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Automation AI
Mars Masters the Art of Scaling to 500,000 Hours Saved
ABOUT
Mars is a global, family-owned company with a diverse portfolio of confectionery, food, and pet-care products and services. With $40 billion in annual sales, they produce some of the best-loved brands and take care of half of the world’s pets through their pet health services.
THE CHALLENGE
Mars began their automation journey in 2018 in the back offices where they were able to easily start, test, and learn from their first use cases. Quickly, they pivoted to the front offices with the goal of not only improving customer experience and driving business growth but also allowing their associates to focus on decision-making and innovation. Yet, challenges as a result of the pandemic created an urgency to ensure sustainable growth moving forward. Low-hanging fruit use cases wouldn’t sustain the operational efficiency Mars was seeking. They needed to re-examine their RPA strategy and supercharge scaling efforts.
500k
Hours Saved
475
Digital Workers
100x
Value Creation
When they invented ATMs, the tellers thought, ‘This is going to replace my job.’ In reality, it transformed their job.
-TJ Young, Head of Process Intelligence, Mars 
THE SOLUTION
Mars leveraged the Automation Anywhere Celonis process and task mining to improve upon automations that were working but could function better. This uncovered bottlenecks, unearthed value trapped within existing processes, and uncovered previously unseen opportunities for RPA. Now, Mars has a niche process intelligence CoE to scale these fruitful process discovery efforts. The hub focuses on “fishing where the fish are,” and together with the Automation CoE, turns insights into quick action. This harmonious partnership of CoEs has garnered confident buy-in from stakeholders, which has made it easy to rally continued support as they scale across all business segments.
Processes Automated
Order Processing
Veterinary Pathology
THE WHOLE STORY
2022 was the “Year of Automation and AI” at Mars. After a successful start, the company found themselves doing 15-use-case sprints, unable to break past that threshold. Determined to scale, they leveraged Automation Anywhere tools for process and task mining to dive deeper into existing processes and expose opportunities to automate their automations.
One example was the process of automating self-service items for customers such as automatic opportunity submissions. This allowed Mars to reclaim time by pointing customers to where answers were laid out, eliminating the need for a person to answer multiple questions before arriving at an actionable item.
Understanding outcome expectations from business units was also key to refining automations and how they impact business. Once the CoE could understand the steps that need to be taken and how often a process needed to be run, or what happened when it didn’t run, they could improve upon that process to extract even more value from it.
As they built a healthy pipeline, the way they observed performance metrics began to evolve and aid in their quest. Rather than solely focusing on hours saved or number of bots, they adopted a wider purview of their RPA program’s landscape— how the company was penetrating into new markets and functional areas across the enterprise. Additionally, the process intelligence CoE was able to tell the whole story of business impact downstream. With all of this data insight, Mars was able to identify transformational processes and replicate them throughout the organization.
THE FUTURE
The Mars Automation CoE is always looking to what’s next. Year over year, business needs and challenges are evolving, as is the technology landscape. The company plans to continue to listen and understand roadblocks for different business units, while keeping in close partnership with their process intelligence CoE to drive more targeted and end-to-end process automations. They have accomplished several single-task processes to solve singular pain points, but moving forward, they plan to build upon these tasks by examining what happens before or after to develop mature end-to-end automations with more tools for their business users.
Technology has never been the challenge. It’s about our ability to reimagine and identify new ways to work.
-Adeel Fudda, VP Intelligence, Automation & Emerging Tech, Mars
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