随着业务的快速增长和客户期望的提高，赛默飞世尔科技（Thermo Fisher Scientific）正在转向利用机器学习和机器人过程自动化(RPA)来改变客户体验。
赛默飞是由Thermo Electron和Fisher Scientific于2006年合并创建的，是全世界最大的科学仪器、试剂和服务供应商之一，全球员工超过13万人。自2006年以来，赛默飞通过不断的并购发展壮大，包括2013年并购Life
Technologies、2015年的Alfa Aesar、2016年的Affymetrix和FEI，以及2018年的BD Advanced Bioprocessing。
快速增长让赛默飞高度依赖于那些碎片化的、手动的流程，以及各不相同的数据源和系统。赛默飞每年在订单输入、销售和客户服务方面的交易和交互超过1000万次，但公司发现，这些流程无法扩展以满足需求并提供客户所需的体验。
赛默飞IT副总裁John Stevens说：“我们非常关注收购的商业化，确保我们不会破坏交易模式，并确保一切都按照应有的方式运行起来。有时后台功能并不总是能够被生态系统吸收。所以，我们公司有很多不同的系统——ERP、CRM、中间件——但我们为客户制定的市场推广战略，要求必须让这些系统对客户是不可见的。”
此前这个问题开始变得日益严重：有时，生命科学实验室产品组的客户服务代表需要10多分钟才能回答客户有关订单状态或产品是否有货这样简单的问题。
“客户服务团队正在通过九个不同的系统和九个不同的屏幕把所有信息汇总在一起，作为一家企业，提出这样一个问题成了一个重要转折点：我们如何以数字化的方式让公司内部员工变得更高效、能够和客户进行内容更丰富的对话？”
因此，赛默飞在2020年启动了一个自动化和数字化项目，重点是消除这些手动流程并打造一个统一的客户参与系统。
统一化的客户服务
赛默飞启动了一项名为Project Northstar的客户参与项目，在该项目下要创建一系列分散的模块，例如订单输入自动化、客单管理、单一面板的搜索平台、客户洞察平台，所有这些都构建在一个集中化的数据湖之上，这个数据湖可以把来自不同平台的相关数据整合到一个层上。
在订单录入自动化模块方面，Northstar依靠AI和RPA来优化数据识别和验证，减少错误并加快订单周期。Stevens说，尽管赛默飞仍在对这个模块进行迭代中，但最终版本的目标是通过OCR自动接收传真和电子邮件订单，并将其上传到记录系统中，同时将订单异常路由到新的客单管理门户。
Northstar的客单管理模块是一个智能业务流程管理平台，使用机器学习来自动执行与客户电子邮件相关的任务，会根据地址或选定的内容和文本自动将电子邮件分配给不同团队。Stevens说，该模块让客户服务团队能够查看整个电子邮件历史记录和任何相互链接的电子邮件，并在同一界面中搜索与电子邮件相关的信息。
智能搜索平台则为赛默飞员工提供了一个易于使用的界面，可从公司的数据湖中提取有关客户订单、产品供货和定价、客户特定报价、承运人跟踪信息、发票等信息。（CXO UNION（CXO联盟）、数字化转型网（szhzxw.cn）、中国数字化转型展、华东CIO大会、CDLC中国数字化灯塔大会、CXO数字化研学之旅、数字化江湖-讲武堂，数字化江湖-大侠传、数字化江湖-论剑、CXO系列管理论坛（陆家嘴CXO管理论坛、宁波东钱湖CXO管理论坛等）、数字化转型网，走进灯塔工厂系列、ECIO、iTdaily、It经理人、CIO训练营、数字化江湖等）
为了完成Northstar项目，Stevens的团队从零开始开发了一个客户洞察平台，使用JavaScript框架和Power BI以客观且实时的方式全面查看客户体验指标，团队还在AWS、Databricks和Power BI上构建了一个集中式数据湖。
催化变革
Stevens说，Project Northstar代表了赛默飞IT的转变方向，见证了Stevens及其团队是如何采用新的方法和解决方案。
他说：“我们在这方面没有太多的专业知识。五年前，有很多IT专业人士在谈论让所有人都使用一个ERP、一个订单编排平台，并花费数百万美元和数月甚至数年的时间来进行整合。”
为了获得灵感，Stevens和他的团队将目光投向了行业之外，了解其他企业组织如何大规模地应用自动化。Northstar项目成功的一个关键，是Stevens决定与专业服务公司Genpact展开合作，帮助赛默飞创建了细化到点击级的流程图。
“这帮助我们去真正了解如何解决其中一些非常复杂的问题，简化我们的客户服务团队与客户互动的方式。”
他还提到，他的团队还为企业高管层打造了一个引人入胜的故事，这也是Northstar项目取得成功的一个关键。
“这不仅是关于转型，而且是为了激烈大家每天都为更加数字化而努力，他们来上班不是为了查看各种电子表格和九个不同的屏幕、在客户互动的过程中倍感挫折的。”
Stevens指出，当然，当IT开始谈论自动化的时候，人们可能会认为IT会把他们从事的工作自动化。因此，变更管理对Northstar项目来说也是非常重要的。Stevens和他的团队与和沟通团队以及HR展开密切合作，确保他们向最终用户传递了正确的信息。
Stevens说，自2021年底全面部署Northstar以来，他们的平均通话等待时间缩短了27%，订单处理更快了，这使得现金流也加速了。
“销售团队有更多的销售时间，因为他们不再需要每周花费三个小时或者更长时间打电话询问产品在哪里了。我们构建了一个企业数据湖，其中包含了分散的系统数据，这样就可以在一个管理面板中呈现所有这些数据，而且我们使用的是低代码和无代码，让各种功能触手可及。现在我们正在把它推广给内部销售团队和商业团队，以便他们可以自助服务。”
