How does an Automation COE spend their time today? Would love to get perspectives on what does an automation COE spend time on and what percentage of time?

A leader of an automation COE would be identifying areas of the business that need to be automated before implementing new initiatives that drive incremental business – creating a strategic roadmap. For example, if your business runs as a 3rd party brokerage (e.g., matching shippers to carriers), you will want to assess the feasibility of incremental customers and the need to automate the matching process so that initiatives that bring in new customers have a greater chance of success – no manual bottlenecks causing failures on the brokerage side.

Data scientists, engineers, and software developers would be managing data pipelines at the enterprise level, integrating data seamlessly in real-time or near real-time, testing algorithms that facilitate automation (e.g., matching algorithms) and then deploying models that meet minimum thresholds on run-time, cost, and accuracy. Leveraging managed platforms such as Azure, Snowflake, AWS, etc. would likely be a requirement, and total cost of ownership would need to be addressed and balanced against value to ensure a ROI. R&D would naturally be a part of this process, and therefore the team would need to be very active in the professional space to stay at the bleeding edge of associated technologies and approaches.  

The COE needs to deliver vakue every day - it needs to bring new automations on tap that meet the business strategic goals. If it is just keeping the lights on it won’t be see as critical to delivery. 

Job of an Automation COE is to be proactive in terms of identifying the manual bottlenecks across the organization and to streamline their processes by either simplifying the process, or by reducing the friction in terms of manual steps