>>Live from Las Vegas. It's the cube covering UI path forward Americas 2019 brought to you by UI path. >>Welcome back to Las Vegas. Everybody, you watching the cube, the leader in live tech coverage. We go out to the events, we extract the signal from the noise. Ahmed Zion, he is here, he's the chief automation officer at accelerate a specialist service provider in this area of RPA in Armando Lambert is the vice president of enterprise optimization governance and risk guys. Oh sorry. At Bayview asset management in Miami. Welcome to the cube criminal. Thank you for that. So Bayview, you've got a good view of the Bay and Miami, is that kinda where the name comes from or the beautiful place to work happening with UI path forward to was in Miami at the Fontainebleau back here in Vegas. But um, so let's get into it. I met um, chief automation officer. That's kind of a cool title. I don't see that a lot. What's that entail? And tell us about accelerate. >>So accelerate at accelerated where one of the largest nice providers is the only thing that we do a process automation and AI company. And our sole focus has been process automation since our inception and our past lives were generalists. We did well and wanted to do it again. Uh, so when we started accelerate, we wanted to make sure that we focused on a very specific vertical niche and process automation was just starting up the uptick about mid 2016 ish. >> So there's gonna be some interesting conversations around process automation is like had an analyst on yesterday, they predicted RPA is dead, you know, process automation lives. You know, it's kind of a tongue in cheek thing. So maybe we can talk about that a little bit, but Amando tell us about your role and a little bit about Bayview. So Bayview is an asset management company, primarily whole loans, mortgage back securities, mortgage servicing rights. >>We offer service advisory as well as investment vehicles. My role basically is to strategize, innovate, look at new technologies, new ways of streamlining the business. Um, and you know, about in 2016, you know, we were faced with the challenge and the challenge was we have a lot of road swiveled to chair type work, back office, operational work. Um, and I went in there just trying to look at people, processes and systems and trying to figure out a way to make things more efficient. And you know, RPA is one of those vehicles. Okay. So smart. You started with people in process, you didn't start with the technology. Yeah, absolutely. Right. So what did you learn? I mean, take us back to 2016 when you started to do the investigation, you started unpack the processes and the people. What did you see and then what led you to RPA? >>Yeah, I mean, I think inherently you're, you're, there's a lot of business processes that are just brought down through years of just being kind of entrepreneurial and doing a lot of business. So a, of these prices of processes early on we felt like we can just go in and automate and we realized that just needed a level of process optimization first. Um, so in doing that, it just kind of directs the vehicle right into what type of automation you need to do. It's not always RPA. RPA is big, a big component for us. Um, it works for us. Early on we wanted to put a strong governance structure. I strongly believe that, you know, and it's worked out so far for us. >> So you, you brought in accelerate, you brought in an outside firm to help you with that process automation, is that right? Absolutely. >>So tell us more about how that all went down. So that was, that was an interesting, um, interesting time, right? The, these products were coming up. Nobody really knew how well they work. And so we went in and we actually did proof of value, right? We said, Hey, this is all well and good. Let's do a proof of concept that a proof of value at that time, proof of concepts really were a thing. I don't, I don't think we should do them anymore. We should only do proof of values. But we went in, looked at the various systems they had, tried it out so he could demonstrate it to his management that this thing works. And as soon as that was over, I think I'd given to her, Armando, here we went all in, right? We said, all right, let's look at the highest value things. >>Let's deliver this. Um, let's figure out a governance model. Let's, let's not, let's not hold it back like we, like we have done in the past. It project spinning up. So let's get the infrastructure up and running very quickly. Let's get, let's get a few automations out there. Some of the business sees the value right away, right? Crawl, walk, run. We can do this. You know, what are we going to automate and what do we need from it and how are we going to govern this? These are the three pillars that I see that I suggest everybody look at it. And we did that in parallel parallel streams and all three of them. And within a few months he was able to return a significant value back to the business, which has led to adoption. I think, I think that has been a very big reason why he's been able to scale because he was able to show early value back to the business very quickly focusing on value rather than the technology or the underlying solution. >>Right? It's um, a lot of times we see folks going into RPA saying, what can RPA do for me? I think that is the wrong question. Um, the question really is what do you do? Let's classify what you do in manual mechanical work, intelligent work and wasteful work, right? And then look at your toolbox. I have RPA, I have AI, I have other technologies that within an enterprise folks are working on, and then apply those to it. RPA becomes the glue for most of these things. You have API as SDKs. You have AI technologies, be it cloud or on prem. RPA becomes the glue and it becomes easy to deploy once you figured out what all the different pieces are. But it's important to look at the process first and say, what? What do you do? So when the business comes back and say, what can you do for me with RPA? >>I said, no, I don't know. What can you do for, with the, I don't know. Tell me what you do and then I'll tell you what the solution is. So mono, given that you started with the value, did that ease some of those potential friction that you sometimes see with change management or change in general? Or did you still see that resistance? And I'm interested in where you