Robots are generally perceived today as a threat to human jobs. Dealing with employees’ fear of losing their positions is one of the biggest challenges Chevron Corp. faced when it started implementing robotic process automation across its organization, according to Richard Fong (pictured), information-technology manager of finance delivery at Chevron.

“There’s definitely some nervousness, no doubt,” Fong said. “But, actually, the story is not ‘you are losing your job. This is an opportunity to upscale, and to grow your career, right?’ So we kind of approach it in that context.”

Fong spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Rebecca Knight (@knightrm), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during the UiPath Forward event in Las Vegas, Nevada. They discussed the process of implementing robotic automation across the organization (see the full interview with transcript here). (* Disclosure below.)

Scale and compliance are other challenges

Chevron adopted RPA to automate repetitive tasks a few years ago. “Believe it or not, we have many people who still go through and open up email attachments,” Fong stated. “And that’s their day job. That’s what they do all day long for weeks — usually, maybe about two weeks of doing data processing; they spend the other two weeks doing error corrections.”

Using the UiPath Inc. platform, the company developed a solution — a bot — to go to the inbox, open attachments, copy and paste that data automatically into a flat file, and then upload it into the enterprise resource planning system, Fong explained. “That was a big win for us. And that’s just one example,” he said.

The employees responsible for these tasks have been relocated to other projects. “And we have, actually, a cost-avoidance situation,” he pointed out. “Because instead of hiring new folks or bringing in contractors, we’re able to redeploy them onto higher value projects.”

Chevron hopes to scale RPA solutions across the entire enterprise — which resides in 160 countries. “The automation that we ran for the finance department has been mostly for the central finance groups,” Fong stated. “But there’s financial groups all over the world with Chevron that are also doing similar data processing. We haven’t even gone out there yet.”

The company is also working to ensure that the automation follows all of its governance standards and compliance procedures. When automating financial transactions, for example, it is necessary to protect the integrity of the systems as well.

“I’m excited to see that the UiPath has invested quite a bit in things like information protection, security, management of bots, and things like that. That’s going to help us,” Fong concluded.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of the UiPath Forward event. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the UiPath Forward event. Neither UiPath Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE