Lessons Learned from Automating 3,000 Weeks of Work

Have you seen the baffling headlines? Despite technology advances, our productivity rate has slowed.

This just isn’t my reality. As the leader of the UiPath automation center of excellence (CoE)—which uses our own technology to accelerate everything from customer order processing to UiPath Foundation donations—I've seen automation make our people more productive than ever.

As we celebrate getting back more than 70,000 hours in the last quarter (Q4) of our fiscal year (and 568,896 hours total since March 2020) we’ve found that the headlines are missing something. There is a productivity transformation underway; we just need to know where to look.

For our CoE, we look at our people. Our employees are at the heart of automation and productivity.

Read on to meet some of the individuals that made automating more than 3,000 weeks’ worth of work possible:

• A CoE business analyst who project manages dozens of automation projects

• Two citizen developers revamping how their teams get work done

• A sales leader embedding automation into his team’s DNA

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Want to dig deeper into use cases by department? This encyclopedia of CoE automations has more info on the hundreds of automations our team has delivered.

Citizen developers aren’t hype – meet some of our favorites

There are now dozens of citizen developers working across UiPath to accelerate their teams.

Let’s hear from two of our most prolific citizen developers on the Finance team, Stere and Bogdan, as they share lessons learned from their own automation journeys.

Lessons learned from Stere Iancus, Real Estate Project Manager at UiPath:

• Company leaders help provide the space for citizen developers to imagine new, more efficient work days. Imagining a better way of working as one works can be difficult. It can be helpful to have dedicated time for citizen developers to dream up more efficient workdays.

• Citizen developer programs empower end users from the business to do initial business analyst work when collaborating with the CoE. The best automation strategies blend both citizen developer-driven development and CoE-driven development.

• Find common pain points across your team’s time zones (Stere’s team has 30 team members working across the globe). Citizen developers and the UiPath CoE have been able to design automations that accelerate work across the global team.

Lessons learned from Bogdan Matei, Senior Manager (Tax Technology) at UiPath:

• Like Stere, Bogdan echoes the importance of support and buy-in from your leaders

• Great results come from trusting employees and providing them with automation tools

• Employees can self-serve lots of great resources like UiPath Academy, but a formalized citizen developer program led by the CoE provides a cohort to lean on

• When citizen developers and the CoE partner, the CoE can help citizen developers transition from UiPath StudioX to Studio as use cases get more complex

Meet more UiPath citizen developers.

Business analysts make the automation world go round

Have you ever had an awesome experience with a realtor? The best realtors know all the right questions to ask to get your “forever home.”

Business analysts are integral members of the CoE. Without them, our houses (productivity-freeing automations) wouldn’t have a chance.

Meet Georgiana Ana-Maria Stroe, a Senior RPA Business Analyst / Technical Lead who guides her clients (fellow employees) through the automation-finding process.

Georgiana shares what it’s like to shepherd employees through creating one of our most used internal automations, Avokudos, an automation-powered app on Slack that let’s employees give kudos and recognition to other employees.

A GTM Ops Leader with an ‘automation first’ mindset

Led by Dan Carpenter, the UiPath Go to Market (GTM) Ops team is focused on growth and productivity, operational excellence, scaling our revenue engine, and building a world-class team. They have really embraced automation across all facets of their work and launched nearly 100 robots which have helped them save over 50,000 hours and more than $1.75 million.

Among many other things, the robots on the GTM team:

• Keep account hierarchies in check

• Prepare deal reviews

• Automate testing during Salesforce deployments

• Allocate tasks to Deal Hub team members

• Email license keys so that our customers can quickly start using UiPath products after they buy them

Importantly, employees are freed up from repetitive work so that they can focus on higher-value tasks that help UiPath achieve operational rigor.

My vision for RPA is to make it a key part of how the UiPath GTM Ops team works every day to achieve higher productivity, operational excellence and employee engagement, while scaling our processes. Automation is a key enabler of agility and growth and a must-have solution to free up my team to do more meaningful work.

Dan Carpenter, SVP, GTM Operations, UiPath

Want a sneak peek of next quarter’s blog post?

Our second citizen developer wave of UiPath employees eager to uplevel their automation skills just started.

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