>> Announcer: Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas 2019. Brought to you by UiPath. >> Welcome back, everyone, to theCUBE's live coverage of UiPath Forward here at the Bellagio. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside of Dave Vellante. We have two guests for this segment. We have Sanjay Sadasivan, he is attended automation process lead at EY. Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Sure, thank you for having us. >> Rebecca: And we have Goutham Goudgere, he is the attended automation lead at EY. >> Great to be here. >> Thank you so much for coming on the show. >> Thank you. >> So, about a year ago, you embarked on an attended automation project within EY. EY, of course, is a company that helps other companies with their RPA transformations, but this is one you did on your own. I want to hear about the impetus for this project. Why did you start it? What was going on? >> Sure. >> Yeah, so I can take that one. So we started this project, like you mentioned, about a year ago. We both are from EY's SAP practice, and EY has been undergoing SAP transformation for the past few years, and so, we're kind of replacing a whole bunch of, almost 1,400 systems and moving to a single-instance SAP project, which covers everything that our client servers do in the market, entering client information, all the things that CRM does, project management, engagement economics, as well as the whole finance and procurement work. So I think we've got, right now, 100,000 users on the SAP single instance. And SAP is great at what it does, which is essentially entering transactions into the system efficiently at scale, but the feedback that we were getting from our end users, especially those end users that end up using the system maybe once a week to maybe once a quarter, was that it was sometimes too difficult for them to navigate into the system, try to remember all the things that they had to do in the SAP system. So we were at the Miami event last year, and so, we heard about attended automation from UiPath, and we kind of went back and did a POC to see, can we use attended bots on top of SAP system and help the user go through some of those usability challenges? So we started last year, and we are currently live as a pilot. EY is 250,000 users, so our pilot is huge, so it's got about 20,000 users as of this week. >> Why attended bots? What are attended bots? What's the motivation for attended bots? >> So, in fact, when we started the process, we had two options, to go through kind of the traditional unattended bot, which was have the user enter data in an Excel sheet or some sort of screen capture, email that information, and have the bot then enter it. We initially started with that, but that ran into several problems, like the data was already too old by the time it got into the transaction system. Then we had to rebuild the full front end of SAP, which has taken years to build. So that's why we started using attended bots, which was, can we just put a bot on the user's machine, so that when they want to enter a transaction, they just call the bot, and the bot does all the hard work for them? So that's how we've been-- >> Your question as to why attended bots, there's a certain level of intelligence, actually, the user puts in when entering these transactions, so an attended bot actually just takes some information and then plugs it in. But that's not the way EY works. For example, if you're entering an opportunity, there's a lot of thought processes the clients are actually going through. "What's the pursuit going to be?" "Who are my likely sales leads?" "What's the percentage of what I'm "winning this transaction?" So we needed the user to actually enter that information in the system. But using our normal SAP system, especially when you're on a sales lead and you're meeting with a client, entering all that information was getting a bit cumbersome. The attended automation process actually cuts down those steps. For example, if SAP requires you to enter, say, 20 fields, this actually cuts it down to five fields or five screens, and they can enter that information to the attended bot, it guides them through each process, it's a streamlined process, and they can exit out of it, that's it, they're done with the system, focus on the lead, actually. >> So you came to the conference last year, had this eureka moment, "Hey, could we do this "and help our people who are suffocating "under these dreary, tedious tasks?" So, was it a hard sell? I mean, were they easily brought along, of, "Yeah, we want to try this"? Or was there any anxiety on their part, of, "Ooh,"-- >> Sure. >> "What are we doing here?" >> We had that. >> So I think we had a great sponsor within the firm, and we are trying this out for the first time. >> Sanjay: Yeah. >> In fact, from talking with UiPath, the experts here, not a lot of other companies have tried this. So we did go through a step-by-step approach to kind of de-risk as we went through this. We started with a small POC, learned from that. We then put those bots in front of real users, got feedback, kind of Agile approach and built it over time. >> Yeah, I think one of the key points was really doing a business "let's go" definition, so we went to our partner community and asked them, you know, "What are the most frequently used processes "that we should automate with an attended "automation process? "What are the pain points? "What are the current challenges? "We want you to alleviate us." So, basically, we actually used the feedback from the partnership to focus on those particular steps to automate. So, and then change management, obviously, you have to engage with the user community all the time to make sure that, you