Siemens has three primary approaches to RPA: the initiative approach, the citizen developer approach, and robotics as a service.
Under the initiative approach, which has become the most popular path to automating processes at Siemens Mobility, Bock and his team enable colleagues to deal with RPA themselves. The idea is to provide a framework, tools, and training that allow business units to apply automation to their processes.