>> theCUBE Presents UiPath FORWARD 5. Brought to you by UiPath. >> We're back in Las Vegas live. You're watching theCUBE's coverage of FORWARD 5 UiPath's customer event. My name is Dave Vellante. I'm here with David Nicholson. Our third Dave Espinoza is here, Director of Transformation at Cushman & Wakefield. And Marshall Sied is also here. He's the co-founder of Ashling Partners. Guys, thanks for coming on theCUBE. >> Thanks for having us. >> We know Cushman & Wakefield, huge real estate firm. We'll come back to that, wanted to dig into some of the industry trends. But Marshall, what is Ashling Partners all about? >> Great question, Dave. So Ashling Partners was founded with modern automation and continuous improvement in mind. So a lot of us used to implement large ERP systems, accounting transaction systems. We viewed RPA and broader intelligent automation as kind of the wave of the future. So everything we do has continuous process improvement and automation in mind together. So we don't want to decouple, we want bring those together in an agile way. >> It's interesting, Rob Enslin this morning on the stage was talking about the waves of industry tech that used ERP was where he started and you know, et cetera, internet and now automation. He's sort of drawing that analogy. It's interesting that you're seeing the same pattern. >> David: Were were you fist bumping in the back of the room? >> Marshall: Absolutely. >> Well, I mean there's a lot of opportunity there. A lot of money to be made on both ends. Dave, talk about your firm. What's going on in the industry specifically? You joined sort of as we're exiting the isolation economy. Right? So what's happening in the industry now? I mean, real estate has been up and down and, you know, wild ride, you know, with COVID. What are the big trends in the industry that are informing your automation strategy. >> And actually I joined probably like right in the middle of the isolation economy. So it was a really interesting time to like to, I'm sure for most people also onboarding into groups. But coming on Cushman, you know, Cushman itself is an organization that formed predominantly through acquisition and through merger, right? So three large companies came together. And so a lot of the times the sort of headaches and the opportunities that we find are probably no different than other legacy organizations have when they're merging three companies together, right? So lots of disparate process, lots of paper, lots of process that isn't really very standardized. And so really it's a lot about us trying to make sure that we're continuing to double down on really that continuous process improvement but also bringing technology, lots of different types of technologies to bear to solve different problems throughout the organization. >> Well is the pandemic a catalyst for the automation initiative? Or actually you guys started before that I think, Marshall started about 2018. But was it like a rocket booster during the pandemic or was it more sort of steady state? >> I think it was actually a little bit of both Dave. 'Cause the reality is there was already top down executive support at Cushman pre-pandemic. So Cushman was already moving on this in a big way and they had executive sponsorship across the C-suite. Pandemic came, never a good time for a pandemic, but it came at a decent time for Cushman because they were prepared. They had the foundation of governance, everything you need in a large enterprise to run a program. They had that in place so they were able to kind of just put kerosene on the fire when the pandemic hit with certain automation candidates. >> Because I often said that pre-pandemic, you know, digital transformation was kind of this buzzword. A lot of firms were sort of giving it lip service. But it sounds like Cushman actually had started down the digital transformation path and then obviously everybody was accelerated. If you weren't digital business, you were out of business. But but how tightly aligned, 'cause we heard this in the keynotes today, I'd like to test it. How tightly aligned is automation and digital transformation at Cushman. >> They're pretty synonymous really for us, right? So like it is really about bringing different types of technologies, whether it's like NLP. The other really interesting thing that we were talking about the keynote, right? There's just so much that is going into the UiPath platform that is enabling us and enabling the things that we want to do across the organization, right? So like natural language processing, document understanding, you know, cloud based items. Like there's just so much that we can leverage and it's really about that continuous process improvement. It's trying to make sure that we're aligning ourselves to the strategy that the organization is absolutely pushing, but making sure that we're doing it in smart ways, right? And that we're empowering our employees as we do it, right? So it's not just very top down from a COE, it's also very bottoms up, very citizen-led throughout the organization. >> So I think of this as a strategic initiative that happens over time. But how does Ashling, and Marshall, how do you engage with Cushman? Do you engage on a project by project basis? Do you have sort of a long term strategic arc that you're working to? >> Absolutely. >> How does that work? >> No, that's a great question. So we started project based, so we were a part of the co-establishment of the intelligent automation COE. So very outcome driven, top down approach as Dave mentioned. But we also had a wider aperture than just RPA. It was broader end to end automation experiences that was project based. We had so much kind of quantifiable evidence at that point that we wanted to go bigger with the program. Over time we matured into more of an agile DevOps methodology with the Cushman team. And Dave should certainly speak about the size of the Cushman team and how that's evolved over time, but- >> Because the two of you are in a partnership in terms of proving out the ROI of what you're doing. >> Oh, absolutely. >> Right? >> Marshall: Every day, every day. We all have numbers we got to hit, right? And that's just the reality of it. But in order to do that, you know, agile DevOps approach where you're, you know, releasing every two weeks into production, you need a dedicated team that has like a longer term roadmap that is coinciding with the Cushman objective. So that's what we have in place today, something we call build as a service and mROC. So kind of think of that as as plan, build, and then run. We're infused. You have to be infused with your clients if you're going to run an agile DevOps program. >> Is automation more self-funding? Marshall, I