 Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward America's 2019. Brought to you by UiPath. Hello everyone and welcome back to theCUBE's live coverage of UiPath Forward. I'm your host, Rebecca Knight, co-hosting alongside of Dave Vellante. We are joined by Layla Dillich. She is the Chief Information and Digital Officer at Coca-Cola Ichichek. Thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you, great to be here. Very exciting. And also, Christina Perola, she is the Group RPA Lead at Generale. Thank you so much for coming on the show. Thank you too, for inviting me. Thank you. So I want to hear from you both about what your industry is and what your role is. Layla, let's start with you. Okay, great. So we are one of the largest bottlers within the Coca-Cola system. We produce, distribute, and sell Coca-Cola company products. We operate in around 10 countries, around Middle East and Central Asia and parts of Middle East, Pakistan, Syria, and Turkey. We are actually born out of Turkey, and that's where our central office is. We operate with 26 plants, around 8,500 employees. We serve a consumer base of 400 million, and we have around close to one million customers, and we continue to invest in the countries where we operate. And my role is chief, and my role is all things digital, within this community, so. Leading technology. Leading technology. All things digital, yes. So, Cristina, tell us about Generale. Generale Sicurazioni is a leading insurance company as the presence in 50 countries worldwide, and more than 70,000 employees worldwide. So it's a big company not only for insurance, and my role within Generale Group is to lead the RPA program. So I'm inside the group data in digital. So, inside this group, I'm very focused on smart process automation. So RPA plus AI, because as we already know, Leila, RPA without AI is announced nowadays, so we have to keep on talking about AI, machine learning algorithms to enrich the capabilities of basic robotics, and reach also the end-to-end automation of processes. Leila, you're the CIO and the CDO, is that right? Yes, yes I am. That's unique. Well, first of all, one that's unique too, it's even more unique that a woman has both roles, so what's the reason behind it? So, there's definitely a reason behind it. I joined the Coca-Cola system about a year ago, so I'm just over a year in the company. The reason actually I wanted to make sure that we highlight the CIO and CDO role together is I want to educate for all the IT organizations to transform and really get into the digital world, and get into the world of advanced technologies, become strategic business partners, get out of the kitchen, I call it kitchen, kitchen IT. Get out of the managing of data centers or cloud and just the core foundational systems and applications, get into the advanced technology, understand the business, gain business acumen, and deliver solutions based on business needs. So, to highlight that, I want to make sure that I hold the role of both, and I'm able to be advocate of both worlds, because digital without IT support is not able to accomplish what they need to accomplish, and IT needs to get into more of the digital space. And Christina, as the RPA lead, you write bots, you evangelize the organization, both? Mostly the second. So, in general, we have a very, so a sort of hybrid organization. So, for something we are very decentralized, for example, for the developing of robots, the deploying production, the operational stuff, and so on, but for some stuff, like guidelines, risk framework to ensure that robots can do their work in the right way, with no risk at all for the business processes. For this stuff, for guidelines, framework, best practice sharing, we try to be centralized. So, my role is to try to collect, to not try, to collect best practices and share within the companies, share the best use cases, and also try to gather what are the main concerns, what are the difficulties in order to facilitate and to boost the smart process automation adoption. So, Leila, you were up on the main stage this morning. UiPath highlighted Coca-Cola Ichichak as a customer that has embraced automation, embraced the UiPath solution. So, tell us a little bit about the challenges you were facing and then why you chose UiPath. So, as I joined the company, I introduced a very strong digital strategy that required a lot of change. And it's within a company that has been very successfully operating all these years and doing pretty much know what to do very well. And all of a sudden, with digital, we are starting to disrupt. We are trying to say, hey, we're going to change the way you do some of the things. So, belief in digital and belief that it can really bring efficiency and outcomes was very important and I needed a quick win. I needed to have a technology or a solution or an outcome that I would generate very quickly and show to the whole organization that this can be done and we can do this as Coca-Cola Ichichak. So, that was RPA. That was RPA for me. So, this is fascinating to me because you're an incumbent business, been around for a long time. And if I understand it, you're a bottler and a distributor, right? So, your processes are around the bottling plants and the distribution system. And now you're transforming into a digital business. Which means you got to put data at your core. Totally, North Star is data and customer. Okay, so describe sort of the difference between the traditional business and what it looks like when you've transformed. It's particularly from a data perspective and then I want to understand what role RPA plays. Sure, so we are definitely a very data-rich company. However, to call ourselves data-rich and to call it a strategic asset, I first need to capture and control my data. And I have to treat it like a strategic asset. So, that is a huge transformation. The second, once you treat it as an asset, how do you generate more insights? And I call this augmenting the gut feeling. I have an amazing gut feeling in the company. How do I augment that with data and provide our business partners and then our customers and our suppliers with some of the information. And then obviously, future maturity level is shared economy and data monetization, et cetera. So, that's how I describe within the company. And then assets, other assets like our plants and coolers. Cooler, we call it cooler, where you actually see all our products, they are cold, they are visible and they are available. But they are also an asset