The right questions helped Novuna close its digital capabilities gap, with Workato

The Situation: Hitachi Capital Business Finance has rebranded as Novuna in a wider merger, making Hitachi Capital Plc (UK) part of Mitsubishi HC Capital Inc. With change on the agenda, the business seized the opportunity to close its digital capabilities gap. The result was a toolset destined to save one of the UK’s leading consumer lending, asset finance, and vehicle leasing providers millions of pounds and revolutionize how the business works, all supported through a platform enabling automation and integration with Workato at its heart.

When it set out to achieve large-scale digitalization of products with increasing levels of automation, Novuna’s first task was to establish its purpose for digital improvement: to provide enhanced customer experiences for individuals and corporations. Novuna employs more than 1,600 staff serving more than 1.3 million customers across five divisions.

Novuna’s Enterprise Architecture team, in partnership with Cloudorizon (a Workato Platinum Service Partner), considered the existing strategies across each of the group’s business units to identify those to target for digitalization and those in which to create new business outcomes that were only possible because of digital technologies.

The team recognized that improving customer experiences with increasingly innovative solutions would also require improvements in operational processes.

Automation had been ad hoc and focused on tasks rather than end-to-end processes

An audit of current capabilities found gaps and determined what Novuna could use or repurpose to deliver its digital goals. The findings revealed limitations linked to automation and integration capabilities. The company was using automation only on an ad hoc basis and focused on tasks rather than end-to-end processes. Another drawback to the existing task-focused approach was that it resulted in little consideration of integration and poor traction with robotic process automation (RPA). An API could take 30 days to build, an integration, more than 40. At that time, Novuna had only been using RPA in one department, and when it upgraded or changed underlying systems, RPA stopped working.

Workato’s automation and integration capabilities at the API layer offered the ability to close many capability gaps at speed. Novuna selected Workato from a shortlist of leading integration platform as a service (iPaaS) vendors (which included Boomi and MuleSoft), Workato also impressing with its ability to support trials for each automation in a test environment, ahead of making a financial commitment to go live.

Workato’s user-friendliness also met an internal demand to democratize whatever technology it selected. Business and IT users could engage swiftly to run and integrate automations in their first proof of concept within days.

The technology wasn’t enough—Novuna needed to ask itself different questions

Novuna acknowledges that there were teething problems. It acquired, installed, and made available the new technology, but nothing changed. People continued to work as they had before. IT remained on standby for ad hoc business requests. Consistently servicing unconnected requests to automate unconnected processes based on someone’s “hunch” was not creating value.

Novuna needed to ask different questions to identify and plan value-building solutions. Instead of “What could we automate?” it asked, “How could we create a cohesive backlog of requests, working holistically across the business?” and “How could we measure and deliver financial benefits based on added-value volume transactions?”

It set up a new dedicated team to introduce a new way to identify opportunities, leading high-level discussions to walk through relevant end-to-end business processes. This method provided a better understanding of the upstream sub-processes and all relevant inputs, such as what systems were in use, where the hand-offs were, and what gaps could be closed through automation and integration to deliver successful end-to-end outcomes.

Process mining revealed unknown business challenges for automation to tackle

The team added process mining to its toolkit to help identify processes to improve with automation. The team chose Fluxicon’s affordable Disco tool primarily because it can be placed on a desktop computer, avoiding the requirement to get internal approvals to access the cloud.

One of Novuna’s business areas planned to outsource part of its invoice processing function. The business case appeared strong until process mining discovered the actual invoice volume was more than twice the estimate. It also found that most manual interventions were duplicated, almost quadrupling the original estimated number of touchpoints. The business was stunned.

With this clearer understanding of the process, automation and integration proved to be a viable alternative to outsourcing. Novuna designed a new process applying intelligent data extraction from Evolution AI—with a guaranteed 99.5% accuracy, significantly higher than Novuna’s existing optical character recognition (OCR) provider—and using Workato as the connective tissue and orchestrator of every step of the process. The process incorporated picking up the file, passing it through Evolution AI, pulling data back into Workato, integrating checks with third parties (in this case, the UK’s Companies House), validating company names, addresses, and VAT registrations, and returning the outputs to the accounts payable system.

The team completed the proof of concept in four days. This same approach to generating a backlog has resulted in 10 now-live processes and a backlog of a further 40 processes delivering multi-million-pound savings.

Novuna now has an automation and integration platform with Workato at the core, a new way of working established to generate pipeline, and “best of breed” technologies, including OCR, process mining, and RPA.

Combining technology within a platform is key to generating end-to-end success

This application of combinations of technologies and platforms to generate end-to-end outcomes is becoming mainstream in the enterprise. The evidence from data gathered in our 2021 HFS OneOffice Services Top 10: Native Automation report reveals leading enterprises are embracing a broadening range of key emerging technologies beyond RPA (Exhibit 1). Combinations of technologies are taking center stage. RPA and process intelligence have become the power couple of automation engagements, packing a powerful combo punch of understanding and automating processes, then measuring the impact.

Exhibit 1: Average contribution of core HFS OneOffice™ Emerging Tech stack elements in native automation engagements

Sample: HFS Research survey, 2021, N = 13 native automation service providers serving more than 14,000 enterprise customers
Source: HFS Research, 2022

The diversification of automation away from single-thread RPA is critical for its scale and long-term success because it is in the combination and connection of technologies that enterprise-wide, cross-silo automation (inclusive of IT and business) is enabled and business outcomes are achieved.

The Bottom Line: Even the best automation platforms must also be evangelized to create business value

Workato has become Novuna’s go-to solution provider for any new digital journey it faces. The next steps include exploring how it can apply the platform to work with open banking.

Novuna’s experience demonstrates how success requires more than simply building the platform. The platform must be treated as a product within the business, with a product owner to evangelize it and build communities around it. It must remain closely aligned to the business to ensure the services it provides are those the business wants and make them easy to consume.

Novuna’s experience also suggests that if you are about to embark on your automation and integration journey, you should think about setting up a platform team in IT to own and evangelize the tools you select. That team should stay close to the business and act as a business enabler. That team should include business process management expertise and have the capacity to support, train, and provide guidance to enable the business to build automations and integrations.