Ep. 75: Shifra Kolsky - The Effective Roll Out of RPA Implementation

Contact Shifra:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/shifrakolsky/


FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPTAdam: (00:05)
Hi, everyone. Welcome back for episode 75 of Count Me In, IMA's
podcast about all things affecting the accounting and finance
world. I'm your host, Adam Larson, and I'm pleased to introduce
you to our featured expert speaker, Shifra Kolsky. Shifra is the
Vice President and Assistant Controller and Finance at Discover
she is responsible for external reporting, the SOX compliance
program, accounting policy, corporate accounting and financial
systems. In this episode, Shifra talks about the value of an
effective rollout and what all aspects of an RPA implementation
look like. Shifra  launched the finance RPA team in 2018.
The first RPA team at discover. So to hear firsthand experiences
and actual applications, keep listening as we head over to the
conversation now. 


Mitch: (00:56)
So Shifra, you know, we've had a lot of episodes here talking
about artificial intelligence, RPA, and from your experience and
you just, how you answer questions regarding these topics. Can
you first start off with telling us how is RPA different from
AI? 


Shifra: (01:13)
So RPA is robotic process automation, AI artificial intelligence,
and the main difference is that the way I think about it as the
bots are a little bit stupid. So AI tools can and learn from, the
different data that they're exposed to and they can develop more
sophisticated responses over time. Bots can strictly do whatever
it is you tell them to do so they just follow instructions,
nothing more. 


Mitch: (01:45)
So as far as following instructions, you know, I know you are in
finance and accounting, right? VVce President Assistant
Controller here at Discover,  and again, your perspective,
what are the best type of tasks for these bots to perform? 


Shifra: (02:00)
Bots are great at doing simple, repetitive tasks where you can
give exact step by step instructions. Some of the examples in
controllership might include things like pulling reports or
setting up journal entries based on specific data fields in that
report, preparing reconciliations where the bot would 
compare data from one source to another source and create a list
of exceptions. So again, all simple, basic repetitive tasks, but
we have a lot of those in finance and accounting, and so they're
very helpful to us. 


Mitch: (02:38)
And being in finance and accounting, you know, a lot of people
probably outside the function would look at this as maybe a cost
cutting measure, right? It's, it's a way to kind of eliminate
some of the human tasks that are out there, but from within the
function and the organization as a whole, really, how do you get
in to get people to understand the benefits of these bots and
RPA? 


Shifra: (03:04)
Yeah. So when we first launched our RPA program, we were not
looking at cost cutting, and we were looking at, ways to become
more efficient and free up people's time to be able to do more
high value work, to kind of critical thinking things that you
need a human to do and so when we took on this program, we
started by, we asked people to tell us about the things they
hated doing, the things that they found, kind of mind numbingly
boring. And thought let's take that list and see if we can get a
bot to do those things instead. We also made it very clear to
people that it was about shifting people to doing the higher
value work, the critical thinking, the analytics, so that people
weren't focused on the, Oh my goodness, the bot is  going to
take my job. Building a foundation of trust that it really was
centered around helping people, was really important to get buy
in and to get people engaged. We also enlisted one specific team
at the start, to be guinea pigs for everyone. So they test it
out. They were the first ones to have a process automated, and
they were specifically selected because they had two clear
qualifications. One, they had a whole bunch of tasks that were
repetitive and easy for us to automate the box. But the other
thing they had was a sort of general sense of excitement about
the program and the possibilities, and so they were able to
really carry the message and they were able to help the bot
developers understand things quickly. And then they were also
able to convey their enthusiasm to other people as they started
seeing the results. And so having those natural cheerleaders or
business champions was a really effective way for us to build
some momentum around the program. 


Shifra: (05:11)
And what were some of the recognizable benefits of implementing
this program? How did it ultimately impact your team? 


Shifra: (05:18)
So there are a number of different ways that this has helped our
team. You know, on the simplest level, it changed the energy. I
mean, it got people excited and really thinking in different
ways. Our team has long been focused on continuous improvement,
but this is really taking things to a different level and helped
folks think more creatively about the things that we can do
instead of feeling hampered by the things that we can't do. You
know, so that's one element of it on the people's side, but
frankly, it's also allowed us over the course of the last two
years to redeploy about 10% of our headcount in the
controllership team to take on new opportunities within the
group. So this furious focus on automation has really enabled us
to keep up with the growing needs, that are coming at us from all
of our business partners and, and keep up with those demands
without increasing head count. 


Mitch: (06:25)
One question that I hear a lot when we start talking about RPA is
the length of time it takes actually to implement the program. So
are you able to share how long this whole process took from the
analysis through identifying what people hate until you were able
to recognize the benefits and get these cheerleaders for the
program? 


Shifra: (06:45)
Sure. I would say for us, the research we did before we jumped
into it probably took longer than getting it moving once we
started. So we spent a good couple months really talking to a lot
of other companies and understanding, you know, some of the
things that worked for them, some of the things they wish they'd
done differently. We spent a chunk of time looking at the
different tools that were available and deciding what the best
tool was for us. And then we invested in, recruiting and training
some folks, and we did all internal recruiting. We thought that
it was smarter to take people who understood the business and
understood the business processes, and teach them how to use the
tool rather than taking somebody who knew how to use the tool and
try to teach them the business. So we spent a couple of months
with all of that kind of upfront research and, and training. And
once we got into the training it was fairly quick. So depending
on the nature of the process that you're trying to automate,
things, can we fairly quick, if you know how to use the software
and you understand how some of the different connections work,
okay. You can get something going in as little as a week when
you're first starting out. You're more likely looking at things
taking between eight and 12 weeks for a process. And again,
probably depending on the complexity and the number of different,
systems the process might touch. But we had our first process in
place within about 10 weeks  and built on things from there.
And one of the things that we...