The deployment of NICE Robotic Automation is easy and can be done by a single developer. However, adapting the code is complex.

Setup is easy if you're certified and IT savvy.

The technical setup of the solution was actually really straightforward. The part that's more complex, is the way that we at Thomas Cook set up our projects around it. We have multiple competing projects all wanting to use a shared infrastructure in slightly different ways. So the NICE tool setup was probably the easiest part. It's more our management and governance at the start, where we were quite immature and didn't have much experience for automation and that's how the CoE was born in Thomas Cook, to overcome those hurdles and provide a better service.

There was a learning curve about how to manage business automation. Take IT, for example. The change management processes, which we have in place to protect the business from itself, don't fit with automation that can be turned around in a couple of weeks. Traditionally the processes have been more archaic. A change request form would be submitted and then, three weeks later, you'd sit and present it to the board, and then your change would be approved or disapproved. If it was approved, you would go ahead the following week. So that timeline for implementation, traditionally, was four or five weeks. It would take less than that to build an automation and make it live. We had challenges around those ingrained processes from day one. So the CoE was brought in to make sure that the people within IT, and out in the business, who were not confident or were worried that we'd be impacting business applications or processes adversely, were brought along on that journey and that helped them overcome those issues quite well.

Those challenges are still there. There are still a few. It's more a case of reassurance. We've hit our target and it's starting to prove to the business that automation it works, that it does what it says on the tin. It makes everyone's life easier. We're just creating automations that replicate what a human is doing rather than building something new.

For example, and here I come back to change management, they were really worried that if we put a robot onto an application that the application would suffer because the robot was going too fast. Bringing them on that journey and showing them that we can actually speed the robot up or slow it down, that we can put more robots on or fewer, and that helps to make sure that we're not breaking anything. It wasn't a way of working that they'd previously seen or agreed to. But by showing them it is that easy, that we could just turn the thing off if we started to see something break or started to feel there's a problem. By showing them and bringing them along with us, we managed to turn it. They have all bought into what we're doing.

To get the first robot live took a lot longer than it should have. Again, not because of the NICE toolset, but because of the way we structured our projects. It took us the best part of six months to get the first robot live.

At the moment, we have a pipeline of work that's coming in from all over the group, around the world. That includes a contact center, a finance shared service center, human resources, IT, e-commerce, and our yield department. Pretty much everyone's seen the success that we have delivered over the past year and are keen to come on board. They have each assigned someone to be a project manager for automation and to manage their own pipeline of work within their own transformation programs. Each of the automation managers send through their roadmap to me. We then assign a business analyst to work with them to track some metrics, to find out what the benefits will be from automating.

Once we've got all that information together, the business analyst goes through in fine detail to understand what that process actually is. The process is then translated it into a technical document that we hand over to our developers who then build the solution within the NICE toolset. We go through a very small change management process within the center of excellence to make sure the documentation is up to date, that it can be supported, and to make sure there's capacity available on the servers. Then we put the automation live and monitor it for two or three weeks, depending on what the business wants. Once they've signed off on it — after two or three weeks of it being successful — it moves into our run team which then looks after the automation and any ongoing improvements going forward.

It took us a while to get there, but it's quite robust and we've got a lot of checkpoints in there to make sure that all our stakeholders are fully up to date and that it's all signed off and everyone has approved and is happy.

We used an integrator for the initial setup and implementation took nearly two months. All NICE products are a little complex to implement. We have around 30 users and plan to increase usage. We already have two more processes in development now. The solution is running all the time. 

The initial setup took place before I started with this company. I have been involved in upgrading and that did not take very long. It was more a case of our internal mechanisms, getting ourselves organized and ready for the upgrade.

Our implementation strategy for the upgrade, first of all, meant we had to upgrade in 200 to 300 PCs on our floor plan. We connected to all the PCs and we did half of them over a couple of days. Any issues, where it couldn't remotely connect to upgrade, I needed the floor plan so I could go to that PC and have a look at it. Often it was either that the PC was switched off or had a bug or some other application needed to be reset.

Once we got it organized it was very quick. What took time were our internal processes to organize resources with our IT department and then to do it first thing in the morning, before the first shift would start. The upgrade process was done by three people. 

The solution is maintained by our IT service desk. If anyone has a problem with any system issue, they call them. The IT service desk looks into it. It could be that they just need to have it reinstalled, or that there's a problem with another part of the system. It's maintained constantly through our standard process.

It was easy to deploy because the installation packages are very simple. It doesn't require any maintenance.

It is pretty straightforward. It is a basic solution.