S&P Global Ratings is the world’s leading provider of independent credit ratings. They are essential to driving growth, providing transparency, and helping educate market participants so they can make decisions with confidence. 

With more than one million credit ratings outstanding on government, corporate, financial services sector, and structured finance entities and securities, S&P Global Ratings offers an independent view of the market built on a unique combination of broad perspective and local insight. To support their critical role in the markets, S&P Global Ratings has established a powerful combination of skilled automation Center of Excellence (COE) automation developers and a group of federated citizen developers.

Challenge

S&P Global Ratings operates in a highly regulated industry. When they began exploring technologies to help them increase operational efficiencies, they needed a solution that offered the strictest governance and allowed them to maintain control. They wanted to establish an impactful program that could scale quickly across the organization, take advantage of institutional knowledge, and enable more complex automations designed to deliver sustainable business benefits.

Solution

S&P Global Ratings set a solid foundation and ensured stringent governance by building a robust Robotic Operating Model (ROM™) and tested this model on a series of pilot projects before scaling to the wider organization. They established an effective COE, but soon realized they could accomplish more if they leveraged employees in each business unit. The COE set out to train a dynamic team of citizen developers drawn from across the organization.

Citizen developers were recruited in a variety of ways. They used internal automation pipeline idea contests (where an experienced automation professional is paired with a newbie), peer-to-peer evangelization, and education by the RPA Academy. Since these employees are the boots on the ground in each department, they’re encouraged to submit automation ideas to boost their team’s day-to-day work. To date, hundreds of ideas have been submitted to the COE. S&P Global Ratings has a thriving team of over 20 active citizen developers in 13 locations around the globe. These developers often discover and share high-value ideas, which allows the COE to connect the dots to other departments that might be able to use the same automation.

Backed by the advanced automation COE, citizen developers have created digital workers across the organization to complete tasks that weren’t possible before, including:

• Verifying the correct publication of articles on the S&P website and immediately flagging issues to the publishing editor for review and resolution
• Sourcing data and pre-populating it into templates ready for Analytical review
• Automating control and internal reporting processes

The S&P Global Ratings network of citizen developers also contributes to the wider success of the automation program. They act as automation ambassadors; equipped with the knowledge and passion to identify opportunities where Blue Prism can augment human processes to drive quality and control, improve employees’ experiences, and return thousands of hours to the business.