How a leading health system unlocked 110,000 hours of automation capacity across 7 lines of business

It's a centralized governance structure that owns an organization's automation strategy, standards, and delivery model across departments, rather than leaving automation to develop independently in each function. A CoE typically maintains a shared playbook, a prioritized roadmap, and a knowledge repository, which is what allows automation to scale consistently instead of staying siloed within individual teams.

Without a shared governance framework, automation tends to develop inconsistently across departments, different tools, different standards, and no way to reuse what one team already built for another. That fragmentation limits scalability and makes it hard to know where the next high-value automation opportunity even is, which is why a centralized roadmap and repository matter as much as the automation itself.

Citizen development means training business users, not just IT or automation specialists, to build and maintain their own automations using standardized platforms and practices. It matters because it removes the bottleneck of routing every automation request through a central technical team, which is a major reason automation adoption speeds up once business users are enabled directly.

Prioritization typically starts with a structured discovery process across business functions to surface repetitive, manual, high-volume processes, then ranks them by potential impact and feasibility. In this engagement, that process identified more than 75 high-value automation use cases spanning Finance, Pharmacy, IT, HR, Facilities, Supply Chain and Customer Experience, giving the organization a clear, sequenced roadmap rather than a scattershot list.

A Bot-a-Thon is a structured, time-boxed event where business users and automation teams build and test automation ideas together, similar in spirit to a hackathon but focused on process automation. Events like this help surface new use cases quickly and get business users hands-on with automation platforms, which supports broader adoption beyond what a central team could drive alone.

Capacity gains depend heavily on how many processes are automated and how manual the starting point was across the organization, but in this engagement, the CoE realized approximately 110,000 hours of automation capacity across seven lines of business. Want to estimate what that could look like across your own functions? Consult with our experts to work through it.

This depends on how standardized the governance framework and delivery model are from the start, since a framework built for one function often needs rework to fit another. In this engagement, a single CoE model supported automation across seven distinct lines of business, from Finance to Supply Chain, using the same governance playbook and reusable frameworks throughout. Curious whether a similar model could span your organization's functions? Consult with our experts to talk through the fit.

A one-off project solves a specific process problem, while an enterprise program builds the governance, roadmap, and reusable capability to keep scaling automation indefinitely across the organization. The distinction matters because one-off projects rarely compound, each new automation still starts from scratch, whereas a program built around a CoE and trained citizen developers keeps generating capacity gains well beyond the initial rollout.