know, getting the right feedback, maybe adjust our process or how we're building the bots accordingly as you're going through the process, I think that is key as well. >> So, the user experience now, so walk us through what it's like now for the human worker who had these tedious tasks, and now, what's it like with this attended bot? >> So, the attended bot is an application which is on the end user's laptop. So as soon as they open the laptop, it's right there as an icon on their bottom right corner. So they go there, click on that, and it lists about 15 SAP processes that they can run. So they know what they want to do in the system, they want to create a new client, they want to create a new engagement, or a project, and so, they would go there, call that, you know, just click play, and essentially sit back and watch the bot then take over their screen, navigate to the right SAP transaction. And, you know, navigating to this transaction seems easy, but when you have 15 processes that 200,000 users need to know, and it's not straightforward sometimes, the bot does three, four clicks, before they know it, brings them to the right screen, and then it also adds a message on top of every screen that says, "This is what you are supposed "to be doing on this screen. "So, before creating a new client, "first search within our MBM system, "first search within this DNB system, "to make sure you're not creating a duplicate." So we've got help messages added on top of the screens as well, so it kind of takes you through the process. >> So I think one of the main points, yeah. Yeah, I think (clears throat) a normal SAP system in a particular screen, you could always go to a help, maybe a portal, and get some help. But with attended automation, it gives an opportunity for each of those screens as well to give specific help, contextual help. So basically, if you're on a particular screen and you're having an issue with this particular screen, you don't have to pick up the phone and call, maybe, a user desk, or close the screen and look through some manuals. Right there, through the attended automation process, we gave a link where they can get actual information on that particular screen, so they can finish that step without actually closing out of the process itself. So that is one of the big-- >> So the way I explained this to internal audiences is, we have built the bot to be our best-trained employee in SAP. So instead of them calling a human to go through the SAP transactions, the bot is right there, guiding. And the bot is watching what they're doing, so if it gets a SAP error, then it can suggest to them, "Here's two ways that you can get around "this particular error." So it's doing things like it's having your friend sit next to you and tell you how to go through the process. >> Your smartest friend. >> You guys are in the SAP, sorry, you guys are in the SAP practice. >> We are, yeah. >> That's right. >> And, so it's been quite a run, the last 10 years, for Bill McDermott, and I believe they acquired an RPA company, a small, little tuck-in. >> Goutham: That's right. >> But you guys chose UiPath. (laughs) You know, I don't know what that says. >> Goutham: Yeah. >> But what are your thoughts on that? I mean, in terms of, we've been asking practitioners, best of breed, or full suite? Obviously, you went with best of breed. >> That's right, actually, we spoke with SAP before we started our journey. We actually did a POC with one of the smaller firms, an RPA firm, and we spoke with SAP as to what their capabilities were. But just looking at what's out there, in terms of the product suite and how it fits our processes, we just felt like UiPath went that step further, and really met our needs in terms of attended automation. And then, obviously, we looked at the Gartner surveys it's on, and it was right up there in the right-hand quadrant, so we felt like UiPath was the right answer for us. >> Rebecca: Great, well-- >> But we are working with SAP to actually help through this process. So, the bot has to watch the screen, like I mentioned, and kind of understand the screen layout, the screen fields, so, instead of that watching words and names on the field, it's actually using this thing called automation ID. So SAP is adding these IDs on every screen, which actually helps any RPA vendor sit on top of it. >> And that's one of the key learnings that we've been finding out, that SAP, as Goutham was mentioning, we have these automation IDs that the attended bot actually uses to transact with the system. And then we see that SAP CRM as this cloud release every quarter, and they basically push out some code to our systems, which is every quarter, and we see that more and more automation IDs are coming through the SAP systems as well. So we have our own challenges in terms of managing those quarterly releases and make sure that it doesn't break our attended bot. But UiPath so far has been good. >> Excellent. >> Yeah. >> Rebecca: Well, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. It was a great conversation. >> Great, thank you. >> Thank you for having us. >> I'm Rebecca Knight, for Dave Vellante. Stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of UiPath Forward. (upbeat music)

