- Up next we're joined by Xerox,
best known for their workplace technology globally,
to see how their internal community of citizen developers
are using Microsoft's Power Automate
with robotic process automation, or RPA,
to extensively automate everyday manual business processes
and how this homegrown expertise
has now led them to launch a rich catalog
of unattended bots as a service to their customers.
So I'm joined today by Shivani Agarwal from Xerox.
Thanks for joining us today.
- Thanks for having me.
- And I appreciate you joining us all the way
from Bangalore today, but before we get started,
why don't we step back to give everyone a bit more context?
Because, I think most people are probably familiar
with Xerox for office solutions,
but maybe not for the software and services
and really automation side of things.
Now, Shivani, this is really an interesting story
on a few levels.
So first, in how everyday business users
are driving process automation at Xerox,
and second, the sheer breadth
of what you're using automation for,
and also thirdly, how it's enabled a new revenue stream
for the company.
- When we first started down this path,
it was pretty experimental,
but now we are at a point
where Xerox can't function without unattended bots.
The original vision has been to have a bot on every desktop.
We started with Softomotive,
which was the genesis for Power Automate RPA.
And today we have more than 450 bots deployed.
These manage increasingly complex transactions
across almost every business function
and completing over 4 million transactions per quarter.
We also launched our commercial Xerox
RPA as a service last year in 2020,
that harnesses the expertise of our growing global community
of close to 200 citizen and professional developers.
- And really in many ways, you know, your citizen developers
are best placed to do this work
since they're the domain business experts
who intricately understand
what it takes to really get specific activities done.
- Right. One of the critical success factors for us
has been having the people
with the process expertise actually automate the process.
We have found that nearly any repeatable process
used by our staff to get their job done
is ripe for automation.
For example, here's a process
that one of our citizen developers created
to generate unattended and daily up-to-date
customer service operations billing reports.
The accounting team uses these reports to quickly identify
and monitor monthly billing trends
and potential inconsistencies in invoicing,
which they can view through their management console.
Prior to this automation,
someone would have to manually generate the report
once a week.
And this is one of many such examples
of manual repeatable processes
that business users are automating.
If you look at what's behind this, here's the cloud flow.
It runs through a number of steps.
The first step defines the recurrence, it occurs every day.
Then we have two steps
where we grab the user's credential to log into SAP,
to access and run the required report.
And from there we run the desktop flow
using those credentials.
Let me go ahead and show you this flow on the VM,
where it's going to run.
As we scroll through,
you will see this final step actually consists
of over 300 actions.
I'll explain what it's doing while it runs
and you can follow along.
As we run the flow in a VM,
the first few steps are capturing some dates
in particular formats.
Its first task is to figure out the period
from which the report needs to run,
because we are only pulling the report updates
from when it was run last.
So the bot opens the current month-to-date report.
It does a max formula
to figure out the last time the report was run.
And will take that as a parameter to run in SAP.
It then logs in to SAP with the user credentials
that are stored on an Azure Key Vault.
Everything is kept secured
with 256 bit encryption in our case.
Next, we run the transaction code where the report lives.
So it's just entering that now with a specified variant.
It makes its way down to the current date.
The report then runs and is exported to Excel.
It removes blank fields and scrubs all the fields we need
and basically manipulates the data to get it into a format
that we need.
It's like doing an ETL inside Excel.
It then reopens the file that it started from
and copies the data across from the exported spreadsheet.
Then it saves the file, a close rule kicks in,
and an email is sent
to the report requester to confirm that the report is ready.
We used to run a report like this manually
and on a weekly cadence.
And now using this automation,
we can run it whenever we like.
And all this has been vital during Covid.
- And really this automation I understand
was initially automated using Softomotive
before it was shifted then to Power Automate.
So, first, how was that transition,
and also are you using other parts of the Power Platform?
- Yeah. Moving from Softomotive to Power Automate
was pretty straightforward
because there are a lot of similarities.
We also use the free process migrator
for Softomotive products, which is currently in preview.
And we are using several components of Power Platform
in unison with Power Automate.
A great example of this is our workforce management portal.
This solved for a major workforce visibility challenge
that we had.
That's because technician talent
is typically assigned by contract to customers
and we wanted to have visibility
into what talent exists and where,
so we could reallocate them to jobs
based on the required skillsets,
of course, within realistic geographical radius
so that these technicians could be fully utilized.
This solution is based on a Power App
that captures workforce data,
including job function of their staff,
special worker skills and other data.
This is one source of data.
Other sources of data flow from our HR system
that has information on worker department affinity
and work locations,
and time sheet summaries,
which track how busy a given technician is.
And this is delivered by our Office 365
to a shared mailbox containing employee utilization data
and contract data so we know
the primary account assigned to them.
All this data is stored in Azure SQL.
Then Power Automate is used
to process and translate data from these sources.
For example, you can see two flows here.
One pulls utilization
and the other, FieldGlass, pulls contract names
from a SharePoint list.
The FieldGlass flow also pulls files off an email
that is generated on a weekly basis with an attachment
that contains utilization data for each worker.