want to draw on your experience with ERP. Is automation more self-funding than other technology initiatives? And if so, why or if not, why not? >> It is, and it's a double edged sword actually. We talk about this all the time at Ashling. We've never worked in an enterprise technology space where there's more accountability to value delivered because it's so quantifiable and measurable. So every time a transaction runs you can measure- >> Dave: How are we doing? >> Exactly, I mean the ERP days, nobody questioned. They just, they thought we just have to move to S/4HANA, we just have to move to Oracle. >> We'll let you know in a couple years. >> That's it, yeah. >> I mean the stuff that we just saw earlier from Javier Castellanos, right, from Orange. It is very much like each transaction has a value associated to it. Each part of that transaction has a value associated to it. We're constantly monitoring the numbers of looking at our performance, right? There's very real value associated to maintaining business as usual for the 50 plus automations that we have in production, right? So like the business is really counting on us to maintain and to make sure that we're continuing to perform. But also that we're continuing to work with them to find additional value and additional opportunities, right? To make sure that we are saving money and finding dollars- >> But it's dropping hard dollars to the bottom line, right, that are quantifiable to your point. But what's the governor, what's the barrier to your ability to absorb whether it's new automation? Is it just expertise, talent, or you bandwidth? Is it the prioritization exercise and thinking intelligently about, you know not- >> Dave: All of that. >> So how do you, I guess you guys work together, but take us through that a little bit. >> I mean, we're constantly refining our approach. So we were just talking about our DevOps approach. You know, we started with I think maybe five or six different teams based on specific service lines. We modulated that recently to go to two teams, right? One specific to build and one specific to enhance. So we're constantly looking for and building new automations throughout the organization. And then also looking for incremental value to enhance the automations that we've got out there, right? So making them better, faster, making them more resilient so resolving technical debt, doing a lot of different things to make sure that we're as stable as we possibly can be. But it's not only that, it's really like making sure like we're just as pinched by everybody else in terms of like the great resignation and looking for talent. I think everybody here is basically looking for the exact same talent. And so it's really making sure that we have interesting work, we're doing interesting work, we're making people feel valued, and we're bringing value throughout the business. >> So I remember Bobby Patrick called me when he joined UiPath. He goes, "You're not going to believe what I'm doing now. You got to get on this train." And so I started looking to it and we actually downloaded, you know, the package and started playing with it. And we tried to do it with the competitors, we, you know, we couldn't. It was like call for pricing kind of thing. We're like, well that's interesting. But what we saw was my perspective, this bottoms up adoption. And I know there was top down as well. But then, I remember I was in the meeting when they announced the sort of process gold acquisition and then started, I said, "Okay, they're going for platform now." And then Microsoft came into the market like, okay, they got to differentiate there. Now you're seeing everybody, all the software companies think they should own every dollar that's ever spent on software. So SAP's doing it and ServiceNow. And so Marshall, from your perspective, how has this platform evolved? And then Dave, to the extent you can talk about it, how is that platform adoption taking shape within the organization? I mean, platforms are much more complicated than products and they require integration. How is UiPath doing there? >> I think they're doing fantastic in that category. If you think about, and it's been a natural evolution. They're not fighting inertia, they're following challenges of their clients, right? So RPA obviously came onto the scene hot, everybody understands the business rule driven automation value. Easy to, you know, make a quantifiable, tangible evidence with RPA. But exceptions happen in a business and upstream processes break that, you know, cause challenges with downstream automations. So what do you do? You have to go upstream. You have to have more automations, you have to have process discovery, process mining with process gold. You need to have the ability to have a better user experience interface, which we've definitely incorporated into Cushman when we didn't get adoption with certain automations that we like. You build low-code apps. People want that consumerization of technology in the enterprise and that allows them to adopt more of the automation which triggers the robots and then you report analytics on it. So that expansion's been pretty natural with UiPath and I think the next acquisition they just made with Re:infer's really interesting, 'cause now you're going even more upstream with communication mining, turning that into structure data that you potentially could automate or analyze so it's been natural. It's truly the only platform that we've encountered that can do all of this at this point. >> So a couple things there. You know, one is the nuance of adoptions, not just the function of the potential savings or, you know, revenue production or productivity. It's, you know, the experience because you got to have a great UI. And then what are you going to do with Re:infer? I don't know if you guys are adopting Re:infer but what do you see as the potential. Marshall and Dave, if you guys have visibility on it? >> I know we've talked about it Dave so I mean the potential's huge. I think it's going to be more of a question of change management for each organization just to feel comfortable with that. But I mean, think about all of the communication and the semi and unstructured data in an organization that comes, you know, via Slacks, Teams, emails. It's huge and it's significant if you can figure out the right identifiers that you want to trigger for your business. And then figure out is that something downstream we can automate or can we just analyze and make our business more effective, more efficient, or provide a better experience. So I think it's huge. We don't know how big this is yet, but we know that it's something that, I mean, think about Cushman, get brokers all day long that are