started, what were some of those high value areas that you attack but, but the cultural piece first if you will. Yeah, I mean a lot of marketing, you know, it's really what it comes down to trying to prove to the Csuite and managing director areas. Like this is a value proposition. You know, early on, you know, we did a lot of presenting roundtables, luncheon learns with the business. You know, because there is some resistance early on. >>I think everybody has a misconception that it's going to take their jobs where I believe it's gonna create a lot more jobs in the future. Um, for me it was always a scalability play. You know, how can our business do more for less? And that's really what we really wanted to get to. Throughout that journey. We realized there's a lot of benefit, especially for companies that have a heavy back office operations. Um, and we just started, like I mentioned there, we started slow. I didn't want to boil the ocean. I knew I needed to prove to leadership that this works. And I think about three years ago, we all kind of felt, is this going to stick? You know, we've seen technology, I've been in technology for over 20 years and you know, some things fly, some things don't. Right? So we wanted to prove that it worked. >>And you know, the industry just kind of surrounded itself around that. And look where we are now. I think everybody's putting a lot of money in their budgets for, you know, intelligent automation, not just RPA. So the initiative was kind of middle up to the C suite and then top down. Is that how it, absolutely. I'm a firm believer the tone needs to come from the top. It has to come from the top. And you know, luckily for me, I have great leaders in our company. Um, they understood the vision, they understand what, what it could potentially mean for their business. They just needed someone to help execute it. So what kinds of things did you start with? There was a lot of sort of manual form filling out or some of that, uh, you know, data extraction from PDFs using, utilizing OCR, you know, RPAs great to gather and collect data so that they can put it in their models and make more informed decisions. >>Uh, claims processes, you know, dealing with different agencies. So, you know, early on in adopting UI path, there were some limitations. We worked around that. Now it's pretty much limitless and they could touch any system, any technology, any process. So yeah, it's growing tremendously. And in terms of just ensuring governance and compliance as you scale, you have robots doing that. Um, how do you tell me what we're working more and more. I mean, I think regulators now realize, okay, you're removing the human element, right? So, you know, that's a big value as well. Or sampling. Now you're not limited to what you can sample. You can sample 100%, you know, so those are big values and when you speak to regulators, they really understand that I would say five years ago, I'm not so sure. Um, but now they welcome it. And I think a lot of the government agencies now are, are adopting RPA. >>Uh, so it's, it's a good story. Well, automation kill sampling is that I think it is absolutely right. The point actually interesting point that you made, right? Uh, the regulators or the auditors or for that matter, the security and the compliance guys inside the enterprise have this. So this term of the bot, right has this connotation of Terminator and I keep telling him, no, this is that thing. You buy a target that does this. I press the right button, it goes right up, press the left button, mil goes left. It just doesn't think on its own. And I think that conversation is very important, right? Once you have that conversation with the security and the compliance guys to say, this is a bot, it only does what you ask it to do. You could put a social security number in front of this guy all day long in front of this user ID all day long. >>It just doesn't know what to do with it. Won't ever read it. And once they realize that they, the, the conversation changes, um, you know, especially when it in compliance and audit, right? Uh, the compliance officers would love this. Once you tell them there's a lot of decision making that happened in people's heads or Excel spreadsheets that never made it to systems and was never logged. So you'd get something in you massage that, you did that, and you put that in the system. That decision making is now auditable. So you can go back and say, here was the input, here was the massaging of it. Here's what went into the system of record after it came in. So that I think, I think those conversations early on really helped this scale in an age old problem and tribal knowledge. Exactly. You know, Joe has his spreadsheet and Fred knows the Joe has the spreadsheet. >>So when Joe leaves, he has to get the spreadsheet back. And that's kind of this perpetual thing. How much of what you guys did, Armando was processed re-engineering versus just applying automation at some low hanging fruit. Um, I think looking back now it's about a 50, 50 split. Um, you know, there are some areas that have robust processes and that makes our life easier. We can just kind of go in, map it out, look at the automation future state and deploy, develop and deployed. Uh, you know, some areas, you know, they inherit processes and they don't always just so busy doing their day jobs and they don't always realize there's, there's room for efficiency in their process. So, you know, early on when we priced out how much this would cost, how much development it would be, we didn't always factor in that it would be a 50, 50 split and doing a lot more process improvement in the beginning. >>Um, we've now counted for that. So absolutely. It's about a 50, 50 split. Craig LeClaire this morning said something that, you know, I was an analyst and he says, very, you know, very analyst's sort of savings. You've got to stop worrying about the ROI, you know, focus on the more strategic stuff. Every analyst sort of says that. But yeah, there weren't a lot of CFOs too. And they're like, where's the ROI? So you know, you're in the services business, you know, you have to have ROI dollars matter. Absolutely. So you obviously measure ROI. How do you look at it? You know what you said earlier, you're not cutting jobs, right? But so what do you tick? How do you measure kind of the, the value, the ROI? I mean, you know, giving