>> From the Bellagio hotel in Las Vegas.
It's the cube covering UI path
forward for brought to you by
UI path.
>> Hello from Las Vegas
live at the Bellagio.
Lisa Martin, with Dave Volante.
We are at UI path forward for,
like I said, in Las Vegas.
So great to be, in-person
sitting at an anchor desk with a co-anchor
and a guest.
We're going to be talking about deploying new
technologies in a large global enterprise.
Vicky Harris is here.
Manager application,
performing platform engineering services
at Chevron.
Vicky, welcome to the program.
>> Hey, thank you.
Happy to be here.
>> So is it great to be, we're outdoors?
Nice. Everyone's nice and safe,
but great to be back at an
in-person event where so many
hallway conversations
can spark more innovation.
That's one of the things
I think a lot of us have been
missing in the last 18 months.
You've been with Chevron almost 15 years,
but this is we're talking
about 142 year old organization.
Talk to me about the
evolution of IT that you've seen.
>> Very happy to do that.
A lot of,
I would say the greatest jump forward
we saw in cloud and we
started our cloud transformation before digital
transformation came along, but it was the,
really the thing that enabled us to be ready,
I would say for the extra value, the extra push.
And so we were so happy to be well positioned.
So we started our cloud journey in 2017
and between 2018 and 19,
because of the investments in automation,
it just took off.
And today we're still receiving
the benefits of that.
But prior to that, it took a little bit longer.
Also we had an agile transformation,
which was very helpful
because we can't really afford to
move at waterfall speed anymore.
And so cloud and agile really
helped boost that and get us started.
>> So whenever we get a practitioner on,
we have a million questions. So,
so can we start with your role? Are you in it?
That's where you're in that organization or.
>> I am in it. So I'm a product line manager.
We support really the core
for software engineers and citizen developers.
So on the software engineering side,
CICB pipeline, dev ops tooling, code frameworks,
all of that to make our
software engineers more productive
and on the citizen development side,
same philosophy.
We want to make them more productive,
not worry about how do I do it,
just how to apply their business logic.
So we support the citizen development programs
and the underlying platforms.
>> So Vicki, when you talked about cloud in 2017,
are you talking about infrastructure
as a service platform,
as a service SAS, all of the above.
Cause cause, I'm sure you were doing SAS
before then, but how do you think about cloud?
>> So that's a great question. Yes.
We were always doing SAS
and we continue to do SAS.
So, and Chevron was one of the earlier adopters
of UI path for cloud.
Because we do want to be cloud first,
always, always, always.
And we are trying to really
reduce and restrict our on-prem footprint.
But the automation we started in kind of
2017,2018 is I would call it
infrastructure as code.
So deploying everything with code
the same way all the time,
which was partly a technical shift,
but also a really big cultural shift
that instead of having people
doing the same task,
you know, 400 different ways,
which is hard to sustain,
it's hard to troubleshoot.
So we took the pain in,
in building that and
there's a lot of pain in,
in the transformation itself,
but the upside when you're finished as amazing.
>> Yeah. So that's what you just answered.
My next question, which was what is the catalyst?
It was seeing the clouds
potential for programmable infrastructure.
And that sounds like it was a game changer.
>> It was a huge game changer.
And that really on the software engineering side,
the whole way we do infrastructure,
the way we program everything.
But we also found we're not touching part of the
organization with that transformation.
And that's where the
citizen development programs
and RPA comes in is, you know,
Hey, we're really proud of ourselves.
We did so well,
but how do we get to the edge
where we haven't been able to
have the same impact with that automation.
>> For an organization?
And I mentioned 142 years young will say,
I guess you could say old for an organization,
young for a person where in
terms of the cultural change,
that's hard to,
to manifest across such a
historic history institution.
Talk to me about the appetite for automation.
You said you guys started doing automation,
bringing it into the organization
and in the last five years or so,
what's been the appetite across
different lines of business
to embrace it,
to see it as an advantage
rather than taking jobs away.
>> So there's never appetite
for automation on its own because
you're changing someone's process.
But what there is appetite for is the results.
And also we went through a large organizational
transformation. so in addition to value,
you know, bottom line cost savings,
we have people who are just improving their,
their work flow for themselves.
And so there's also a
sense of empowerment for them.
So I would say the empowerment
and then the results are,
are much bigger drivers.
And then you say, oh,
if you want that, yes, by the way,
this is how we get that.
