Multinational corporation automates 250,000 hours of tedious design tasks

ORGANIZATION PROFILE

As the world's largest supplier and manufacturer of athletic shoes and apparel, this corporation centers its focus on one vital thing: its athletes. The company does this by bringing innovation and inspiration to everything they do. By championing continuous advancement for athletes and sports, they help athletes reach their potential.

CHALLENGE

In line with the culture of constant innovation and inspiration, the company looked for a way to work smarter and remove the bottlenecks to productivity. Since the company relied so heavily on creativity, it set out to enhance its Consumer Creation team, a creative design team plagued with manual, highly repetitive, tedious tasks. But, because designers want a visually appealing result, the automation pathway was not obvious. So the team partnered with Automation Anywhere, using the Pathfinder Workshop to find a simple way forward.

250,000

Hours saved

Design tasks automated

We wanted to maximize the benefits of automation and create sustainable growth.

-Automation & Workflow Director quote

Solution

After developing options, they chose to target their automation efforts on their design team. The company automated over 80 tasks, giving designers time to focus on the more human part of their job instead of tedious, frustrating processes that took them away from their more cognitive tasks.

Now, instead of designers repeatedly bumping up against bottlenecks, the team moves fluidly, saving 250,000+ hours and shortening its design cycle times. Celebrating this significant win, the designers’ morale improved drastically, and they looked forward to more of what their “digital assistant” could do for them.

Processes Automated

Creative design tasks

Non-creative design tasks

STORY DETAILS

As constant innovation and inspiration were the bread and butter of this multinational corporation, the company felt a natural draw to eliminate process bottlenecks. The company saw significant benefits from automation due to Automation Anywhere’s expertise and tools, notably the Automation Anywhere Pathfinder Program, library, and university.

Looking to free the heart of the corporation from the blocks plaguing it, the company focused initial automation efforts on one of the design teams. First, the company educated the team and included them in the brainstorming sessions to help identify potential use cases. Then, deploying the company’s Six Sigma-inspired project management tactics, they began their weighted prioritization to target technically viable, high ROI automation opportunities. Once identified, product managers owned the end-to-end idea. An intelligent automation design team created an automation solution, deployed it, and moved on to the next opportunity. Each time an automation was released, the company focused on making it even more efficient and effective, maximizing the benefits of intelligent automation while allowing for sustainable growth.

The company automated 80+ processes, saving 250,000 hours and shortening the design calendar, which was a significant win. Designer morale skyrocketed, with workers exclaiming how excited they were to be able to focus on the truly creative, cognitive tasks of creating products.

THE FUTURE

The company recently finished migrating to the Automation Success Platform and is looking forward to using AARI. Designers are eager to use bots with their most utilized applications. The company has also built a roadmap for its citizen development program. After seeing the benefit of their "digital assistant," employees look forward to taking the process to the next level.

Designers want visual appeal. Creative people work differently from finance people, so our bots had to be different.

-Automation & Workflow Director quote

DOWNLOAD CASE STUDY

Click here to download a PDF copy of this case study for your reference