Robotic Process Automation (RPA) at Vattenfall began as a grassroots initiative as many business units within Vattenfall began to explore the potential of automation technologies. In 2018, the Vattenfall Heat division was the first to experiment with RPA by deploying software robots to automate simple processes and optimize daily tasks. Together with the Vattenfall IT team and external implementation company Ciphix, the Heat department was able to integrate the software robots into native Vattenfall systems.
The success of the business case within Heat was shared through various forums to inspire colleagues and show how powerful these technologies could be. As the news spread, the IT team discovered that there was increasing demand for automation within the organization. With growing requests and interest in RPA within the company, Vattenfall IT established RPA services to facilitate these requests in a streamlined manner.
As the Vattenfall IT team continued to develop RPA services, they created a “Robotics Filter,” a tool to evaluate which processes were best suited for RPA. This led to a productive dialogue within Vattenfall that helped raise awareness of these innovative technologies.
With support from external IT implementation partners, Vattenfall IT then established their own Robotics Centre of Excellence (CoE), which enabled them to scale up robotics and automation activities in an efficient manner.
In the early days of the Vattenfall Robotics Centre of Excellence (CoE), the main focus was on the company’s existing needs – especially repetitive, stable processes with structured data that was readily available. Once these were addressed, the CoE began to analyze other processes and demonstrate the potential of RPA within Vattenfall. The team focused more on processes with rule-based decisions and minimal exceptions, with the intention of simplifying the role of the human worker in the process.
As more projects were launched, the Vattenfall CoE defined the following criteria to determine which processes would be considered for robotic automation:
- Repetitive with high process volume
- Rule-based with minimal human intervention for decisions
- High level of standardization with few exceptions and modifications
- Use of structured, electronically available data
Once the processes were identified, the IT CoE could determine what level of support (if any) would be required from their external implementation partners in the Netherlands, Germany and Sweden. To centralize and manage all RPA initiatives from start to finish, the CoE began using the UiPath platform.
Thus, the Robotics Platform within Vattenfall was born. The platform grew rapidly between 2018 and 2022 and currently supports eight business units. According to the system administrator of the RPA platform, Peer Fiedler, “RPA is here to stay. The automation potential in companies like ours is huge and growing every year. That’s why we see this technology as an important tool to transition to more integrated software solutions.”