This is an event-based flow.
If I click into edit, I can see what happens.
When an email arrives in a shared mailbox,
an attachment is copied to our file system for processing.
Here's the flow that pulls the contract name data
from a SharePoint list
and inserts that into an Azure SQL database
so that we can associate the workers
with the primary account that they are working on.
If I click into edit, I can see the flow itself.
Under the recurrence we see that this runs every Thursday
at four o'clock, and in get items you see
where the data is pulled from in SharePoint,
and finally, my stored procedure
that writes back to Azure SQL.
All this is integrated data and visualized in Power BI,
including the global mapping.
So when I go to workforce analytics,
that takes me to Power BI.
We've got our filters
and we've got our total workforce counts represented.
If I want to look at people with specific skillsets
that are around this area, I can do a geo search.
And if I zoom into a map,
I get a great picture of people in the UK, in this case.
Then using the selection tools in the map,
we can pull them up.
I can click in and see their locations
and find more details.
If I go back to the home screen,
we have a radial mile search
where we can find people within a specific radius.
We try to only dispatch technicians within 50 miles
from where they are now.
Otherwise it would be too far for them.
Right now we can see,
we have the county of Yorkshire selected with West Yorkshire
and we can see there are 153 people
within a 50 mile radius of this UK post code.
During the pandemic,
this solution has been key to minimizing unnecessary travel
and keeping our staff fully utilized.
Before we did this, the process was completely manual
and managed in a fragmented, siloed way.
- And you mentioned also
that you have an automation center of excellence.
So how were you then able to get business users
in particular on board with this?
- You need a champion for every team.
We focus on giving everyone access to technology
and empowering them to be able to use it
through our automation SharePoint site.
We have really learned the importance of giving recognition
and making support a constant focus.
And so, on this site,
we also share employee use cases and success stories.
We run competitions and highlight competition winners
on our internal employee news page
to raise awareness among the entire employee population.
People can join regular boot camps
where we teach people the basics,
and all these efforts combined
have helped us to build an internal community
and center of excellence globally.
- Right, and as a direct result, in 2020,
you were able to extend the expertise
that you've built internally also to your customers
with a catalog of unattended RPA bot services
that are built on Microsoft's Power Automate.
- Right. We have been able to use our substantial experience
to come up with a catalog of around 30 bots
built on Power Automate that support a variety of verticals
and all functional areas of a business.
The Xerox Robotic Process Automation Service
uses a combination of hyper automation techniques
across cloud flows with business rules, RPA and AI.
In addition to the catalog,
Xerox also offers custom-built bot services
using Power Automate and Power Platform.
- Sounds great, can you walk us through an example?
- Sure. So a great example is the work we did
for the legal firm Lexitas.
Their staff of lawyers and paralegals
were spending more than 250 hours a month
processing more than fifteen hundred exhibits monthly
as they worked on cases.
This involved manually grabbing files from servers,
manually stamping them, converting, renaming,
and storing files, before manually checking them for errors
and centrally sharing them.
Today our unattended RPA bots handle the entire process
using business rules.
Now let me show you
how our service automates the entire file processing.
I'll open the document we just saw
to show what it looks like before processing.
This document has normal text
along with embedded text elements and images.
Note the name of the file currently is Hotel.pdf.
The second file is a statement of work
and the header is actually an image embedded in the file.
Both files are saved to a location for processing.
I'm going to drag this window to the left
so we can see what happens to the files
as our automation runs.
Now I'll kick it off, and as those documents process
I'll show and explain the steps in our flow in detail.
First, we rename the files
to get them into a normalized naming convention.
For example, with a case and exhibit name.
This process calls a VB script to perform naming.
Then depending on the file type,
we convert the files to a format
that can be read by subsequent steps
like optical character recognition, or OCR.
The resulting file extensions
for each then determine the subsequent steps.
So a document will go through different processing
compared to a photo.
Once the renaming and conversion is complete,
the process then labels the file
with visible markings or metadata labels
to aid the classification and search.
Then for Adobe file types, we prepare the files
with any additional information needed
and to help improve the accuracy of the OCR.
Here we are using PowerShell scripts
that will launch Adobe apps
and perform a standard set of actions,
what we call pre-flight.
Then the OCR process
can convert the scanned printed documents
into digital documents.
After that we do a little more optimization
on the resulting files
to further improve the precision for file processing.
And once everything is complete,
we upload the files to a location in cloud storage
that is marked as being processed.
Before I open the same file, the first thing you'll notice
is the new file name.
And when I open it, as I showed you before,
you'll see the document is fully digital
and we've applied visual markings
as well as file labels in the metadata.
And the same is true
for the statement of work we also processed.
- Nice, and I can really see
how this would be a huge time saver
for legal teams and really set them up for
improved search and discovery after the case.
So thanks, Shivani, for joining us on Mechanics today.
And if you want to learn more about what Xerox
is doing in this space or to view their RPA services,
be sure to check out xerox.com/RPA.
And for more about RPA, visit powerautomate.com,
and be sure to subscribe
to Mechanics if you haven't already.
And thanks so much for watching.