the end user a little more to think about, right? Giving them the opportunity to, you know, do more, be more thoughtful in what their day to day job is rather than doing the swivel chair type work. >>So, you know, the measurement, the beauty around RPA is it's very quantifiable. You know, unlike some traditional it systems, you really can, the data doesn't always kick back. You know, all our, our, our own bots, all our processes kickback, they give us data that we can quantify, um, metrics on, on, on volume versus man hours. This is all information you capture early on. You need to do this at the discovery stage and we train. We have a robust training program for our business analysts and program managers and developers and they're always, that's the question they ask every time. It's not just about what is your process, your cute future, current state, future state, and it's like, how many limit? Let me look at your historical trending. What are their volumes look like? You know, our business is very cyclical. It goes up and down, and when I mentioned I want them to be scalable and have more capacity, that's really the play for me. >>For me, it's never been an FTE. I get it. It may come from the Csuite, but like I said, the tone from the top has been solid. Their vision is more about, Hey, when it's cyclical and it goes up and down, we need to be able to do more. We need to be able to scale. Have you been able to measure productivity improvement? Absolutely. Absolutely we have. If you had a Mulligan, what would you do differently? A good question. I mean, I think we factored early on, I mentioned this early on how much process improvement was needed. I think we undervalued that. And um, you know, every business faces the same challenges, right? They, you know, everyone feels like they're doing the right thing. These processes are inherited. You know, regulations change, investors change. There's new business rules every day, you know, and you kind of need to sit back as a business user every now and then and refresh that. >>And um, you know, we didn't account for that early on. We're helping the business do that. Our business is fantastic. They bought into the program and it's like having additional workforce working on your side. You know, Daniel Dienes in his keynote last night, basically sending them pick up on something you guys said is, is, um, he really appreciates those customers who took a chance early on. He goes, because frankly, our product wasn't, you know, fully, fully baked out. And I was like, wow, what an honest statement from a CEO. You don't usually hear that. My sense is that they got it right. You path. And I'd love your comments. In the sense that they attack, they went after simplicity and said, okay, make it easy to adopt and then we'll figure it out. And then, you know, bringing in the functionality is that, is that kind of what happened or picking up on Daniel? >>And by the way it was, it's amazing. Humility really comes through, right? So I saw him 2016 standing on stage and when my partner came to us for the idea of saying, Hey, we're going to do, we should do this RPA thing. Now I'm giving away my age. But 1998, my first job, I was sitting in front of the computer and Prudential and they put this software in front of me. It was called SQA robot. It was a test automation tool. It was called SQL robot. Uh, why that relates to Daniel is he's had a, came on the stage in the IRPA conference in 2016 if remember, I love this presentation just to blues black thing and few words on it. He goes, let's not kid ourselves. We have this very traditional, you know, QA automation technology that we think can do something really super. >>And I have built a product on top of that, but there's, there's not a lot of magic in here yet. Right. So that's, but, but I think the, the, the great thing about you I've had has been the vision, right? The vision has been, and if you saw yesterday they started with the core and unlike some of the other vendors, they said, we're just going to do RPA really well. We're not going to go into the OCR market. We're not going to try to build AI things. Let's make sure that our core RPA, so you know, you want to go, you're an enterprise, you want to do OCR, you're not going to buy it from an RPA company. You want to buy it from somebody who's been doing it for 30 years or we just has that sole focus. I think you'll have had had that sole focus. >>But as I've seen in the past three, four years, they've just done a great job with the, with the full vision, right. Starting from, they started with the middle of the core of the product and they said, okay, let's go towards the business and see what the business needs with, you know, planning of their, um, of their automations on and so forth and going further to the right to say, let us enable the technology guys who actually implement this to give them the tools and the integrations they need to, to actually make this routed to full product. Um, I think it's a very good question when people say, what can you do with RPA for me? So I said that answer was very different three years ago than it is today. Right? Some of the things are coming out of the box with these. So I, I, I predict that in the next few years, document understanding and natural language and all of that will just be built in today's still very sort of clunky in terms of how you do it. >>But I think those things are coming, coming together. So looking at processes that way is really important. It's a lot of runway for this. Margaret, Armando, I'll give you the last word. Where do you see are RPA or intelligent automation going in, in your organization? Is it still early days you had a lot more adoption or you're pretty much, you know, settled? No, definitely not settled. Um, I think it's, you know, RPA is just one of the tools in the spectrum of intelligent automation. So more integration, more API APIs, a lot of machine learning, uh, eventually some AI. Um, so yeah, we are not slowing down. There's a lot of opportunity. My mandate as I mentioned before, is just scale, scale, scale. So you know, the process is working. We have a good program in place. We'll continue marching forward. Great guys, thanks so much for coming. Thank you for sharing your story. Thank you for watching. From right back with the cube. Live from UI path forward three in Las Vegas. Right back.