>> 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)