i am andrew mcbean i'm the director of
uipath here in thailand i'm
really honoured uh to be joined today by
tibor jarrah who is the head of business
automation at dtac
thailand uh so we're really grateful
that you could join us today i'm
i'm gonna just go straight into the
first question if i may uh uh thibaut
which is
um why did why did dtac decide on
embarking on driving an automation
culture
throughout their organization thanks
andrew for your question uh so telecom
companies you know
are old companies and ndtac was born 30
years ago with uh with a mobile
revolution
so we see ourselves as a as a disrupter
changes in our dna and and of course the
last five to ten years
there was a big disruption in in the
telecom industry
and operating models are being
challenged
i would say first on the revenue side we
have new player
that came to cannibalize revenue voice
traffic for example
they're also bringing new experience for
the customer uh
gamification instant gratification so we
see that customers ex
more from telco they expect things to be
much faster
and and on the course side i think uh we
we
need to continue to invest to uh to be
able to deliver this experience
dtac has invested a 1.5 billion dollar
in 2018
to buy a new spectrum we are investing
more than 25
of our revenue in network capex and in
parallel we need to continue because of
5g
so we need to really change we need to
be
i would say much leaner organization all
our manual process needs to be
automated and this is definitely a key
strategy driver for us
we need to automate our company uh so
thank you tibor you've set up your
center of excellence
right at the beginning so i just wanted
to understand why why did you do that
why did you set it up right at the
beginning
no actually i think honestly automation
is is not new to dtag
we have seen many uh automation across
the company for example our call center
has a more than 150 use case and 200
virtual machine doing automation for for
for the agents we have also digitization
with our
dtac application for customer uh more
than i mean close to 100 retailers
are using our retailer application so
so we have been trying to automate in
all the different parts of the company
i think what's new this year is we see
that to to go to the next level
uh we needed a centralized uh way
to drive a company directly working with
the ceo and the strategy team
uh so that's why we set up this
automation center of excellence i would
say
outside of it we see automation we see
rpa and ai
as a as a i would say not
just an i.t topic we
need both i.t driver and the i.t
tools and capability and by being
outside
we are able to also work on business
process and simplification
so we felt that that was the right time
for us to set it up
uh in in the office
so your your early experiences
uh were all at the time when when people
were working from home
um so what what challenges and what
opportunities
did this create for for dtag
yeah actually uh interesting question
because in uh kovid
uh uh i mean i think strike in thailand
around
february march and uh i mean it's just
at the time where we were thinking to to
organize a bottom as a
a way to bring the innovation uh and
automation culture to detect
um actually we didn't know what would
happen
we were a bit worried but i would say
doing a virtual battalion
became much easier to be honest we were
able to
to organize a lot of events we were ceo
with uipath and we had
i think you have provided a lot of
trainer that were
available in uh in a virtual room what
we call bot clinics
we use also automation hub as a way to
crowdsource
the ideal across the company so i would
say
i'm very happy with the result and
i think it it allowed us to bring the
right resource
without any issue around around the
logistics side yeah
so after you ran the bottlethon and the
first robots were presented and i and i
was there it was uh it was an amazing
event
did anything surprise you uh during that
time
okay so first i have to be honest we uh
on the employee engagement side
um we were worried also because it's
quite a technical topic
but to our surprise a lot of people are
connected to
to all the different virtual events we
organized
i would say consistently 100 to 200
people are tuned in in our in our town
halls
i would say then we had 54 people that
joined our bottom which is uh
probably more than what we would have in
if we had done physically
uh so we the other thing that surprised
me is um
we are a top-down top-down company i
would say
and um i didn't really know if people
would feel
confident to really raise a process
saying look this is my process
i would like to automate it uh and
but then they did i think uh we at the
end we selected 15
uh robots for roboton uh which was also
more than i thought
and uh and it worked out a lot of uh
because of all the training we did uh
even when we started some robots were
already finished that was also quite
impressive uh
and and then finally i would say of
course not all the robot makes sense
uh financially to to up to put into
production
but more than fifty percent are being i
would say
productivized right now so i think i
think overall it's a it's a big success
and a lot of learning for us we'll
probably do another one next year
uh either on rpa or ai
or anything around automation for sure
yeah this is here to stay
great and then i know the ideas were so
good that you had to give four prizes