(upbeat music) >> Live, from Las Vegas it's theCUBE. Covering Informatica World 2019. Brought to you by Informatica. >> Welcome back everyone to theCUBE's live coverage of Informatica World 2019. I'm your host Rebecca Knight along with my co-host John Furrier. We are joined by Adam Mariano, he is the Vice-President Health Informatics at HighPoint Solutions. Thanks for coming on theCUBE! >> Thank you for having me. >> So tell our viewers a little bit about HighPoint Solutions, what the company does and what you do there. >> Sure, HighPoint is a consulting firm in the Healthcare and Life Sciences spaces. If it's data and it moves we probably can assist with it. We do a lot of data management, we implement the full Infomatica stack. We've been an Infomatica partner for about 13 years, we were their North American partner of the year last year. We're part of a much larger organization, IQVIA, which is a merger of IMS quintiles, large data asset holder, big clinical research organization. So we're very much steeped in the healthcare data space. >> And what do you do there as Vice President of Health and Formatics? >> I'm in an interesting role. Last year I was on the road 51 weeks. So I was at over a hundred facilities, I go out and help our customers or prospective customers or just people we've met in the space, get strategic about how they're going to leverage data as a corporate asset, figure out how they're going to use it for clinical insight, how they're going to use it for operational support in payer spaces. And really think about how they're going to execute on their next strategy for big data, cloud strategy, digital re-imaginment of the health care space and the like. >> So we know that healthcare is one of the industries that has always had so much data, similar to financial services. How are the organizations that you're working with, how are they beginning to wrap their brains around this explosion of data? >> Well it's been an interesting two years, the last augur two years there isn't a single conversation that hasn't started with governance. And so it's been an interesting space for us. We're a big MDM proponent, we're a big quality proponent, and you're seeing folks come back to basics again, which is I need data quality, I need data management from a metadata perspective, I need to really get engaged from a master data management perspective, and they're really looking for integrated metadata and governance process. Healthcare's been late to the game for about five or six years behind other industries. I think now that everybody's sort of gone through meaningful use and digital transformation on some level, we're now arcing towards consumerism. Which really requires a big deep-dive in the data. >> Adam, data governance has been discussed at length in the industry, certainly recently everyone knows GDPR's one year anniversary, et cetera, et cetera. But the role of data is really critical applications for SAS and new kinds of use cases, and the term Data Provisioning as a service has been kicked around. So I'd love to get your take on what that means, what is the definition, what does it mean? Data Provisioning as a service. >> The industry's changed. We've sort of gone through that boomerang, alright, we started deep in the sort of client server, standard warehouse space. Everything was already BMS. We then, everybody moved to appliances, then everybody came back and decided Hadoop, which is now 15 year old technology, was the way to go. Now everybody's drifting to Cloud, and you're trying to figure out how am I going to provision data to all these self-service users who are now in the sort of bring your own tools space. I'd like to use Tablo, I'd like to use Click. I like SAS. People want to write code to build their own data science. How can you provision to all those people, and do so through a standard fashion with the same metadata with the same process? and there isn't a way to do that without some automation at this point. It's really just something you can't scale, without having an integrated data flow. >> And what's the benefits of data provisioning as a service? What's the impact of that, what does it enable? >> So the biggest impact is time to market. So if you think about warehousing projects, historically a six month, year-long project, I can now bring data to people in three weeks. In two days, in a couple of hours. So thinking about how I do ingestion, if you think about the Informatica stack, something like EDC using enterprise data catalog to automatically ingest data, pushing that out into IDQ for quality. Proving that along to AXON for data governance and process and then looking at enterprise data lake for actual self-service provisioning. Allowing users to go in and look at their own data assets like a store, pick things off the shelf, combine them, and then publish them to their favorite tools. That premise is going to have to show up everywhere. It's going to have to show up on AWS, and on Amazon, and on Azure. It's going to have to show up on Google, it's going to have to show up regardless of what tool you're using. And if you're going to scale data science in a real meaningful way without having to stack a bunch of people doing data munging, this is the way it's going to have to go. >> Now you are a former nurse, and you now-- >> I'm still a nurse, technically. >> You're still a nurse! >> Once a nurse, always a nurse. Don't upset the nurses. >> I've got an ear thing going on, can you help me out here? (laughter) >> So you have this really unique vantage point, in the sense that you are helping these organizations do a better job with their data, and you also have a deep understanding of what it's like to be the medical personnel on the other side, who has to really implement these changes, and these changes will really change how they get their jobs done. How would you say, how does that change the way you think about what you do? And then also what would you say are the biggest differences for the nurses that are on the floor today, in the hospital serving patients? >> I think, in America we think about healthcare we often talked about Doctors, we only talk about nurses in nursing shortages. Nurses deliver all the care. Physicians