UiPath Gives Strategic Edge to Sopra Steria’s Intelligent Automation Push

Sopra Steria partners with UiPath to bring intelligent automation-driven robotic process automation (RPA) solutions, helping its customers meet their transformation goals and accelerate business outcomes.

Sopra Steria India Ltd. is a leading European IT consulting and digital services company with 45,000 employees across 25 countries. It caters to enterprises across major industries like BFSI, retail, government, energy & utilities, telecom, media & entertainment, transport, defense, aerospace, etc. Through its comprehensive portfolio of technology services, SI, infrastructure management, cybersecurity and Business Process Services, the company is helping businesses drive digital transformation to obtain tangible and sustainable benefits.

Automation is an integral part of Sopra Steria’s offerings as it works with organizations to intelligently apply digital technologies that deliver business transformation. In fact, the company works by ‘automation first’ mindset when doing the solutioning and resolution of customers’ business challenges. Its driving philosophy is delivering cost-effective and assured process excellence with advanced, intelligent automation, the operative word being ‘intelligent automation’.

We see our partnership as a winning combination of product innovation from UiPath and agile methodology and expertise from Sopra Steria. The strategic capability that UiPath brings to our digital practice is helping us meet our customers’ transformation goals while accelerating their business outcomes.

Mohit Gupta • Director – RPA, BPS and IM, Sopra Steria India Ltd.

The focus on intelligent automation has led the company to build a strong robotic process automation (RPA) ecosystem with UiPath as a key partner. Integrating RPA with disruptive technologies such as AI/ML, mobility, cloud, etc., Sopra Steria and UiPath together are helping businesses navigate their digital transformation journey. The company currently has around 54 RPA experts in its RPA center of excellence that are L4-certified on the UiPath platform.

Leveraging the strategic edge with UiPath

For Sopra Steria, RPA is embedded in most of its digital transformation solutions when bidding to the customers besides being a standalone offering. The partnership with UiPath helps it take the right-fit RPA solution to its customers. For quick win RPA areas, such as BPO, Finance & Accounting and HRO, there are modules already available on UiGo.

In areas with growing traction like infrastructure management and IT solutions, especially testing and ticketing, the company is again betting on its partnership with UiPath to help its customers transform and simplify their operations. Taking it a step further, the two are working on a joint offering around HANA migration, consolidating their portfolio further.

Sopra Steria considers intelligent automation as the future of RPA as the market shifts away from automating only rule-based tasks. The company is striving towards establishing a niche in this area with an amalgamation of AI/ML, blockchain, etc., working in tandem with RPA and possibly a handoff between humans and bots. The result being that it hasn’t let vanilla RPA implementations exceed more than 30% of its overall RPA business.

For Sopra Steria, UiPath’s continuous bid for product innovation and investments in R&D to bring stronger AI/ML capabilities to its RPA platform is a key lever in streamlining and accelerating its intelligent automation offerings to its customers. A case in point is the ‘computer vision’ capability that UiPath offers for Citrix automation, which has been quite a game changer.

In fact, UiPath’s strong presence in the Citrix environment is the biggest differentiator that it brings to the table. “When it comes to offshoring or projects in secured accounts, Citrix is the only way to have access to those accounts. With the strong value proposition it brings in the Citrix environment, especially around computer vision, UiPath surely gives us a distinct edge in the industry,” exclaims Ankur Bansal.

A leading global travel retail company that was one of Sopra Steria’s marquee clients, wherein the entire implementation was done on Citrix, is one such example. UiPath has provided the automation piece with its enterprise RPA platform, which is a critical component of HR digital transformation by Sopra Steria.

For the company, another key differentiator that sets UiPath apart from its peers is the flexibility and scalability in its licensing model, which allows for buying as per need.

Process re-engineering to meet customer needs

Customer priority is the philosophy that guides and shapes Sopra Steria’s automation journey for its customers. The result is, it does the solutioning working backwards, thinking from a customer's perspective rather than thinking from a solutionist’s perspective. “At the end of the day we all work for the customer and we need to be obsessed with how we're going to deliver for our customers and that's where the right re-engineering comes into play,” says Ankur Bansal.

Needless to say, process re-engineering to meet customer needs is the most critical component of the RPA journey that the company undertakes for its clients. Its focus on intelligent automation, requiring integration with AI/ML, has led to a charter that’s built around process re-engineering and not just process automation.

Sopra Steria relies on UiPath’s Robotics Enterprise Framework to provide a structured approach to its methodology and ensuring a strong governance and implementation framework for its customers. This supports in deploying and scaling, especially when working on similar domains like F&A, HR, Utilities and government sector.

“The framework helps us in putting together the right governance structure and control on the bots as well as defining the development methodology, using the reusable components, etc. This really makes a lot of difference in terms of our deployment cost reductions and savings for our customers, making it a key differentiators for us,” explains Ankur Bansal.

Sopra Steria’s typical RPA journey for its customers starts with assessing the processes using the process discover technology that captures every single step/transaction of the process. This leads to the creation of the Robot Service Definition (RSD) document, a document detailing out the ‘as is’ process and ‘to be’ process after the re-engineering, how the process is going to work post-automation, what components will be used, who is going to use it, the commercials, among other details. The business case is also created and the results and ROI are predefined in the RSD document.