instead of the
the three that you intended
yeah yeah exactly i think uh that's also
a very
uh very good uh uh i would say uh
uh gesture from our ceo because we we
gave cash price
uh to to untitled uh you know to really
excite the team i think it was around 1
000 per team
we had yeah we had t-shirts we created
uh
some nice uh robot uh picture that
people could use for their presentation
uh so all of this in thailand i mean
people are very creative here
and they like to have fun so at the end
i think we uh we created a very
interesting event for
our company yeah yeah so so based on
that
timber what what's been the reaction of
the staff so far
so during our different communication i
think we uh we spend a lot of time to
explain that uh
rpa and robot uh process automation is
not
just about replacing jobs or uh
it's also about giving back time to
employee
so i think um what's what we saw is uh
some of our employees became
more excited they started to they asked
to be
trained as a rpa developer
some employees feel confident already
that they can develop
on uipath studio we're also discussing
about studio x but we are we are still
on the studio side
and and then over time uh we see more
teams
you know knocking on the door and saying
oh i heard from my friend that you're
helping them
can you help me too because my boss said
we have to do something
so no i think it created awareness
across the company that was really the
goal of this
and yeah i'm very very happy with the
results
um you incorporated many contemporary
very new modern thinking into your ideas
for ensuring that staff
recognized automation as a key tool to
make them happier
in their work so could you could you
just expand a little bit on on what you
did there
yeah so i think as i said in thailand
and southeast asia in general i mean fun
is
very important i would say fun and food
so we didn't bring food because it was
virtual
so we tried to really uh make this as
a fun event people were able to
you know exchange very casually with a
trainer
we've also created this community i
think now we have around 150 people that
identify themselves as part of the
automation community
with a monthly coffee shop and an
exchange
with the others about what they are
doing on automation
and so having t-shirts having visuals
was quite important we have a blog post
we have like small videos in the
elevator
so that people recognize the robot and
see that really automation is
is something that uh all management
really wants to
uh to do and is serious about uh
i think one thing we also try to do is
on on the organization side
is that um i strongly believe that a
robot
needs to be managed very closely as an
employee
so we are putting them on our chart in
workday
people can see what what they are doing
we can manage all the credentials also
on the security side with them
and it it personify the robot so if
a robot breaks people can talk to the
manager
and it's not just an i.t system uh
because i think
maybe before it was a little bit like
that like as soon as the robot
was broken i think people would call it
and say please fix it
but actually it's really an addendum to
any employee so the employee need to
feel in charge
yeah so tibor final question
uh now now you've created this initial
demand and excitement
um how how are you going to keep up the
momentum
yeah so i think this is uh this is key
uh we cannot stop so as i said before we
we have this monthly coffee chat we have
these 150 people doing online training
we have different roles uh around
automation super user
developer business process analyst so we
are checking that they're actually uh
attending the training as they committed
um also what we see is now when people
come to us it's not just rpa it's they
come for ocr they come for
nlp a chatbot they come for a
power automate or it's they have we have
to be the one to uh master
even more technology uh to give
the right answer to the teams so um so
we cannot stop and uh our pipeline is
growing
we will of course we have affiliate i
would say amount of developer right now
working for us
uh so it's always about blowing the
benefit to management to be able to
continue to
to invest and uh i think i would
conclude saying that
we have a strong strong target for the
company as well is to have 100
of all our manual process and repetitive
process
automated by 2023. so uh that's
directly top down from our ceo and uh
and i guess i need to deliver so you i
will uh
i will be talking about rpa for for many
years now
so timo it it leaves me to just say
first of all thank you very much for
spending time with us today and sharing
i think the incredible contemporary work
that you've done at dtac
um you know you and i have been involved
since the beginning of the journey
and i'm i'm looking forward to being on
on that journey with you as well it's a
really truly exciting and we're inspired
by the work that you've been doing here
as well
so again thank you very much um and
we're looking forward to working with
you
no thank you i want to thank you andrew
and all the urpath
team because we cannot do this alone i
think we need to learn
we need people who are there to train us
to coach us
it's not just a license that's for sure
and
it takes time it takes time to change
the mindset of the people
but we're getting there so if you are in
a journey with us i think
we can we can do a lot of things
[Applause]
together
you