Canon New Zealand’s Peri Siatras, former Head of Business Transformation and Janice Lamb, National Sales and Service Support Manager tell us the challenges they faced and how the outcomes were achieved through the implementation of RPA with Canon Business Services (formerly Converga).
Peri: Canon’s printing business is B2B and B2C. We sell photocopiers, consumables, software and collaboration gear via a direct sales team and a direct channel to our partners. My role as Head of Transformation is to look at ways we can make the business more efficient – and one of the ways we can do that is to take manual processes to digital ones wherever possible. The first area we looked at was the Service Delivery Team, the people who key orders and send out service technicians. Any improvement would benefit our customers so we were looking to attain faster, more efficient transactions. It would also free up the service teams to be more proactive in servicing our customers.
Janice: If we could speed up the processes of service calls, consumables orders and invoicing, it would be of huge benefit to both our customers and our teams. Our teams would be free to create more capacity and get away from the boring, repetitive tasks and create real value for our customers.
Peri Siatras. Former Head of Business Transformation, Canon New Zealand
Janice: Everything was done in stages and tested prior to going live. The Canon Business Services (CBS) team were great and there were no disruptions to daily tasks.
Peri: We saw how successful it was by measuring how many tickets it lodged. We looked at the exceptions and tweaked it even more so now we know the process is functioning as it should. The pre-testing was the same for every process we looked to automate, and every roll-out produced the same success. We’re currently replacing manual inputting with RPA at around one process per month.
Janice: For my team of 15 in sales and service we now have three fully automated processes: Automation of customer service calls, consumables ordering and invoicing. We’re also working on a bot to automatically process customer rebates. It’s all positive from the client end because the processes are now faster and more efficient. As soon as a client’s request hits the inbox, it is actioned straight away with no delay whatsoever. My team are happy to know they’re not stressing about how many emails they have waiting to be actioned. The only impact on both my customers and team has been positive.
Janice Lamb, National Sales and Service Support Manager, Canon New Zealand
Canon New Zealand Sales and Support Operations has automated 5 of 10 manual repetitive processes that interact across four systems and nine different spreadsheets of data. The automation has freed the team up from repetitive manual tasks like logging service calls, which would take 10-15mins – a task the robot now completes in 3-4 mins. The RPA program has streamlined these processes, removing errors, increasing speed and improving quality of service as a result of the additional time the team can now spend solving customer needs.
Impact
Peri: For the customer it means a faster transaction and its way more efficient. They can fill out a form online and get an instant reply saying, “Your order has been requested”. They don’t have to wait on the phone, so it’s a faster, more efficient customer experience. It’s moved our team from the laborious tasks of keystrokes to creating real value for our customers.
Janice: They benefit because RPA ensures the moment their request hits the inbox it’s actioned immediately. Naturally, we’re looking at identifying any other process that can be RPA driven.
Peri: They know the steps; they know the processes and guide you through all the things you need to consider when automating your processes. The conversations are based around “These are the processes you have, and your initial selection criteria needs to be based on how uniform or structured they are and how often they’re done”. It’s more system-based than simply a hunch. Once all the choices are analysed, they guide you through so you can make a logical decision. And once the decision is made, they continue to guide you along the process and how best to structure it. Once you hand over to CBS, their developers are clear on the structure needed and put it all together. It’s in the testing environment that many of the best conversations occur. Daily face-to face meetings ensure that everything is on the right path. And once it’s in production, they continue to give support or suggest any further way the processes could be improved. That’s what I really love about the CBS relationship - the way they examine closely, the way the processes work – observing and then making suggestions about how we can improve the success rate even further.
Janice: It’s definitely the way Canon is moving forward. We’d never go back to manual processes. The CBS team are fantastic.