see at this point, the way that medicine is running, physicians see patients an average two to four minutes. You really think about what that translates to if you're not doing a surgery on somebody, it's enough time to talk to them about their problem, look at their chart and leave. And so nursing care is the point of care, we have a lot of opportunity to create deflection and how care is delivered. I can change quality outcomes, I can change safety problems, I can change length of stay, by impacting how long people keep IVs in after they're no longer being used. And so understanding the way nursing care is delivered, and the lack of transparency that exists with EMR systems, and analytics, there's an opportunity for us to really create an open space for nursing quality. So we're talking a lot now to chief nursing officers, who are never a target of analytics discussion. They don't necessarily have the budget to do a lot of these things, but they're the people who have the biggest point of control and change in the way care is delivered in a hospital system. >> Care is also driven by notifications and data. >> Absolutely. >> So you can't go in a hospital without hearing all kinds of beeps and things. In AI and all the things we've been hearing there's now so many signals, the question is what they pay attention to? >> Exactly. >> This becomes a really interesting thing, because you can get notifications, if everything's instrumented, this is where kind of machine learning, and understanding workflows, outcomes play a big part. This is the theme of the show. It's not just the data and coding, it's what are you looking for? What's the problem statement or what's the outcome or scenario where you want the right notification, at the right time or a resource, is the operating room open? Maybe get someone in. These kinds of new dynamics are enabled by data, what's your take on all this? >> I think you've got some interesting things going on, there's a lot of signal to noise ratio in healthcare. Everybody is trying to build an algorithm for something. Whether that's who's going to overstay their visit, who's going to be readmitted, what's the risk for somebody developing sepsis? Who's likely to follow up on a pharmacy refill for their medication? We're getting into the space where you're going to have to start to accept correlation as opposed to causation, right? We don't have time to wait around for a six month study, or a three year study where you employ 15,000 patients. I've got three years of history, I've got a current census for the last year. I want to figure out, when do I have the biggest risk for falls in a hospital unit? Low staffing, early in their career physicians and nurses? High use of psychotropic meds? There are things that, if you've been in the space, you can pretty much figure out which should go into the algorithm. And then being pragmatic about what data hospitals can actually bring in to use as part of that process. >> So what you're getting at is really domain expertise is just as valuable as coding and wrangling data, and engineering data. >> In healthcare if you don't have SMEs you're not going to get anything practical done. And so we take a lot of these solutions, as one of the interesting touch points of our organization, I think it's where we shine, is bringing that subject matter expertise into a space where pure technology is not going to get it done. It's great if you know how to do MDM. But if you don't know how to do MDM in healthcare, you're going to miss all the critical use cases. So it really - being able to engage that user base, and the SMEs and bring people like nurses to the forefront of the conversation around analytics and how data will be used to your point, which signals to pay attention to. It's critical. >> Supply chains, another big one. >> Yeah. >> Impact there? >> Well it's the new domain in MDM. It's the one that was ignored for a long time. I think people had a hard time seeing the value. It's funny I spoke at 10 o'clock today, about supply chain, that was the session that I had with Nathan Rayne from BJC. We've been helping them embark on their supply chain journey. And from all the studies you look at it's one of the easiest places to find ROI with MBM. There's an unbelievable amount of ways- >> Low hanging fruit. >> $24.5 billion in waste a year in supply chain. It's just astronomical. And it's really easy things, it's about just in time supplies, am I overstocking, am I losing critical supplies for tissue samples, that cost sometimes a $100,000, because a room has been delayed. And therefore that tissue sits out, it ends up expiring, it has to be thrown away. I'll bring up Nathan's name again, but he speaks to a use case that we talked about, which is they needed a supply at a hospital within the system, 30 miles away another hospital had that supply. The supply costs $40,000. You can only buy them in packs of six. The hospital that needed the supply was unaware that one existed in the system, they ordered a new pack of six. So you have a $240,000 price that you could have resolved with a $100 Uber ride, right? And so the reality is that supply could have been shipped, could have been used, but because that wasn't automated and because there was no awareness you couldn't leverage that. Those use cases abound. You can get into the length of stay, you can get into quality of safety, there's a lot of great places to create wins with supply chain in the MDM space. >> One of the conversations we're having a lot in theCUBE, and we're having here at Informatica World, it centers around the skills gap. And you have a interesting perspective on this, because you are also a civil rights attorney who is helping underserved