William Hill had previously experimented with workflow automation technology to automate some customer due diligence tasks, which although weren’t ground-breaking and the technology was fairly limited, were robust and reliable, and William Hill were convinced that a Bots program would deliver the results they sought. However, they weren’t entirely sure how to really get started on a fully scalable Bots journey, so William Hill turned to automation specialists Bots For That, to help realise their vision.

William Hill knew from prior experience that there were several Bot solutions with a wide range of technical features and prices, but on the recommendation of Bots For That, selected UiPath for the initial pilot. Due to the industry experience of Bots For That, a fairly complex and ambitious process was chosen for the pilot phase of the Bots program, ‘Cross-Brand Self-Exclusions’.

This process involved processing customer account exclusions upon their request, but also required identifying all known associated and linked accounts for a customer plus searching for any possible duplicate accounts across several different and unintegrated systems and William Hill brands. In people terms, this process would consume the equivalent of 20 full time equivalent staff to perform the ongoing steps. Working with the process teams, it began by fully understanding and defining the existing processes, identifying automation improvement opportunities and outlining the solution design requirements. This essential task took several weeks, due to the number of different systems, brands and screens involved and the high number of variables, but the effort was worth it, and allowed the development and testing to be both comprehensive and completed successfully. The longest phase of the project was to establish a safe, secure and compliant IT environment that the automation would eventually operate from. With the final pilot process live, a single robot could complete the full process within just 2 minutes per customer on average, representing a 90% reduction in time per customer account, with 100% accuracy and total time returned to the business of approximately 20 full time equivalent worker hours per year – which they could instead spend delivering higher value services to their customers.

With the successful delivery of the pilot process, work began to start prioritising the pipeline for delivery and a number of processes were selected based on their respective value to the organisation. In parallel, the fundamental concepts for a successful automation programme were introduced, including a Bot Governance Framework, Charter and a Technology Roadmap that would underpin the future plans and help manage everything from infrastructure through to design, build, deployment and support of all robotic process automations.

These essential frameworks laid the foundation for the evolution of the programme work that followed, from proving the concept through to establishing and expanding phases and ultimately to scalable readiness.

The plan was to work on up to four new processes each quarter, each with a different delivery timeline and defined benefit. The focus remained on the Customer Operations processes, but also included activities from the Retail, Commercial and other more traditional back office areas too, in order to sustain the momentum and excitement from the extended leadership meeting.

A number of important process areas were prioritised across Responsible Gambling, Customer Services, Risk and Compliance, Customer Due Diligence, Trading Operations and Gaming Operations, where it was felt there would be a good balance between improving employee and customer experience, reducing manual workload and optimising processes for an exponential benefit.

Lawrence & Wedlock were asked to take the lead in collaborating with the various William Hill process teams to fully discover, define and design the automated process solutions, and then continue to build, test and deploy those processes, using unattended robots that operate with minimal dependency on the operational teams. The essential routines and schedules were set up to optimise the RPA license management and ensure operational service level expectations could be met. The majority of automations included user-definable and modifiable configuration layers containing key business process variables that the teams could update as and when requirements changed, without having to re-build the solutions. This gave the necessary scalability and adaptability the business so greatly needed and allowed robotic capacity to be diverted accordingly when volumes dictated.

Several more processes followed, being first added to the pipeline, then evaluated to ascertain the complexity and suitability for automation and verify the potential benefits to the business. A rhythm was soon established enabling the automation lifecycle phases to get completed in sequence and prepared for operational go live.

The programme very soon begun expanding across the business with more candidates being submitted and finding their place on the delivery pipeline. With solid foundations laid and a growing appetite across the business for Bots, the time was right to progress to the next phase on the journey by expanding the pipeline further and preparing for controlled scale at pace.

Essential to this next phase of growth, were two key elements: The first, deploying a scalable steady state infrastructure to support the ambitions of a company-wide deployment of Bots. The second, training today’s business users to become tomorrow’s Bot developers.

Working with William Hill IT, the first step was to define the future Bot architecture – they decided to continue with UiPath technology with Bots residing on the William Hill internal networks and Bot orchestration on the cloud (what is called Cloud Orchestrated Bots). A plan and timelines were agreed, and the work was completed in weeks along with the implementing the ongoing best practices to scale quickly and safely but at ease as demand dictated.

Next up was to build the Bot developer team that would enable William Hill to scale those heights. Bots For That delivered a tailor-made training program over five weeks covering the essentials of the automation lifecycle. Students were recruited from several operational areas of the business, fifteen in total, for the first training wave.

In week one the recruits settled in, gained an appreciation of the automation lifecycle and its various phases and became familiar with the technologies they would be learning for their future roles. In week two, reality dawned, and everyone began to realise that although Bots are simple, it’s not always easy, as the pace of the new skills and challenges gradually increased. Week five brought the course to a close with a series of practical challenges to really test their understanding. It was an incredible journey for them, and they’d all learnt not only the art and science of robotic process development, but how to practically deliver results within their operating environments.

In parallel, we developed the essential operating foundations that will support and guide the pathway to scaled automation, which consisted of a company-wide Charter with detailed Governance Frameworks. These importantly set out the rules of engagement for the teams with their internal business customers and all other stakeholders and beneficiaries of the programme.

“The recruits completed the course and graduated just before the Christmas break. They continued they’re education in the new year with practical experience and learning on real process automation projects. We’ve truly begun laying the bricks that will help transform our future operations”.

A number of new initiatives were then planned and delivered to help the Bots program evolve and continue to flourish, which spanned technology, people and process and included:

• Advanced Automation Technologies including Cognitive Bots and Conversational AI powered by Machine Learning to expand the diversity and complexity of automations and deliver even greater benefits.
• An Automation Idea Chatbot, driven by AI, as a direct engagement tool for the business teams to suggest candidates, receive real-time feedback and begin the discovery process.
• Bot Academy training waves for further batches of tomorrows Bot teams for continuous learning and improvement.
• Development of the Central Bots Hub and creation of new roles to help drive, monitor and manage the continued and scaled growth of the Bots program across more areas of the business.