>> TheCUBE presents UI Path Forward 5.
Brought to you by UIPath.
>> All right, everybody.
We're back live at the Venetian,
formerly the Sands Convention Center.
Dave Vellante with David Nicholson.
UIPath's Forward 5.
This is the fourth Forward conference
that theCUBE has done.
So we've seen the ascendancy of UIPath,
the growth of customers.
UIPath is one of the first companies
to actually come back Post COVID.
Last year, 2021 at the Bellagio,
they took a chance and it actually worked out great
had a couple thousand people there. Lots of customers.
We're here with Lauren Joyce,
who's the global automation lead at Whirlpool.
She's joined by Rajendra Prasad (RP),
who is the global automation lead at Accenture.
Good to see you again.
Lauren, welcome to theCUBE first timer.
>> Thank you very much. Yes, thank you.
>> So, you're relatively new to automation,
but you, as we were talking, you're a process wiz.
Talk about the center of excellence
that you're building out.
What's the importance of that to Whirlpool?
>> Absolutely. So we are first looking at automation
from our finance organization
and they were coming to us with,
hey, here are 12 things we want to automate.
And really what we are finding is that,
not all of these things suitable for automation.
So we started on the COE journey of,
well how do we make sure that we're getting
the most ROI for our business?
Starting with discovery,
making sure that what we're automating, it makes sense
it's the right process,
versus just an upgrade or a retooling set.
So for us, especially being a global company,
making sure that we had that governance in place,
that mindset and,
what should be automated and when, really made sense
and helped us on our journey for COE.
>> And, I presume that's where Accenture comes in.
I mean, RP, you got deep industry expertise,
you've got automation expertise.
What role do you play in that prioritization exercise?
>> So the the way we approach any automation implementation
is similar to what we did here in Whirlpool.
First step is, you know, I call it as knowing where you are
in the automation journey.
Like what everyone always says,
if you don't know where you are on a map,
a map won't help you.
So base-lining the current automation maturity
and the current journey where they are.
And once you do that, you identify you're north star
and prioritization and the goals that are required,
and then you build the plan.
And exactly how we approach in establishing
a center of excellence that drives the automation
with rigor knowing where you are
and where you want to get to.
>> What's the team look like? Who's on the bus?
You know, who's in the circle if you will?
How do you, you know, build, you've written about this.
It's like a sports team, you put it together,
you need a quarterback, you need a lineman,
you need, you know, wide receivers,
who's on the center of excellence team.
>> So the way you always build
the center of excellence is making sure
that your business partners
and the senior leadership team is committed
to the entire automation journey.
That's the key ingredient for success.
Then you build, one of the critical aspect is the talent
the quarterback, you said, the talent.
In today's world, automation talent
is just not about knowing,
you know RPA techniques or you know, process optimization
but it is an end-to-end technology stack
starting from cloud to data to analytics
an entire platform capabilities of automation.
That combined and coupled with change management
and how do you drive an enterprise chain management
is very, very critical in terms of implementing automation.
>> Lauren: Absolutely.
>> Lauren, I'm curious, did Accenture bring UIPath
to Whirlpool or did you bring
Accenture in and UIPath in together?
How did that interaction work?
>> Yes, so we brought Accenture in
and they really helped us along
with that journey and they brought UIPath to us.
Our European business was actually using Blue Prism
and that's when we said no,
we want to standardize specifically on UIPath
and make sure from a global standpoint
we're using the same tooling.
And that really helped that, as we were building our team
we leaned on their expertise,
and then even we're retooling people within our corporation
of, hey, we took our SAP lead our GCP lead
to be our technical architect
and people that could help speak the language
and translate from process and explain
that doesn't have to be a large project
and explain what automation is to help
drive return on investment, for sure.
>> Now you're early in,
but have you seen results, you know so far?
Can you talk about that, quantify it in any way or?
>> Absolutely. So we started our journey December of 2020.
We've automated about 60 or so bots,
but really, everything that we've done
is based on hours saved.
So we're at about 60,000 hours automated
and with some of our biggest, like, our big box stores
and our Kitchen Aid small appliances,
we've even had hard dollar savings.
We had a bot that went live, about, in 60 days.
We had a $3 million return
and took out 3000 hours of human interaction.
That was great for us.
>> So the world's kind of a mess right now.
You got supply chain issues, you got inflation,
you got a recession,
you got, the United States anyway,
you got the Fed trying to figure out
oh, there's sling shotting,
you know, some people are, you know, really hurting,
stock market is starting to show that.
There's a lot of confusion out there.
The world is changed quite a bit, obviously,
the last few years.
How do you guys see it?
What role has, I wonder if both of you could answer,
what role has automation played
in helping like, for instance, Whirlpool,
with maybe supply chain problems
or maybe better forecasting
and what are you seeing across organizations?
But Lauren if you could start.
>> Absolutely. So for us, being able to show improvement
in a six to eight week development cycle
and instead of saying here's a heavy dollar investment
or a new tooling that you got to
get people resources up to speed on,
we can take, where we are today,
automate, save hours where we're getting
our employee engagement scores of,
I'm overworked, I have too much on my plate,
how can you help me?
And automation is there to support
and that's really helped our business,
one, take unnecessary work off their plate
and show very quick value-add to the business,
without having to have huge dollar investments
when we're trying to save money.
>> And RP, what are you seeing in terms of,
some of the problems that people,
I see a sign out here said,
oh, inflation at 5 to 7%, go after productivity
and make it in 20% gains.
