Discover saves 800k hours with Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform

Discover, a leading digital bank and payments company, has recorded significant growth, both in its offerings and market share. As part of a wider drive to become a product-driven business, it launched a program for its manual processes to be understood, optimized, automated or eliminated. Assisted by platforms such as the Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform, Discover can identify and use repeatable solutions across the business. This frees up staff time that can be spent on developing new initiatives or interacting with customers.  

Benefits:

• 800,000 annualized hours given back through automation
• Increased use case ROI by applying repeatable solutions across the organization
• Enabled staff to focus on higher value work

Discover is a leading digital bank and payments company and operates in a highly regulated environment. Critical to its success is a significant level of operational rigor, given the vast number of processes across its operations. It realized that the ability to create predictable and consistent processes is key to unlocking innovation and continued growth.

As part of a wider strategy to become a product-based organization, Discover focused on a mission to ensure manual processes were understood, optimized, automated or eliminated. Its primary aim was to extend automation to every possible process within the business.

Discover developed the Extreme Automation program to promote a holistic culture of automation across the business. Extreme Automation spanned three pillars: DevOps, process automation and an automation community of practice, each with its own senior leader.

Using platforms like Red Hat Ansible Automation Platform provided a composable, collaborative and trusted execution environment, facilitating the process of evaluating manual work and nonengineering tasks, and identifying automation solutions for each one. This enabled Discover to identify common problems with replicable solutions. The business also established a centralized automation guild, or community of practice, composed of automation experts, to take in problems and help identify which automation products can be used. 

800,000 annualized hours given back through automation

To date across the business, Discover has seen over 800,000 annualized hours of manual work freed up through automation. Instead of staff triaging, validating and processing data extraction requests, Discover has automated this process, freeing up around 20,000 hours a year in this area alone. Processing time-off requests has also been automated; software now handles as many as 23,000 requests in a single weekend, eliminating 184,000 clicks and weeks of work. 

Increased use case ROI by applying repeatable solutions across the organization

Repeatable solutions enable engineers to replicate processes and apply them to other parts of Discover’s operations, enhancing the frequency of deployment and improving ROI. “When we use repeatable solutions, we can develop and deploy these in other areas of our business much faster and more frequently. It’s a huge enabler for us and increases our ROI,” said Joe Mills, Director, Discover Financial Services.

Enabled staff to focus on higher value work

Automating repetitive or repeatable tasks has freed up staff time that can be put to better use elsewhere. Call center agents can now spend more time engaging and solving customer needs when on calls, while automated reconciliations help accounting personnel to focus on higher value tasks.

Driving toward a single organizational mission

Discover intends to maintain its trajectory of Extreme Automation and accelerate its application across the wider business. Over the next two years, the business expects both centralized and embedded automation engineers to continue to deliver high value opportunities, both in terms of product development and through an expert-led community of practice focused on evolving new technologies.

“With evolved technologies, I can see us using more of our data as it becomes more consumable and accessible across our organization. We used to do things in silos; now we’re pushing Extreme Automation as a whole and driving toward the same mission. We’re going to do some amazing things,” said Mills.