But it's not, you know,
automation for automation sake,
but people understand,
they understand now the value of it and they,
the more they learn,
they understand that
doing one process, 25 ways.
It's not a way to run your business.
>> Right.
How to actually drive this
outcomes that they're looking for.
>> So how did it start? Did it start in IT?
Was it IT led initiative or was a department.
>> IT led, yes.
>> Okay. And so, so focused on the IT department.
So you automating certain tasks within it or,
or not necessarily.
>> Not necessarily. So IT led,
but as the foundation
for all the business units. So again,
we focus on the core,
but we also focus on enablement.
So anybody who's a builder maker,
developer out there in the business units,
we just want to make
their job easier, better, faster,
just for the business logic.
So then we bring them in and say,
here's how you do it.
But they bring the best ideas, right?
They know their business processes.
I don't know their business processes.
If I sat down and said,
here's where automation value is,
we wouldn't be doing so well.
They know where it is.
We just give them the tools to,
to find that value.
And you know,
it's extraordinary how they find it,
but there's a lot of manual processes out there.
>> But it's a common story.
When you talk to UI path, customers,
that'll start maybe one person
in a department and then
people looking over her shoulder going, oh,
I want some of that. And then it explodes.
It sounds like you were taking
a much more whole house approach.
>> We are taking a whole house approach,
but we did start early with POC.
And so, and then those prove their
value pretty easily and pretty
quickly. And so then
it was a determination of, Hey,
we would like to do
something bigger here than just leave
this technology out there.
We're just leaving all this value on the table.
We're leaving all this skill sets,
all this passion,
all this enthusiasm in our citizen community.
We don't think we can transform as a corporation.
If we leave that energy,
motivation, skill on the table.
>> Add some color to the ROI.
Have you said the POC?
You a good quick hit, obviously.
Could you give us some details on that?
>> Um.
>> What can you tell us?
>> What can I tell you? Okay, well,
so from when we started the program three years,
I think we're showing about $6 million of return.
We, we see the value just in time savings
like everybody else does.
And we have, so that's with
about 300 automations,
six over 600,000 hours, I think saved.
But first year it's just so easy. You can see it.
It's not hard to calculate it. The hour saving,
very simple calculation.
So anybody who's concerned about ROI,
it's so simple. It's so easy.
You should be able to find it
in your first year if you're
not finding it in your first year.
I mean, obviously it grows,
but if you're not finding
some return in the first year,
I would say, you know,
take a look at what you need
to adjust because it's not that hard.
>> And your CFO. Sorry.
One more question.
If I may, and your CFO saw that, okay.
Time-savings essentially was the business result,
but it wasn't necessarily it,
was it hard dollars or were they,
did your CFO say, ah,
this kind of soft dollars or is it.
>> Both hard and soft?
>> Okay.
So, and yeah,
we would never put a dollar sign
next to something that
doesn't hit the income statement.
So I'm very careful about that, right.
But yeah, it's both because
sometimes somebody actually changed their
group first and they're feeling
the process pain after.
And so the healing of automating something.
So the, just the two people can do it.
We've seen that use case as well.
It's harder to capture any savings
because it's not really savings there,
but it's, it's more of a job satisfaction.
So there's a lot of soft benefits
that go with it,
but we don't usually, you know, commit,
turn that into dollars. That's not very valuable.
Yeah.
>> Those, those employee, employees
that are far more productive are
eventually helping the customers
be more productive as well.
I think they're directly linked.
Well, you said you found ROI quickly
and that's something that UI Path
says about itself that customers are generally
achieving an ROI of a break
even within months alone.
So when you talk to other professionals
in oil and gas,
how do you talk to them
about automation being really a
critical driver of that business's success and
transformation?
>> I think it in large enterprises,
whether they're in our sector or not,
some of them just struggle with the sheer scale.
It's almost like, where do I start?
So they do see the value,
but it's more about how do I,
how do I start this thing?
How do I scale this thing?
How do I structure a program?
I have not found anyone that says,
I don't believe the value proposition again,
it's pretty easy to.
>> And the RPA POC started after cloud, right.
So that was, am I right about that?
It was 18, 19 timeframe.
>> I would say actually starting
around the same time POCs were
done in, in 2017.
So yeah.
>> Okay, and so was there anything
specific in your industry that you
targeted? I mean,
you obviously wanted to hit
the high value items first.
Was there anything particular there?
>> That's a really good question. I think we,
our journey looks like other companies kind of,
they start with the back office.
Those are the easiest processes to,
for people to understand.
