Democratization at the rail tech division of Siemens has been the catalyst to automate more than 700 processes since 2017.
Siemens Mobility has been on a robotic process automation (RPA) journey for years, growing from five automated processes in 2017 to more than 700 now, transforming the company in the process.
“There was just one book [on RPA] on the market back in 2017, where today you have hundreds,” says Benjamin Bock, head of RPA at Siemens Mobility. “By the end of 2017, we already decided to have a global rollout for the whole company.”
Siemens Mobility, headquartered in Munich, is a division of German multinational technology conglomerate Siemens that focuses on railway technology and intelligent traffic systems. Bock, who comes from a business informatics background, says the company’s RPA journey started with an employee in Brazil interested in automating an SAP process. The colleague showed Bock a video about RPA and the company’s CFO, Karl Blaim, was intrigued by the potential.
“CFOs are easy to convince if you’ve got clear numbers that show what you’re doing,” Bock says.
So the company started experimenting with RPA and Bock found that RPA platform company UiPath offered free trials. As a result, Siemens Mobility learned that UiPath could help it automate processes involving different software applications, with a focus on SAP integration.
“We weren’t sure whether it would pay off or not,” Bock says. “We decided to give it a try, get our hands dirty, and see what the outcome was. It was great!”
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.
“Under our guidance they’re pretty much self-responsible for the RPA processes,” he says.
Bock’s team has created a community where everyone is required to document their processes with a brief description about who was involved and what the results were for the business.
The community serves to make visible what the RPA team has accomplished, but it also means employees across business units and regions can take up automation work someone else has done and further develop it for their own needs.
To support the initiative approach, Siemens Mobility has created the Siemens Mobility Framework (SMO), a framework of code with reusable modules, and a central infrastructure that includes development, Q&A, and production environments.
“It’s a huge advantage in terms of standardization and stabilization,” Bock says. “We have one-and-a-half people taking care of more than 400 processes running on the central infrastructure.”
The team has also created more than 10,000 training hours for Siemens Mobility worldwide, and Bock says more than 6,000 colleagues have leveraged the training, most of which has consisted of virtual sessions or in-person sessions. But Bock’s team is currently working on producing more we-based training, recorded sessions, and even AI-supported training.
He notes that he’s often asked about the approval process he follows for individual processes.
“My answer is there isn’t one,” he says. “I don’t approve individual processes because these processes were mostly developed outside of my team.”
The key, he says, is establishing clear boundaries, governance, and asset stability.
“Ensure you follow best practices and you have programming guideline standards for that,” he says.
Power to the people
The citizen developer approach is similar, but supports individuals automating their personal processes. Even though this approach is intended for individuals creating local robots on their own work computers, Bock notes those individuals can have a virtual machine where they can automate their processes.
The team provides a different series of training journeys to support this approach, including an RPA overview, beginner training, and training for specific use cases like web automation, Excel automation, and SAP automation. Bock’s team also offers “clinic sessions” Where employees can sign up for a 20-minute session with a member of Bock’s team to get hands-on support as they work on automating a process.
Finally, Bock’s team added the robotics as a process approach roughly two years ago to develop and manage solutions to automate large, cross-departmental processes dealing with things like financial data, information security, and data protection.
A recent example is an automation that Siemens Mobility has internally dubbed “the Amazon process.” That project took off when Blaim started asking why the company’s order management was so complicated. To streamline the process, Bock’s team built six individual but interlocking robots that automate it from end-to-end, including order intake, order delivery, order closing, and business intelligence.
“We decided not to try to build the end-to-end process at once, but begin by working on small parts of the process,” Bock explains. “We now have fully controlled and transparent monitoring of a 100% automated process.”
Because these large processes tend to focus on sensitive data with compliance concerns, Bock’s team has developed a quality gate and User Acceptance Test (UAT) as part of the development process. This includes a manual code review with subject matter experts.
“It’s really important to have a full-fledged software development process in place,” he says.
Once a robot goes into production, it can’t be changed in a production environment. Any changes, whether business or technical, requires going through that whole lifecycle again.
On the whole, Bock attributes the success of RPA at Siemens Mobility to adopting the citizen developer approach, rather than trying to impose from the top down. Employees respond when you speak to them directly, he says, and ask about processes that frustrate them or what they want to get rid of.
“The acceptance is much higher as opposed to your boss coming in and saying you need to automate this process,” he says, noting that such an approach can lead to employees fearing their jobs will be lost to automation.
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