Genworth financial seeing excitment in quality of work with RPA

ABOUT GENWORTH FINANCIAL

Genworth Financial offers a range of products and services, including long-term care and mortgage insurance. For more than 145 years, the company has focused on helping its customers navigate caregiving options, protect and grow their retirement income, and prepare for the financial challenges that come with aging.

THE CHALLENGE

Genworth wanted to implement RPA for processes in its finance department that were still manual. In order to automate the labor-heavy processes, the company needed to think differently and look beyond traditional automation. In addition to cutting down on manual work, Genworth also wanted to increase productivity, reduce errors, increase speed and cost-savings.

10,000

Hours saved annually

110

Bots Implemented

40

Users Trained

“I have been working on the RPA process from strategy, operations, development to training. Every morning, I’m really excited to come into work and get going.”

-Natinder Kaur, Application Development Manager quote

THE SOLUTION

Genworth Financial started its RPA journey with a pilot program and a 6-week onboarding program. The first few weeks were used to master bot training, with hands-on design and set-up, followed by continued off-site training that led to the production of a few bots by the end of the sixth week. 10 pilot processes were identified across the finance, shared services, corporate systems and tax departments. After the pilot exceeded all expectations, the program was expanded to investments, audit, data security, and customer service. Currently, 110 bots are live, and the RPA program continues to quickly grow.

Processes Automated

Reporting

Reconciliation

SOX/Auditing

Data processing

THE WHOLE STORY

After seeing success with the first few automations at Genworth, people within the company began reaching out to the RPA team because they heard good things and were excited for the potential in their own areas. The company started doing lunch and learns and received an overwhelmingly positive response. A 100-person guest list would fill up in less than 10 minutes after enrollment was open. The company also provided other opportunities for its employees to learn about RPA, including a “Women in Technology” forum.

The first bots helped save four hours of manual labor every day showcasing employees the benefits of RPA. The automation team implemented a successful RPA model, walking a fine line between having standards, maintaining them, enforcing them, and giving teams the flexibility to do what worked for them. The RPA team helped the business itemize, prioritize, estimate, plan, and design automations, all while looking for opportunities to create something other internal teams could reuse as well. With continued support from executives at the highest levels of the organization, the biggest challenge Genworth is facing is how fast the program is growing. Currently, more than half of the people deploying RPA are non-IT employees, who continue to maintain their bots.

THE FUTURE

Genworth continues to build bots and automation in-house from the ground-up. 40 people across different teams have been trained in RPA and evangelize automation not only within their teams but all over the organization.

By the end of 2019 the company expects to have save around 15,000 hours for the year, with 250 bots in production and 50 employees building bots. A pilot with Document Automation is also planned. By the end of 2020, the hope is to have 50,000 hours saved annually with 1,000 bots in production.