This is followed by creating a complete automation and transformation journey for the customer, which could span across months or years, depending on the customer’s need. Once there, a project plan is put into picture, starting with deployment and then maintenance support. The framework has an integral component of change control management for project success.

Post-implementation, the company conducts process assessment and business case ROI analysis and shares the savings and efficiencies delivered through the project with the customers. This is validated and governed by the company’s finance teams.

Besides this, Sopra Steria also offers its customers the flexibility to take just consultancy or training services should they choose not to go for an end-to-end project.

Conclusion

Sopra Steria and UiPath are already working on further strategic integration of their respective technologies. A joint proposition currently under works, is around botify.kit, Sopra Steria’s own AI powered chatbot platform with a strong traction with both public sector and private sector customers. In Addition to this, multiple other joint prepositions are currently being worked on which will bring disruption and innovation in the field of intelligent automation.

“Our partnership with UiPath started really well with the unique business value it has helped deliver to our customers. Now, we are working on strengthening our relationship further by working on multiple joint propositions that we can take to the market that can really transform the industry and the way it works today,” says Mohit Gupta.

Case studies:

Automating financial report extraction process for leading bank in Germany

The Challenge:

The customer requirement was to automate the extraction of the financial report from the SAS web application to facilitate extraction of these reports at any point of time during the day.

When performed manually this process required the requester to provide the account number of the parent company over email which would be reviewed by a business executive who would check the relevant permissions and retrieve the financial report of both the parent and daughter companies, this would then be shared with the requester.

This was a process that required high precision due to the nature of queries, and resulted in a lot of effort being invested. There was also a dependency on the availability of the concerned business executives for these requests to be processed.

The solution:

Sopra Steria RPA CoE simplified and automated this process by developing and deploying a robot that monitors the designated mailbox where the requests are received.

Once a new request is received via email in this mailbox, the bot validates whether the requester is allowed to request the report or not, by consulting a CRM system.

If the requester is allowed to request the report, the Robot searches for the daughter company’s account numbers in the CRM. It then retrieves the report from the SAS Web application and sends it to the requester.

This bot monitors the mailbox for new requests as scheduled, enabling extraction of these reports at any point of time during the day, while ensuring 100% accuracy as well as 100% effort reduction.

Automation of production log analysis process for a French multinational company that provides services for the aerospace, and transportation market

The challenge:

The requirement was for the time-taking and multi-platform dependent process of reading & analyzing production logs, based on a supervising file to be automated, complete with ticket logging and reporting, as this was a tedious process that consumed a lot of effort when performed manually.

The solution:

Sopra Steria RPA CoE automated this process by developing and deploying a bot that reads and analyzes the production logs that are received in an email as HTML attachments along with a zip folder. The bot saves the zip folder at a designated location before unzipping, then creates a directory based on the processing date. As for the HTML logs-each log falling under the category of ‘warning’ or ‘errors’ is validated from a metadata file that is downloaded from an online portal (ETOL portal).

Once validated, the necessary action is taken on that particular interface. The resulting actions could be-raising a ticket on the portal, sending an email to the administrator, or both. Post this the bot shares a final log with the team confirming the action taken on each log by the bot, thereby considerably reducing manual intervention and improving processing time.

The Results

• 90% effort automated

• 4x faster processing time

• 95% manual effort reduction

• 0% Errors reduced to 0%

• 6 months to ROI

• Productivity Increased productivity

• Resolution Quick resolution of errors and warnings

Mobile app & UiPath integration to create positions in SAP & MyPad for one of the leading global travel customers

The challenge:

The erstwhile position creation process was quite tedious and restrictive, leading to an automation opportunity towards employee experience enhancement.

Previously, to request for a vacancy, managers were required to download a position creation form from the company intranet page, print it, fill it, and then scan the filled form to be attached to an email that they would draft to the HR organization management team.

The HR organization management team would check the scanned form for accuracy, and request further details in case of missing or incomplete information. In case the information was correct, the Org. Management team would manually complete the position creation request on SAP. This process took up to three days for completion.

The solution:

Using integrated digitization, the Sopra Steria RPA CoE created an HR mobile application, which was shared with potential requestors/managers. This application contains a web form for position creation requests complete with mandatory field highlights, and is integrated with the email account in the phone. In doing so, a manager can now use this application to request for a position creation anytime, anywhere. Scope for missing/incomplete information is eliminated.

Once a manager submits the form on his mobile phone an email is triggered to the HR group mailbox which in turn triggers an RPA Bot that has been monitoring the mailbox. This bot processes the request by logging in to SAP over Citrix, and creating the position in line with the details received in the email, in less than 3 minutes. Upon successful position creation, the bot sends a confirmation back to the requester via email.

The Results

• Digitization Integrated digitization by use of mobile application and RPA

• 100% manual effort reduction

• 0% Error rate reduced to 0%

• 3 mins Faster processing time from 3 days to 3 minutes