Enter Centric: A 10-Year Journey from Agile Coaching to Hyperautomation
Early Adventures in RPA
In 2014, WWT engaged Centric Consulting for a small Agile coaching engagement. Since that initial project, our relationship with WWT has expanded into several service offerings, including process excellence, program and project management, change management, and technology.
In 2020, WWT partnered with us to conduct a robotic process automation (RPA) proof of concept project. RPA automates repeatable tasks with digital robots, or “bots.” Bots mimic human activities, like monitoring email boxes for specific messages and responding to them quickly. For example, we helped WWT use bots to speed the processing of time-sensitive military contracts to more than 100 per hour.
After that successful proof of concept, we deployed several technology projects that used RPA to benefit the company’s supply chain. For example, our team used a more advanced application of RPA to create a “universal bot” to create templates for vendors, standardizing how they submit information to WWT.
We also helped WWT implement RPA in their finance department. Over a year, the company automated over a dozen processes and completed a time-critical project using RPA to update 36,000 lines of accounting data in a malfunctioning code. Normally, WWT would have needed at least three weeks to test and build the solution, but our team built the automation solution in two days and conducted the testing over a weekend. The project outcome helped prevent millions of dollars in losses.
Evolving RPA at WWT: RPA + AI + ML
As a company that prides itself on innovation, WWT began looking for ways to derive even more value from RPA. We identified the combination of RPA with artificial intelligence (AI) as a more powerful tool that could automate the company’s back-office work, such as managing the high volume of business documents WWT processes each year.
These documents come to WWT in multiple formats from around the world and are too numerous and complex to templatize. AI and its recent large-language model (LLM) advances solved the problem. AI can read and interpret the information on the documents and decide what to do with them next. The combination of RPA and AI, sometimes called hyperautomation, gets closer to delivering no-touch, end-to-end automation that frees employees for more valuable work. And because the automation is typically low-code or no-code, it makes RPA easier and less costly to deploy.
The Results: ‘Communications Mining’ Speeds Document Processing and Points WWT to the Future
As a partner of UiPath, the world’s largest RPA vendor, we worked with the St. Louis UiPath community to identify documents WWT could manage with hyperautomation. The company then trained a machine learning (ML) model on more than 150 purchase orders from one of WWT’s largest vendors. Instead of relying strictly on where information appears on a document, AI recognizes types of information by its characteristics. Known as “communications mining,” this use of hyperautomation does the heavy lifting overnight, so employees are ready to take over when they arrive in the morning.
Called “Document Understanding (RPA + Machine Learning),” the app was successfully deployed in December 2023. In 2024, we worked with WWT to enhance the DU/ML app, which will soon process dozens of PDFs weekly. Future projects will take our work to the next level by helping us understand how long employees need to perform all the tasks involved in work, like building server racks and repairing complex computer cabling projects.
DU/ML is only one of three current development tracks that WWT is embracing, prioritizing and expanding. The feedback about DU/ML — the first artificial intelligence RPA app to go live at WWT — has been remarkable. The next major challenge is developing a generative AI and LLM solution. Interest in these ubiquitous, highly intelligent, interactive technologies is at an all-time high at WWT, and we predict it will continue to grow. While humans still train the models for these applications, RPA, ML, AI, GenAI, and LLM represent the future of automation at WWT.
Conclusion
Our nearly 10-year relationship with WWT demonstrates that even technologically mature companies can benefit from outside perspectives and innovative approaches. As new AI technologies like LLMs put RPA and automation within reach for more companies, it’s becoming even more critical for organizations to examine their existing processes and identify which could benefit from automation. Where do processes get bogged down? What routine, repetitive tasks do employees dislike doing themselves? How long will it take for automation to justify the cost of investment?
Such analyses take time, which is where partners can help. After all, great automation solutions are not just about technology — they’re about knowing when, where and how to deploy it before developing a strategy to introduce it to employees. If done properly, RPA and AI together can potentially transform your business.
