Eversource Energy’s automation journey shows that companies can reinvigorate operations and employee experiences through intelligent automation. By addressing backlogs, adopting process mining and reducing manual work, Eversource has transformed its business practices and customer interactions, according to Rockie Solomon (pictured, left), manager of enterprise automation at Eversource Energy.

Eversource’s Rockie Solomon and EY’s Jamaal Stanford discuss process mining and RPA’s enterprise value.

“We had processes that would stack up for quite a bit of time and ultimately were costing us a bit of money,” Solomon said. “That was our introduction to automation. When you see work piling up, that’s frustrating. That’s when we partnered with Ernst & Young to do that proof of concept and then begin our automation journey by building the foundational capability and the governance to support it, and that’s what has allowed us to scale.”

Solomon and Jamaal Stanford (right), senior manager at Ernst & Young Global Ltd., spoke with theCUBE Research analyst Dave Vellante and host Rebecca Knight at UiPath Forward 2024, during an exclusive broadcast on theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio. They discussed Eversource’s tie-in with EY and the power of robotic process automation, AI and process mining in modern enterprises. (* Disclosure below.)

Leveraging intelligent automation and process mining for granular insights

Eversource first tackled back-office tasks, using unattended automation to handle repetitive tasks efficiently. This helped reduce the burden on employees, allowing them to focus on more meaningful work. Over time, the company expanded its automation efforts to include attended automation for front-office tasks, allowing customer service representatives to perform their duties while bots worked in the background, according to Solomon.

“They’re invoking these automations to work in real time while they’re on the phone with the customers,” she said. “We’ve also introduced chatbots. So some of our CSRs can go into a chatbot and say, ‘Whatever information they need to retrieve something is in their knowledge base.'”

Process mining provides deep insights into how business processes are executed and where deviations occur — and EY’s experience in the field has been instrumental to Eversource’s operations. This data-driven approach allowed the company to uncover inefficiencies, address the root causes of problems and optimize operations further.

“They didn’t know if it was a people, process or technology issue,” Stanford said. “We were able to come in and leverage process mining to give them greater transparency into their process to help them identify areas where they could either apply automation, provide coaching to some of the folks that were completing the work or needed to change the process itself.”

Here’s the complete video interview, part of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE Research’s coverage of UiPath Forward 2024: 

(* Disclosure: UiPath Inc. and EY sponsored this segment of theCUBE. Neither UiPath and EY nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE