A financial services company with more than $200 billion in assets has implemented robotic process automation (RPA) and intelligent automation to improve the business – but not without also implementing Lean and Six Sigma to ensure automated processes are as efficient as possible.

The two go hand in hand, according to leadership at Voya Financial, which focuses on providing retirement products and services to customers. The company, headquartered in New York City, has 49,000 institutional clients and about 5.1 million individual retirement plan investors.

Before 2013, Voya was the U.S. arm of the Dutch bank ING, headquartered in Amsterdam. Voya has focused on process improvement since leaving ING, according to a December 2019 profile in Forbes, and “favors Lean and Six Sigma methods.”

What Is Intelligent Automation?

Consultants McKinsey & Company call intelligent automation “the engine at the core of the next-generation operating model.” Using five key technologies, McKinsey reports, organizations can make their operations more productive, reduce operational risks and improve customer experiences.

Those technologies are RPA, smart workflow software, machine learning and advanced analytics, natural language generation and cognitive agents. RPA, which is the most frequently mentioned intelligent automation tool, is software designed to handle routine and repetitive tasks, such as data extraction.

The goal is to take these tasks off the hands of humans, giving them time for more creative endeavors.

How Voya Uses Lean and Six Sigma With Automation

Voya has established a center of excellence, where 35 people from different areas of the company work to oversee RPA and other intelligence automation efforts at Voya. In addition to automating routine tasks, Voya also uses “intelligent OCR” (optical character recognition) to pull information from documents.

Voya also is considering the use of machine learning coupled with RPA to build programs that make decisions based on data and algorithms in automated processes, according to Forbes.

Where Voya differs from many companies is the commitment to couple process improvement with innovative technology. Jeff Machols, vice president and head of the Continuous Improvement Center (CIC) at Voya, told Forbes that automation is as much a process-oriented engagement as a technical one. This is managed through the CIC.

All this dovetails with the 2019 Kofax Intelligence Automation Benchmark Study. In a survey of 302 senior executives in 16 countries in North America, South America, Europe and Asia, the study found many business leaders believe implementing RPA and automation requires a commitment to process improvement.

What the CIC Does At Voya

Essentially, CIC has developed a methodology that combines RPA and process improvement. According to Forbes, it works in the following phases.

  • Discovery – This involves analysis of the process where automation is expected to be applied. A determination is made if the company should first improve and optimize the process before automation is applied.
  • Implementation of automation – In this phase, the goal is to implement quickly and not strive for perfection but rather getting 80% of value from 20% of the effort.
  • Assessment – Assessments are done of the automated process, usually after 90 days, to see how it is working. Changes are made if required for improvement of outcomes. The CIC also measures the value of automation against the original purpose.

Voya so far has reported saving 20,000 employee hours through automation.

One of the current projects is integrating human representatives with automated software in the company’s call center. The goal is to have automated systems that interact with customers but are overseen by employees.

Coupling process improvement with intelligent automation “allows the company to get the full potential from its people by automating away the tasks not worthy of them,” according to Forbes. It’s an approach companies worldwide may start adopting in the coming years.