While most of us might not consider it, buildings have an enormous impact on global climate change. According to the United Nations Environment Program’s most recent Global Status Report for Buildings and Construction, buildings are responsible for 34 percent of global energy demand and 37 percent of energy and process-related carbon dioxide emissions. Finding efficiency in the construction and operation of buildings is one of the most important ways humanity can hope to mitigate the effects of climate change. For 140 years, Johnson Controls has existed to make buildings more energy efficient and, increasingly, the company is turning to automation to accomplish this mission.
Johnson Controls, whose global headquarters is in Ireland, is the world leader in the construction, maintenance and management of commercial buildings. It has more than 100,000 employees globally and, according to Ramnath Natarajan, Director of the Global Intelligent Automation & Integration Center of Excellence (CoE) for Johnson Controls, automation supports and enables all of them to deliver on their mission far more efficiently than in the past—effects that scale given the size of the multinational organization.
But the journey the company embarked on continues, even as intelligent automation has benefited many parts of the sprawling enterprise.
Natarajan spent more than a dozen years with Johnson Controls in IT before moving to focus on intelligent automation at Rockwell Automation. In 2022, he returned to Johnson Controls to lead the company’s automation CoE and bring all its automation teams in- house.
“We had been using consultants or vendors to implement automation projects, but we had ups and downs on that approach because we had to get funding to get the work done,” Natarajan told Automation Today in a recent interview. “The quality of the work also comes into play. We wanted to do a fully in-house automation team, which is not our natural state.”
Until that point, the focus had been mostly on automating processes within the finance function, as is the case in many organizations. As is also the case, early work automating in the CFO’s domain showcased early success, whetting the company’s appetite to expand the program. But with a global entity the size and complexity of Johnson Controls, Natarajan’s growing team had a significant challenge.
“When we were charged with bringing automation to the enterprise, we had to consider way more than finance,” he said. “We have regions in addition to different business functions. So, we started with finance and then moved out supporting all of North America. Then we took it to EMEA. We just went across the board with all the global products. Now we have teams that are dedicated to all the regions reporting back within the business line.”
Establishing the CoE and building those teams out globally has been challenging at times, especially in the wake of the labor disruptions brought on in the pandemic era, according to Natarajan. He notes that, especially in low-cost regions of the world, automation talent is difficult to acquire and has a very high attrition rate.
To combat this, he preferred to hire leaders first, tasking them to build their teams and empower their people.
“Form your teams, I said to them, and we’ll provide you with any help you need,” Natarajan explained. “We started with that. Putting that responsibility in the leaders’ hands instilled a very real feeling of pride. It’s their team, built from the ground up, and it was natural for them to make sure they made every effort to do it well.”
In the first six months after he was hired, Natarajan was able to add 80 people to his team with very low turnover. In the two years since the launch of the CoE, Johnson Controls has implemented roughly 250 automations resulting in $18 million in demonstrable savings, he notes. Invoice processing utilizing UiPath’s IDP capability accounts for a significant number of those automations.
While Natarajan’s CoE and the UiPath Platform they use to deliver automations are available for the benefit of all the divisions, departments and regions that make up the totality of Johnson Controls, not every part of the organization is taking advantage of the technology. Part of his role, he understands, is to evangelize throughout the organization.
“Most people think the good news around automation pilots or initial implementations will just fly around. It doesn’t,” he said. “As the leader of the automation Center of Excellence, I also have a sales job.”
Natarajan’s selling is based on the successes Johnson Controls continues to rack up as the number of automations being used increases. And, befitting the organization’s scale, he leverages a number of different channels to communicate automation wins, hopefully convincing other areas of the business to take the leap.
He has taken his message on the road—organizing town hall-style meetings in various regions to spread the news in person—and he has tapped electronic mass communications as well, publishing a monthly internal newsletter devoted to the activities of the CoE. He utilizes outreach not only to increase the number of people within the organization considering automation, but to identify opportunities as well to keep his team engaged.
“If you’re silent, you’re not going to get ideas,” he explains. “If you don’t have ideas, you have a team that is stale, that is not able to work. I need to make sure that I’m feeding them valuable, interesting work.”
