Pets at Home are one of the few high street retailers who are still seeing significant growth “in-store”. As good as this growth is, Pets have to keep a close eye on their increasing fixed cost base, especially in an environment where competitors are looking to increase margins and decrease fixed costs by moving to digital. One of the opportunities to control costs whilst increasing capacity is to use Automation technologies such as RPA and Intelligent Automation. Pets engaged Robiquity to help understand, prove and initialise Intelligent Automation within PAH.

Robiquity broke down the task of kick starting IA at Pets into simple, bitesize steps, following ATOM. We kicked off with engagement sessions across Executives and Senior Managers, showcasing the technology capabilities with various demonstrations and use-case workshops. Once the Pets team had grasped the concept of IA and how it could benefit their own world, we had successfully created excitement and engagement to progress to the next stage. This next stage was to help qualify the value of automation opportunities and create a compelling business case, with a clear operating model and roadmap to achieve ROI. This was completed after around 4 weeks of analysis and consulting. The final stage was for Robiquity to stand up the delivery team, this consisted of various different people with a variety of skills from Opportunity Identification (Analysis), Solution Build (Engineering) and Run / Support (Management and improvement). The blended team of Robiquity staff and PAH experts was stood up within a couple of weeks and quickly went on to delivering the first 20 Robots within just 6 months.

Pets at home went from “Automation blue sky thinking” to 20 live robots in around 4 months. The robots spanned across multiple business units along the customer journey and continue to delivery 1000’s of hours in benefit, removing various bottlenecks, allowing Pets to continue to grow the business without taking on significant fixed costs.