最后，Stevens建议IT领导者们不要让他们自己和他们所在的组织沉湎于过去的技术中。
“你必须与时俱进，保持最新状态，你必须说服你所在的企业让你抓住机会做出一些灯塔项目，这些项目有可能很快就失败了，也有可能是一个有效的项目。几年前，除了ERP迁移或者做更多的集成之外，我们不会考虑做任何事情。而现在，这些新工具就在我们眼前。”
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原文：
With its business rapidly growing and customer expectations rising,
Thermo Fisher Scientific is turning to machine learning and robotic
process automation (RPA) to transform the customer experience.
Formed from the merger of Thermo Electron and Fisher Scientific in
2006, Thermo Fisher Scientific is one of the world’s largest suppliers
of scientific instruments, reagents, and services, with more than
130,000 employees worldwide. Since 2006, it has grown with additional
mergers and acquisitions, including Life Technologies Corp. in 2013,
Alfa Aesar in 2015, Affymetrix and FEI Co. in 2016, and BD Advanced
Bioprocessing in 2018.
The rapid growth left the company highly dependent on fragmented,
manual processes and disparate data sources and systems. With more than
10 million transactions and interactions per year across order entry,
sales, and customer service, the company found those processes could not
scale to meet the demand and deliver the experience its customers
needed.
“We’re very much focused on the commercialization of acquisitions,
making sure we don’t break the deal models and that things are running
as they should be,” says John Stevens, vice president of IT at Thermo
Fisher. “Sometimes the back-office capabilities don’t always get
assimilated into the ecosystem. So, we have a lot of disparate systems
across our company — ERPs, CRMs, middleware — but our go-to-market
strategy for our customers, you have to make that all invisible for
them.”
The problem had grown stark: Sometimes it would take customer care
representatives in the Life Sciences Laboratory Products Group more than
10 minutes to answer simple calls about things like the status of an
order or product availability.
“Customer care teams were going through nine different systems and
nine different screens to put things together,” Stevens says. “It was an
important inflection point for us as a company to ask: What are we
going to do to digitally enable our colleagues inside our company to be
more effective and have richer conversations with our customers?”
