This is the story of Jetty: a digital robot that started as an RPA experiment and became a highly valued digital colleague at the HR Operations department of Just Eat Takeaway.com. Discover how this Robotic Process Automation (RPA) solution transformed Jetty into a crucial asset, automating global processes and delivering significant value to Just Eat Takeaway.com.
About Just Eat Takeaway.com
Just Eat Takeaway.com is a leading global online food delivery marketplace, connecting consumers with thousands of connected partners across 20 markets, offering a wide variety of choices from restaurants to retail.
The struggle: global processes with local customization
As a large company that spans across geographies and teams, we have a lot of diverse processes. Automating HR operations can bring numerous benefits to organisations, including increased efficiency, reduced costs, improved accuracy, and enhanced employee experience. While the JET HR team automated most Workday (system for human resources management) processes using an API, this becomes really complex for global operations with country-specific rules. For example, the process for pregnancy leave is international, but it differs per country. Automating these rules in Workday was not an option, resulting in much manual work. This gave us plenty of reasons to start a pilot project to automate global processes. Together, we identified three specific automation processes, all executed within the Workday and JET Pay systems.
About JET Pay
By providing a JET Pay allowance, businesses enable employees to enjoy a meal allowance wherever they work. This allows employees to enhance their food experiences throughout their day, whether it's starting off with a coffee in the morning, having lunch with coworkers, working overtime, or enjoying snacks with friends and family on the weekends.
With JET Pay, teams can now enjoy endless choices regarding meals with the option to have their favourite meals delivered to the office using the app or pay with the JET Pay Card at their company canteen and nearby restaurants.
The pilot project: RPA to the rescue!
As a new employee perk, JET Pay had not been fully integrated into Workday, hence the HR Operations team had to manually enter data for new hires, terminations, and job changes, leading to some challenges. That's where we came in with RPA! An excellent solution to automate such processes and start our pilot project.
Starting with Robotic Process Automation
The HR operations team at Just Eat Takeaway.com (JET) was familiar with the benefits of RPA and saw lots of opportunities to use this technology to improve processes and efficiency. This technique could be an add-on to automate processes they couldn’t automate.
Ellie Horne, Lead HR Systems Functional Specialist, explained:
“In most cases, we build an integration to automate processes, but this wouldn’t be possible in some cases. RPA is excellent to use for automating these types of processes. The bot comes in and takes away all the tedious, repetitive tasks.“
Automating a process with RPA can take a day up to a couple of months. Most processes take just four weeks from analysis to production. Since this was the first experience for the JET HR team, they wanted to know exactly what a project would entail, from resources to budgets to infrastructure and support model.
Their main objectives:
Learn how to successfully execute an end-to-end RPA project;
Prove that RPA is a suitable solution to automate manual HR processes.
A big part of the project was ensuring we had a global approach. There was way less standardisation than expected. But now we are 100% sure the processes are executed the way they are supposed to be executed.
Valuable lessons: more standardisation and compliance!
At the start, the main goal for this project was to end-to-end automate the processes. But now, looking back, the team discovered that this project resulted in more than just automation!
Before you start building a robot, you start with a process analysis. This is a very important step because you don't want to automate a process with many exceptions. Therefore, the current processes were evaluated and redesigned to a globally standardised process. This not only simplified the process but also created more compliance while dealing with sensitive data.
Welcome to our digital colleague
Welcome, Jetty! It might sound strange to give a name to software. But for the JET team, it was a great move. Giving Jetty a face made communication much easier and the concept understandable for the employees.
Jetty performs three different tasks end-to-end and saves up time for all the global HR Operations teams. Due to the process optimization, 90% of the cases follow the happy flow. Which means that Jetty can process them easily. The HR team only processes exceptional cases. The time spent by HR Operations teams on the JET Pay process has been reduced by 80%.
Change management has always been an important pillar at JET; therefore, we were always in close contact with our HR Operations team to manage the change. A survey shows us that 100% of the team:
Agrees that Jetty gives them time to work on other tasks;
Agrees that Jetty improves the processes in a positive way;
Wants to continue to work with Jetty in the future.
Working with Incentro was a game-changer. They were approachable, flexible, and took the time to understand our needs. The workshop they provided helped us understand the steps needed for successful automation, and their willingness to dive into the nitty-gritty of the back end of UiPath was greatly appreciated.
Why an RPA robot?
With the implementation of RPA as a tool for automating global processes, JET is experiencing further advantages! One notable benefit is its ability to effortlessly navigate multiple systems.
Luciana Popescu, HR Process & Digital enablement Manager, explained that creating a bot as a digital worker is a straightforward process as long as the IT team is on board and provides the necessary access and sign-on credentials. Additionally, using RPA incurs no extra costs, even when working with multiple systems. She also noted that while they have other systems to automate tasks, the licensing fees required to jump from one system to another can be exorbitant. RPA, on the other hand, is a much more cost-effective solution for seamlessly navigating various systems.
In other words: mission accomplished!
