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From Automation as a Tool to Automation as a Workforce Transformer
Western Union Empowering Employees with Automation
In conjunction with SS&C Blue Prism and its certified partner ISG, Western Union, a global leader in cross-border, cross-currency money movement and payments, has successfully rolled out a strategic intelligent automation program to empower its existing workforce and provide re-skilling opportunities to technologically savvy employees.
As the operator of a global retail agent network consisting of hundreds of thousands of locations serving millions of customers around the globe every day, Western Union realized the potential of SS&C Blue Prism intelligent automation to improve productivity and increase operational efficiency across the business.
How ISG Automation helped Western Union Scale Automation
Western Union also sought the support of ISG Automation, the pure-play automation business of Information Services Group (ISG), a leading global technology research and advisory firm, and trusted intelligent automation partner to SS&C Blue Prism. ISG provided a range of services, starting with the initial automation assessment and strategic plan, developing proof-of-concept automations, establishing an RPA Center of Excellence (CoE), and implementing RPA and OCR technologies across multiple engagements over the last four years.
To grow its automation efforts at-scale, Western Union decided to re-imagine and re-engineer processes and optimize those processes for digital workers. To do this, the business turned to a strategic intelligent automation program.
A citizen developer is an intelligent automation builder, usually a company employee that is a process subject matter expert, who creates new business solutions using low-code/no-code digital worker development. The business embraced this approach, with more than 50 employees across the business coming forward to take on the role.
Having dedicated itself to re-skilling its employees— as opposed to hiring from other companies—Western Union’s CoE developer workforce is now made up of 70% internal and re-skilled staff. Each year, digital workers now process more than five million tasks, across more than 120 different processes: in multiple areas such as finance, accounting, compliance, and operations. Without citizen development, this could not have been achieved on the same scale, or at the same pace.
Taking people who are tech-savvy and re-skilling them into intelligent automation developers has proven to be an extremely effective way of scaling enterprise-wide automation. As a result, we have the right people creating the right automations whilst giving them the opportunity to create a new career path within the company.”John Dyer SVP & Head of Global Operations, Western Union
Western Union has demonstrated what can be achieved when employees are put at the heart of their automation efforts. This approach will undoubtedly help them continue scaling their use of intelligent automation across the enterprise, delivering greater employee satisfaction, higher quality and improved customer experience.”Patrick Finn President and GM, Americas, SS&C Blue Prism