So, in 2020 Thermo Fisher initiated an automation and digitization
project focused on eliminating those manual processes and creating a
unified system of engagement for customers.
Unifying customer care
Dubbed Project Northstar, Thermo Fisher’s customer engagement
initiative involved creating a series of discrete modules — order entry
automation, case management, a single pane of glass search platform, and
a customer insights platform — all underpinned by a centralized data
lake that could consolidate relevant data from disparate platforms into a
single layer.
Project Northstar has earned Thermo Fisher Scientific a CIO 100 Award in IT Excellence.
For its order-entry automation module, Northstar leans on AI and RPA
to optimize data recognition and verification, and to reduce errors and
accelerate order cycle times. Although Thermo Fisher is still iterating
this module, the goal is for the final release to automatically ingest
fax and email orders via OCR and upload them to the system of record
while routing order exceptions to a new case management portal, Stevens
says.
Northstar’s case management module is an intelligent business process
management platform that uses machine learning to automate tasks
associated with customer emails. It auto-assigns emails to teams based
on addresses or selected content and text. The module also enables
customer care teams to view the entire email history and any linked
emails, and to search for information related to the email within the
same interface, Stevens says.
The project’s smart search platform gives Thermo Fisher employees an
easy-to-use interface for pulling information from the company’s data
lake on customer orders, product availability and pricing,
customer-specific quotes, carrier tracking information, invoices, and
more.
To complete project Northstar, Stevens’ team developed a customer
insights platform from the ground up, using a JavaScript framework and
Power BI to provide a 360-degree view of objective and real-time
customer experience metrics. The team also built a centralized data lake
on AWS, Databricks, and Power BI.
Catalyzing change
Project Northstar represents a shift in direction for IT at Thermo
Fisher, Stevens says, one that sees Stevens and his team embracing
approaches and solutions new to them.
“We didn’t have a lot of expertise in this,” Stevens says. “Five
years ago, a lot of IT professionals would have been talking about
putting everybody on a single ERP, a single order orchestration
platform, and spending millions of dollars and months or years to
consolidate that.”
For inspiration, Stevens and his team looked outside their industry
to understand how other organizations have applied automation at scale.
One key to Northstar’s success was Stevens’ decision to partner with
professional services firm Genpact, which helped Thermo Fisher create
process maps down to the click level.
“That helped us to really understand how to solve some of these very
complex problems and simplify the way that our customer care teams
interact with our customers,” Stevens says.
Stevens also cites the team’s focus on putting together a compelling
story for company leadership as a key component of Northstar’s success.
“Not only was it going to be transformational, but it was going to
inspire our colleagues to wake up every day and be more digitally
enabled,” he says. “They didn’t come to work to look through
spreadsheets and nine different screens and see frustration in their
customer interactions.”
Of course, when IT starts talking about automation, the perception
can be that IT is going to automate them out of a job, Stevens notes. As
such, change management was hugely important to Northstar. Stevens and
his team worked closely with the communications team and HR to ensure
they were sending the right messages to end users.
Since fully deploying Northstar at the end of 2021, average call hold
times have decreased 27%, and the ability to process orders faster has
led to an acceleration in cash flow, Stevens says.
“There’s more selling time for the sales team because they no longer
have to spend three hours a week or more calling care to ask where a
product is,” he says. “We built an enterprise data lake that has all our
disparate systems data so you can present it in a single pane of glass,
and we use low code and no code for that, which allows us to have
everything at our fingertips. We’re rolling that out now internally to
our inside sales teams and to our commercial team so they can
self-serve.”
Ultimately, Stevens advises IT leaders to not let themselves — and
their organizations — get stuck in the technology of the past.
“You have to stay relevant; you have to stay current,” he says. “You
have to convince your company that you’re going to take chances to do
lighthouse programs that are going to fail fast or prove the efficacy of
a program. A few years ago, we wouldn’t have thought about doing
anything except an ERP migration or more integrations. Now, we’ve got
these new tools that sit in front of us.”