people with their H1B visas. Can you talk a little bit about the visa situation, and what you're seeing particularly as it relates to the skills gap? >> We're in an odd time. We'll leave it at that. I won't make a lot of commentary. >> Yes. >> I'm a civil rights and immigration attorney, and on the immigration side I do a lot of pro bono work with primarily communities of color, but communities at risk looking to help adjust their immigration status. And what you've had is a lot of fear. And so you have, well you might have an H1B holder here, you may have somebody who's on a provisional visa, or family members, and because those family members can no longer come over, people are going home. And you're getting people who are now returning. So we're seeing a negative immigration of places like Mexico, you're seeing a lot of people take their money, and their learnings and go back to India and start companies there and work remotely. So we're seeing a big up-tick in people who are looking for staffing again. I think the last quarter or so has been a pretty big ramp-up. And I think there's going to continue to be this hole, we're going to have to find new sources of talent if we can't bring people in to do the jobs. We're still also, I think it just speaks to our STEM education the fact that we're not teaching kids. I have a 28 year old daughter who loves technology, but I can tell you, her education when she was a kid, was lacking in this technology space. I think it's really an opportunity for us to think about how do we train young people to be in the new data economy. There's certainly an opportunity there today. >> And what about the, I mean you said you were talking about your daughter's education. What would you have directed her toward? What kinds of, when you look ahead to the jobs of the future, particularly having had various careers yourself, what would you say the kids today should be studying? >> That's two questions. So my daughter, I told her do what makes you happy. But I also made her learn Sequel. >> Be happy, but learn Sequel. >> But learn sequel. >> Okay! >> And for kids today I would say look, if you have an affinity and you think you enjoy the computer space, so you think about coding, you like HTML, you like social media. There are a plethora of jobs in that space and none of them require you to be an architect. You can be a BA, you can be a quality assurance person, you can be a PM. You can do analysis work. You can do data design, you can do interface design, there's a lot of space in there. I think we often reject kids who don't go to college, or don't have that opportunity. I think there's an opportunity for us to reach down into urban centers and really think about how we make alternate pathways for kids to get into the space. I think all the academies out there, you're seeing rise, Udemy, and a of of these other places that are offering academy based programs that are three, six months long and they're placing all of their students into jobs. So I don't think that the arc that we've always chased which is you've got to come from a brand named school to get into the space, I don't think it's that important. I think what's important is can I get you the clinical skill, so that you've understood how to move data around, how to process it, how to do testing, how to do design, and then I can bring you into the space and bring you in as an entry level employee. That premise I think is not part of the American dream but it should be. >> Absolutely, looking for talent in these unexpected places. >> College is not the only in point. We're back to having I think vocational schools for the new data economy, which don't exist yet. That's an opportunity for sure. >> And you said earlier, domain expertise, in healthcare as an example, points to what we've been hearing here at the conference, is that with data understanding outcomes and value of the data actually is just as important, as standing up, wrangling data, because if you don't have the data-- >> You make a great point. The other thing I tell young people in my practice, young people I interact with, people who are new to the space is, okay I hear you want to be a data scientist. Learn the business. So if you don't know healthcare get a healthcare education. Come be on this project as a BA. I know you don't want to be a BA, that's fine. Get over it. But come be here and learn the business, learn the dialogue, learn the economy of the business, learn who the players are, learn how data moves through the space, learn what is the actual business about. What does delivering care actually look like? If you're on the payer side, what does claims processing look like from an end to end perspective? Once you understand that I can put you in any role. >> And you know digital four's new non-linear ways to learn, we've got video, I see young kids on YouTube, you can learn anything now. >> Absolutely. >> And scale up your learning at a pace and if you get stuck you can just keep getting through it no-- >> And there are free courses everywhere at this point. Google has a lot of free courses, Amazon will let you train for free on their platform. It's really an opportunity-- >> I think you're right about vocational specialism is actually a positive trend. You know look at the college University scandals these days, is it really worth it? (laughter) >> I got my nursing license through a vocational school originally. But the nursing school, they didn't have any technology at that point. >> But you're a great use case. (laughter) Excellent Adam, thank you so much for coming on theCUBE it's been a pleasure talking to you. >> Thank you. >> I'm Rebecca Knight for John Furrier. You are watching theCUBE. (techno music)