Consultancies have the crucial job of lending their expertise to the enterprise in areas ranging from accounting to finance, legal and IT.

In a bid to fully leverage automation, Whirlpool Corp. called on Accenture PLC for its expertise in successfully getting companies to their automation goals.

“We started on the CoE journey of making sure that we’re getting the most return on investment for our business, starting with discovery, making sure that what we’re automating makes sense and is the right process versus just an upgrade or retooling set,” said Lauren Joyce (pictured, right), end-user services manager at Whirlpool. “For us, especially being a global company, it was also making sure that we had that governance in place.”

Joyce and Rajendra (RP) Prasad (pictured, left), global automation lead at Accenture, spoke with theCUBE industry analysts Dave Vellante and David Nicholson at UiPath Forward, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Whirlpool’s automation journey thus far and how the company has benefited. (* Disclosure below.)

Building a winning team to crush automation

Alongside identifying where an organization is in the automation spectrum and choosing the right tools, putting a solid team together is immensely crucial to automation success, according to both Joyce and Prasad.

“And what really helped is that as we were building our team, we leaned on their [Accenture’s] expertise, and then did so also in the process of retooling people within our corporation,” Joyce said.

A center of excellence within any organization is charged with providing support, training, leadership and best practices in a certain area. Building out such a team implies the commitment of both senior leadership and the organization’s business partners, according to Prasad.

“The team is the key ingredient for success, the quarterback of which is the talent,” Prasad explained. “In today’s world, automation talent is not just about knowing RPA techniques or process optimization, but it is an end-to-end technology stack starting from cloud to data to analytics and entire platform capabilities of automation — that combined and coupled with change management.”

Accenture brought the UiPath platform as the choice tool for Whirlpool to standardize its automation from a global standpoint — which was a primary goal, according to Joyce. And while Whirlpool has undergone the automation of 60 bots, the real dividend of its journey has been in automated labor, mitigating both needless man-hours and errors.

“We’re at about 60,000 hours automated, and with some of our biggest box stores and our KitchenAid small appliances, we’ve even had hard-dollar savings. One bot brought a $3-million return and take took out 3,000 hours of human interaction,” Joyce added.

Here’s the complete video interview, part 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