Engagement Overview
TELUS engaged CivSafe to rationalize and scale its enterprise automation portfolio across customer operations, network provisioning, and internal shared services. The engagement delivered a unified automation governance framework and a prioritized implementation roadmap generating 340% ROI in the first year of execution.
The Challenge
Like many large enterprises, TELUS had embraced robotic process automation enthusiastically — and without coordination. By 2023, the organization had 60+ active RPA bots across 11 business units, built on 3 different platforms, owned by 4 different teams, with inconsistent documentation and no enterprise-wide performance tracking.
The CFO's office had flagged automation as a strategic priority but could not demonstrate returns to the board, creating pressure to either prove value or consolidate spend.
Our Approach
Automation Landscape Audit
We conducted a full inventory and technical assessment of all active and in-development automation assets, classifying each by platform, complexity, business owner, estimated run rate, and measurable outcomes. The audit revealed that 22 bots had been abandoned, 14 were running with no measurable business owner, and only 11 had documented ROI calculations.
Governance Framework Design
Working with enterprise architecture, IT security, and business unit leadership, we designed a 4-layer automation governance model covering intake, development standards, testing protocols, and performance monitoring. The framework was built to scale from 60 to 500+ automation assets without proportional management overhead.
Portfolio Prioritization & Roadmap
Using our automation value scoring model — which weights financial impact, implementation complexity, strategic alignment, and technical debt risk — we produced a ranked backlog of 47 validated automation opportunities. The top 12 opportunities were developed into full business cases and sequenced into a 12-month delivery roadmap.
Results
- 340% ROI on the Year 1 automation portfolio, verified by internal audit
- $6.8M in annualized savings identified across customer operations and shared services
- Governance framework adopted enterprise-wide, covering all 11 business units
- 40% reduction in automation development cycle time through standardized tooling and templates
- TELUS Automation Centre of Excellence established, staffed with 8 internal practitioners trained by CivSafe
Key Takeaway
Automation without governance is technical debt at scale. The organizations generating outsized returns from automation are those that treat it as a managed portfolio, not a collection of individual initiatives.