Well we’re here again at SSOW in Orlando and I had the great fortune opportunity to
listen to a panel discussion with one of our long-term customers Swiss Re, and Jose great
panel discussion.
Thank you again for all your input.
For our customers though, I'd like to reiterate a few things.
One, tell me long-term customer, three years, I think we talked about.
Give me an idea of how you're using RPA.
I mean been doing it for a long time kind of a little bit progression on your journey.
Sure so we've been using RPA for three three plus years at this point.
We started with UiPath and have stayed with UiPath and it's been a great great experience.
Software has matured a lot in those three years and so really now it's giving us the
capabilities that we need and helps us with automating a lot of our business processes,
and my team it's relatively small team within our organization, but we cover Global footprint
across all business units and all functions.
So we have a big impact across the group and it's been a it's been a fun Journey learning
along the way working with different companies helping them.
Also learn even helping some of our customers that are starting on the RPA journey.
Definitely.
I should look and see if I can get some referral bonuses.
And we've grown I mean, you've noticed when we were very small three years ago in the
last year we've grown exponentially but you've been with us for a long time and again, we
appreciate it.
As you've gone through this journey with us, not only from you know us becoming a bigger
company and with the software growing, what are some of the things as you built out this
horizontal, across a big global company, what are some of the things you can help our customers
learn on that journey.
Yeah.
So I think there are certainly some key factors that helped us be successful from the get-go.
First and foremost is getting IT involved.
I mean three and a half years ago you had Consultants that would come and tell you you
don't need IT.
That's not really true.
And I think if you want to have an Enterprise scale deployment you absolutely need to make
sure that it fits in your environment.
You can set some standards and policies that IT and risk management in particular, I think
management agree to.
Governance.
We work in a regulated environments.
And so having the right governance making sure we have the right change management that
we understand when a business process has some tension, sensitivity.
What is the governance around that and making sure that then when we talked to the internal
Auditors the external Auditors that they can see that we have a appropriate mechanism in
place to make sure that change control there, that we're doing it in a professional way.
Opportunity assessment.
Making sure that things that you look at have the right scale because I mean a lot of things
can be automated but we did end up finding is people look at their pain in the butt things
that they do once a year.
Well, you're not going to get a good return.
Okay, and that so we try and focus on automating the process taking a look at, okay, what is
it we do at scale and then making sure we select those processes assess them for automation
potential.
We have what we call it a rapid assessment form and I sit down with the business typically
a 20 to 30 minute discussion about volume and nature of the process.
What kind of activities are involved in the process.
What applications are there?
And very quickly we can make a determination whether or not it's something that can be
easily automated and that can give us the return on automation.
When you talk about return, I think that's a you know, a lot of people ask how do fast
we get return?
How much return?
Do we get our ROI?
Give me an idea how you measure some of that?
So as an internal unit, all our costs are allocated.
So we, there's a cost component that we go, and we make part of the business case and
we can kind of have a formula and we have a pretty good understanding of how much it
costs a business unit to have a robot built and then we have a maintenance cost.
So I have two services, so it’s actually a build and run as it were.
So on the cost side that’s, we are very well structured.
On the benefit side, we really need to understand what is the driver?
We have some of our robots that are driven by governance, it’s automated and manual
control.
Some of our robots are scale, volume.
Others are data quality; people making stupid mistakes, not copying all the rows in the
spreadsheet.
That's the kind of thing that when you automate with a robotic really is benefiting.
Overarching this we have one big metric which we call Capacity Created.
Okay.
It's a bit different than what we see with capacity freed up, or cost out, or some of
the other more traditional metrics because what we want to be is in an enabler.
So we'll go with the process owner and a sponsor and ask them, “Hey you know, what are your
key objectives?”
We sit down and then we say okay that's part of this will also free up some capacity because
there is some productivity in all cases, even if it's not the main driver and then it's
up to them to figure out well if we're giving them if it's a half an FTE 1 FTE of capacity,
what is it that they do with that?
They can choose to free it up.
They can choose to redeploy it but then it's a process owner and they can use that to justify
the cost that gets allocated.
So again giving back that capacity the business is one of your key metrics and a very positive
thing for the business owner.
So you've come in and giving me time back to my team.
That's fantastic.
I like to see the COE kinda horizontal but then each business owner.
Now, you found that the business owner once you've got one business kind of doing something
does another one kind of go, “Hey, I want that too?”
Yeah one of my team members says that robots are robots.
And so we'll be working with the team and there’s usually some initial skepticism
as to whether or not it'll be effective.
In the end, when the robots running more often than not they'll come back and say actually
come we expand what the robot does, or hey, we got this other process coming in.
So it's quite organic.
We're transitioning trying to be much more strategic and then top down
Here’s my last question, next steps as we go into 2019?
So absolutely it’s, scale, so figuring out where we can have the biggest impact within
the organization.
I think people are now understand what robots are what they're not.
Three years ago, most of my time was spent educating people if you know, these are not
sentient beings.
They're not going to take over the world, you know, they will help your business process,
you know, making sure that we are attacking the right thing for value perspective.
So that's absolutely key.
And then looking at some of the other things that are a bit more advanced so we're actually
have our first machine learning enabled robot already deployed and so that's a huge step.
We're trying to see what use cases makes sense for us to apply that to and you know tack
on potentially some process Discovery or some MLAI components where we see it makes sense
from a business perspective.
So that's really where we're expanding.
Actually very excited to have to say, with the off of the computer vision.
Yeah, I got the announcements and I'm a bit of a geek.
So I went ahead and try and installed it on my night on my system played around with it.
I don't write production robots I can play and I think it's really exciting exciting
development in the product.
We did too we’ve been showing that to some of our customers including you today at the
show think of the the resounding response has been very nice that they like to see that
technology.
Combining that computer vision with some NLP to be able to take semi-structured or unstructured
data and build up the process for the robot, I think will be a huge step forward for us.
Well, it sounds like we're going to have to come back here and in the next few months
and maybe next show get back and see how that progresses.
I know we're doing some other customer stories with you.
Again thank you for your panel discussion and your input for our customers that are
making this journey with us, UiPath.
So Jose.
Thank you.
Again.
Appreciate it.
Thank you very much.
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