Case Study: John Lewis achieves scalable RPA and major efficiency gains with SS&C Blue Prism

How RPA is transforming retail

John Lewis, the UK’s largest employee-owned retailer, faced pressure from pure-play online competitors to improve operational efficiency, handle peak volumes and free staff from repetitive tasks. To do this it selected SS&C Blue Prism’s connected-RPA platform and created an internal Center of Excellence to drive adoption across the business and communicate that automation would enable “better jobs, better performance and better pay.”

SS&C Blue Prism deployed Digital Workers to automate more than 40 processes across contact centers, online, merchandising, buying, Waitrose supply chain, HR and finance, and integrated the platform with Splunk and Slack while adopting DevOps to scale safely. Measurable impacts include 10 Digital Workers performing forensic fraud checks on ~20,000 orders during Black Friday week (saving about 100 days of human effort) and five Digital Workers handling nearly 15,000 price‑match queries (saving 62 days), plus faster returns processing that reduces markdowns and handling costs — productivity gains that John Lewis has reinvested to improve customer experience.

John Lewis

Alec Sutherland

Partner & Automation Technical Lead (RPA)