communicating with clients and third parties. So it could be extremely significant. >> Sounds like a potential to eliminate email hell, but. >> Marshall: Heard those promises before. >> Maybe that's like the paperless office eventually. >> Well in our organizations, like 50, 40 to 50,000 people, you know, globally, right? And there are definitely service lines within our organization where probably it doesn't make sense for us to leverage UiPath and provide them the, you know, studio and low code, no code automation tools. But a lot of this NLP stuff and a lot of the content mining and the communication mining stuff, really has the ability for us to be able to sort of pinpoint opportunities at levels that we couldn't possibly do it before. So it was really very exciting to see the stuff that we were in there. I think when you start your organization, a lot of times you're a hammer looking for a nail, right? And you need to quickly move away from that. And so I think a lot of the stuff that UiPath is introducing, a lot of the stuff that they're bringing into their platform, really helps us to be moving away from that sort of orientation. >> Well when you think of this in terms of CI/CD, you know, people maybe have a better understanding of sort of the life cycles and, you know, the iteration calendar. Can you give us an example of something that went from an idea, something like, "Hey, I think we might be able to automate this process" through "Okay, yeah, let's do it." You try it, at some point there's sort of quality testing involved to make sure that it's achieving that we want to do. Can you give us an example of a process that you've gone through? And then how long do those things usually take? Are we talking weeks, months? What are we talking about from idea to establishing that, "Yeah, this is something we want to keep in place." >> Dave: We always want to make it faster. So we're especially always trying to find ways, especially upfront parts of the process. So a lot of the analysis, requirements gathering, you know, stuff that's not actual building. We want to make sure that we're shrinking that as much as possible, that we're also being comprehensive so that we're not building something that doesn't meet someone's needs, right? Or that just completely misses the mark. But I mean, invoice processing is a good example. We do that internally. Obviously, we have corporate accounting. We also do that on behalf of clients. And so a lot of times, you know, we're bringing some of the internal processes, we're using the technologies for document understanding, optical character reading, and machine learning. And we're doing that on behalf of clients, but we're also doing that internally. So to be able to use some of those processes and automations, sort of client facing plus internally, are big changes. Big changes for us. But I think the other thing too is like, we're always trying to make it faster and better. I think that's one of those also processes where we put something in place and we're constantly looking to enhance it, make it better based on the process that's out here. >> And you're applying automation to that upfront piece, the planning phase? Is that right? Or? >> Yeah, yeah, so a lot of it is about sort of the work that we do on behalf of clients. And there are teams who are specifically tasked to accounts. And so we're looking to find ways to make it easier for those accounts to get their bills paid, to get visibility into, you know, accounts payable, accounts receivable, their full end to end accounts lifecycle. And so yeah, we're doing that directly on behalf of clients and then we're doing that internally. >> How about the why UiPath question. Marshall, I think I heard you say that you're pretty much exclusively UiPath as your automation partner. Why? Why not play the field? Why UiPath? >> So I think it started in like 2017, 2018 for Ashling. We did an analysis of kind of an outside in of what, at that point was the big three of RPA, the vision and the roadmap and the open platform architecture of UiPath and just the self-awareness that, "Hey, we need to operate with other technologies in order for our clients to get the most value from automation." That was really the main reason, outside of the fact that we like working with UiPath, but it was just that complete vision of a platform as opposed to a tool. We felt like everybody else was more of a pointed tool and then UiPath had this platform approach and it was going to be necessary to go end to end like we all are trying to achieve. >> And UiPath continues to deepen that, right? They continues to support us with tons of new technology- >> How so? Can you be specific? >> I mean, when we're talking about document understanding, I mean, we're trying to leverage that for manual handwritten time sheets. We're also using it for, you know, Chronos integration, right? So like there's a lot of stuff that we're using it for and we can go to a single shop, right? To be able to do it, a single platform from a scalability and a supportability perspective, it's also a big game changer for us, right? As you start, you want to be able to scale, but you can't spend a ton of money supporting, you know, a hundred different platforms. You really got to invest and be smart about it. And UiPath for us was a really smart play. >> Are you budget limited relative, you're competing with other initiatives within the organization? Where's the funding come from? Is it from the business? Is it from IT? Is it a combination? >> It had been centrally funded and we are now moving into a different model. So we are constantly looking at, you know, the justification of value, speed to value, and proving it out to our business partners from all service lines and within all different functions of the organization. So we're at an interesting inflection point, but I think we also have a really good background that we're building on. >> I've been saying it all day, I've said it for years, at the UiPath events that they are awesome about putting customers on theCUBE and we love to hear from the customer stories because we get to sort of map what we hear in the keynotes and then test it, right, in the real world. And I also really love the fact that Marshall, UiPath always brings implementation partners so we can get the expertise and you have a wider observation space. So guys, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE and thanks for sharing your stories and good luck in the future. >> Thanks for having us. >> Appreciate it guys. >> Very welcome. >> Thank you. >> All right, keep it right there. Dave Nicholson and Dave Vellante live from Las Vegas UiPath FORWARD 5. We'll be right back right after this short break.