And just of terms of, you know,
where do I have a heavy manual load?
So some of our first work
was with finance in currency conversion.
So pretty, pretty manual intensive
for a global company.
Pretty big deal, lots of immediate value.
But if you think of, let's talk about Wells.
So, you know, we have systems for
mapping Wells drilling, Wells.
You'd be surprised.
Some of those systems look
kind of like your ERPs they
have kind of the same challenges.
So as we extend outside of traditional
kind of HR finance audit practices
into the rest of our business,
the use cases are similar.
I've got disparate documents.
I have systems that
don't talk to each other well.
I have somebody who's and
we have a lot of partners.
So if you're in a project
with five partners and everybody's
producing a different type
of document or something,
how do you make some sense out of that?
So use cases like that,
we're finding in our upstream
and downstream businesses also.
>> And you did an RFP at the time,
wrote a bunch of vendors
and ran them through the cycles or.
>> We did some comparisons. Yeah.
Early on.
>> Why UI path, what was it about.
>> Strong user experience? So,
because this is primarily
citizen enabled and so that feedback.
Hey, could I learn this quickly?
Was it easy to use?
Those were really the most
important things in selection.
I mean, we always look at costs
that's important too,
but also a company's position.
So their ability to scale and grow,
there's a lot of people
in this market because of the
interest in automation.
So part of it is also
understanding the strength of the
company behind as well.
>> One of the things that was mentioned
in the keynote this morning,
I think it was a stat from Gartner that in 2016,
there was about 2% of
automateable processes were automated.
Fast-forward now it's about 25%.
There's still a tremendous amount
of potential for
organizations in any industry
to deploy automation.
You've said, you've got about
300 plus automation so far.
What are some of the things
that are coming next that you can share?
>> What is our upside, or where do we stop,
or our growth taper?
>> Where are we going?
>> I don't think we know
we get so much from our user community
in terms of what can we do now?
They're so empowered.
So I wouldn't want to
set limits on ourselves in terms of
what we can do,
but certainly we're looking at
text analytics, really?
How do we manage that document?
How do we extract that data,
use models to get that into our data lake,
but there's still always
the work of finding still that last
mile of process.
There's many parts of
our business still untouched.
And so we don't, we don't let,
or we don't want to let up on that.
That's still important to go after
all of that and keep the
programs going.
>> Chevron huge company.
And you've got probably
one of everything that's ever been
invented in technology.
We're seeing a trend where a lot of these,
these software companies
are embedding RPA into their
platforms. You see it with the ERP vendors,
you know, acquisitions being made
for service management, you know,
big cloud guys ha have, you know,
on and on and on.
And, and so how do you think
about those sort of vertically
integrated stacks versus
what you're doing with UI path?
>> So for me, I think of them the same
as a code extension.
So, because that was more popular
a few years ago on those big platforms
and you're right, we have one of everything,
but it's important to,
when you think of investment and ROI,
where do we actually spend money?
It's in maintaining the capability,
keeping the programs, doing the training,
that's an investment.
And so when someone comes to me and says,
can you support some other tool?
I usually say, maybe not,
is there a business case for that?
Because we want to be able to
deploy to the whole enterprise
that isn't to say that somebody
who's got a workflow that
stays within that platform,
that that might be an appropriate use for them,
but I'm very sure it's not
an appropriate use to extend it
out of that platform somewhere else.
And so we draw the line really, what do we,
enterprise automation.
We want to be very careful
about the tools we use for that.
And, and the reason for
that is not just security,
reliability, and the ability
to scale those programs.
Because when someone calls me and says,
my stuff doesn't scale, it's like ours does.
And so, but the org capability
investment is also it's, it's not small.
And so if you've going to believe in this,
you have to keep feeding it.
You have to keep training new people,
bringing them on.
And so you can't really do that
across 12 platforms, right.
>> You're creating your own flywheel
and that's how you can
accelerate ROI. Right?
>> Correct. Although, you know,
the citizen developers
are driving the wheel for sure.
>> You as in Chevron, I mean, not Vicky Inc.
>> Vicky, thank you so much.
We are out of time,
but thanks for stopping by talking
to us about automation in
a large global enterprise at Chevron.
I won't look at Chevron the same again.
Now I know how forward-thinking
they are and how much they
are embracing technology.
We appreciate your time.
>> It's been my pleasure.
Thank you both.
>> All right. For Dave Volante and Lisa Martin,
we were live at the
Bellagio in Las Vegas.
UI path forward for.
We'll be right back.