I mean, what are you seeing in the field?
>> More than ever. More than ever,
automation is more relevant now
given the current economy environment
that we are operating.
Because automation always frees up our optimizers,
the capacity that every enterprise has.
Optimizing capacity is very important
so that you can take your talented employees
and the talented resources
to do more strategic transformation program,
which helps to sustain and stay and scale in your business.
So I see that automation playing
a significant role to impact business imperative.
>> What are some of the common misconceptions?
I mean, we talk a lot about people's fear of automation.
You know, I don't think that's necessarily a misconception.
I think a lot of times people are fearful of automating.
Though maybe shouldn't be.
We had Dentsu on today,
Dentsu's like, you know this giant global branding firm
and they get a lot of young kids,
they're like, no, bring it on,
I don't want do all this mundane stuff.
But you know, a lot of folks are concerned,
but so that maybe is one misconception.
Are there others, Lauren, that you found that you can share?
>> I think we were lucky that we didn't necessarily have
that fear of being replaced by automation.
I think our change management plan really helped drive that.
We included some fun things of anytime a bot went live
you got almost like a birth certificate
of here's the process we saved for you,
here's how it's grown over six months, 12 months, 18 months.
But I'm not sure
if we had any other major gaps like that or pitfalls.
>> RP, anything that?
>> So my philosophy is,
automation is human plus machine combination.
You can't run just, you know people can't think that,
you know, if my task gets automated I lose my jobs.
That's not how it works,
because you do need human expertise, competency, skills,
to, kind of, augment what you do with automation.
And most important thing when you do this change
is that most of the enterprises do not believe,
do not understand that you have to get even process, right.
You don't want to, you know, have an inefficient process
and put automation on the top of it.
Then, you just made your inefficiency run more faster.
So you need to, kind of, make sure that you
address inefficiency, optimize your process,
then infuse automation,
then have human plus machine capability
to strengthen your automation.
>> Is it really that easy?
(everyone laughs)
>> Sounds easy, right?
>> So from an Accenture perspective,
if you're looking at the market as a whole
or looking at industry verticals,
what's the difference between an organization
that is leveraging automation
and an organization that is not leveraging automation?
Is there sort of a range of, percentage of efficiency
that you can put on that?
What does it mean for their bottom line?
>> Dave: Accenture must have data on this.
>> Yeah, I mean what, yeah.
>> Today, today's world in the technology world
every organization understands the importance of automation.
That's given. That's a table stake.
Now, where an organization is in the journey differs.
Some of the enterprises may be
at the beginning of the maturity spectrum.
In my book, I talk about automation maturity framework,
wherein there are the initial stages of automation.
Some of them are "intelligent automation",
at the end of the spectrum,
where they're using data, cloud and AI
to drive the automation journey.
But in every enterprise, the key success of automation
depends upon whether you do automation in enterprise-wide,
not in a silo in the organization,
but if you do enterprise-wide apply across,
you get a lot more benefits, lot more efficiency to drive.
>> Does automation being more strategic or key?
Does it in a way make,
investments in automation
more scrutinized or more circumspect?
I would use the term discretionary.
We heard Bobby Patrick today say,
this is not discretionary, it's strategic.
To me, if it's strategic it might be a mandate
but it's might be something I can kick down the road.
What are you seeing there in the field,
just in terms of overall demand and sentiment?
>> Automation today, as I said, is a table stake.
When it becomes an integrated DNA of enterprise,
it is always, you know, whether you want to call,
one pillar of strategy,
key DNA of your strategic roadmap.
Your investments have to be directly proportional
to what you want to accomplish as your business KPIs
to drive and deliver your business with.
Otherwise, if you do it as like a one-off thing,
you know you won't get the benefits.
>> Yeah.
Lauren, from your standpoint, where do you want to take
the automation initiative inside of Whirlpool?
How are you thinking about scaling it?
What have you learned that you can apply to driving scale?
>> So we put some strict governance in place.
We weren't just automating everything under the sun
because..
>> Dave: Wild west.
>> Yeah, I can't support that. Right?
So we made sure that everything had at least
less than a one year return on investment
and 500 hours worth of automation
for us to even consider it as part of our COE.
So because of that, we do have some automations
that would make sense but that's why we're looking
at a citizen development program or low code, no code.
What other types of options are there
to make sure that it does become a part of our culture
and DNA that you can automate
those even small parts of your workflow
to make your day better.
>> When you're looking at those workflows,
do you, are you literally looking over someone's shoulder
with a stopwatch and measuring,
(RP laughs)
an measuring how, no seriously,
>> Dave: Time And motion study.
>> Yeah, yeah. I mean is it time and motion studies?
I mean, is that sort of the entry level data
that that you use, or is it more automated than that?
>> I would say it's a little more automated than that
but we do sit down and we ask our business process,
show me what this process looks like to you.
And then from that, we can take some task mining
and look at, okay, how long did it take you to do this?
How often are you doing it?
And then based on how long the automation would take,
see how many hours are saved
and how many people are doing that same task
on a monthly, daily, weekly basis.
>> Great. All right guys, thanks so much
for coming in theCUBE and sharing your story.
With Whirlpool and always love to have Accenture on.
You guys got such a massive observation space,
global depth of industry.
So thank you very much both.
>> Thank you.
>> You're very welcome.
All right, keep it right there.
Dave Nicholson and Dave Vellante will be back,
right after this short break.
You're watching theCUBE's coverage
of UIPath Forward 5, live from Las Vegas.
(peaceful electronic music)