where I can turn them into a digital cooler. And I can do so much more with the cooler that's standing. And I recently, in one of our leadership meetings, I said, we have as many coolers as the population on the Fisher Island, which is close to one million. So just imagine in this new world, in this digital era, everything that you can do by just having a cooler, one million coolers present out there on the street. I can serve the consumers. I can serve customers with very different information. So that's kind of what I mean by turning the business into a digital business. So that's awesome story, by the way. How does RPA fit into that vision? RPA is everywhere in the vision. So I said, when I started the journey, any digital journey has some muscle in battles. For me, there are four muscle in battles. I need to get certain things right in IT, in the foundation. And one of the muscle in battles was automation. So we have to create efficiency. We have to optimize. We have to streamline. And we said automation first. And we started with, I call it robotics and automation. And I agree with what you said, Christina. It's more than just robots. It's actually a strategic application. It could be a good old ERP. It's an RPA, it's AI. It's all the other technologies around it that they bring, the two of them bring. So how do you create this end to end solution using all the advanced technologies to create optimization? Our goal was, how do we get back to our customer much faster? So many customer-facing processes and they're going to be there forever. We are a very customer-centric customer in the company, obviously. So how do I get back to my customer faster? How do I make my employees just happy? They were working on so many things, would be until midnight, over time, during weekends. How do I take that away from them? So we called it lifting the weight off the shoulders and giving you new capabilities, so again, augmentation. And then giving them that space. So we had three of my employees upskilled and re-skilled themselves. They became developers in the robotic space. Couple of our functional colleagues are now re-skilling themselves because now they have the time to re-skill. More importantly, they have the time to actually leverage their expertise and they are so much more motivated. The engagement, employee engagement is increasing. So that's how we are positioning RPA. Christine, I see you nodding along your head to a lot of what Leila is saying. I'm wondering if you can talk about any best practices that have emerged as you've implemented RPA at Generale too, what you've learned. Yes. For sure, we have a lot of processes automated all around the group, but we have not reached our maximum benefits gaining. So what we need to do right now is to try to boost the smart process automation by analyzing the insurance value chain. So each business area of the insurance value chain because currently we have countries that have a different level of maturities. So some countries are at the very beginning and we have to help them with best practice sharing with the huge cases, successful use cases. And we have a lot of help from UI partner doing this because locally UI partner has a very strong presence and it is very helpful in doing that. And now our next month are very focused on try to deep dive the vertical area of the insurance value chain and identifying which are the processes inside that are best to automated. Basinger, this activity on UI partner experience. So UI partner with his experience has created a heat map, value chain heat map. And so he's giving us some advice where to focus our strengths, our energy in automating. And I think that this is a very huge support that UI partner is giving us. So it's not just a matter of, okay, let's start, do some process assessment in order to identify which processes are the best candidates to be automated. But we have our back, so we have the backing of UI partner saying it's better to do like that and automate in that processes of that value chain. So we are starting a program to do that with all the countries, all the vertical area of the countries. And I think that this could really bring high benefits and can drive us to really having a scaling up in using a smart process automation and UI part. UI part ecosystem, not only RPA, so. One of the nice things about RPA is you can take the software robots and apply them to an existing process and a lot of times changing processes and a lot of times almost always changing processes is painful. However, we've talked to some customers that have said by applying RPA to our business, it's exposed some really bad processes. Have you experienced that? And can you maybe share that experience with us? Absolutely, so for us, one of the initial robots, we applied to a customer facing process. It was our field team trying to get back to our customer with some information. And we realized that the cycle time was very long and the reason is there are four functions involved in answering the question and seven different applications are being touched all the way from Excel to ERP to CRM. So what we did, obviously bringing a strategic solution to fix the cycle time and reduce that to streamline the process was going to take us long. So RPA was great help. We reduced the cycle time by putting a robot and we were able to get back to our sales team in the field in matter of minutes. What used to take hours was now being responded in minutes. Now, that doesn't mean that process is perfect, but that's our next step. So we created value for our customer and our sales team was in the field before streamlining and going into a bigger initiative. Anything you could share, Christina? Yes, so it is necessary to automate something that could be automated. So it is necessary to optimize the process before automating it. But sometimes it's better to automate it as is because also the not optimized process can bring value if automated. So let me share an example. If you, for example, have to migrate some data, obviously it's a one-shot activity, but with a robot you can do it in a very short time. Maybe it's not the best process to be automated, but could be useful as well. So it's always a matter of understanding the cost and the benefits. And sometimes RPA is very quick to be implemented and can have also a lot of savings instead of integrating, instead of doing more complex things. And another thing that's important to take into account is that after automating all the low-anging fruits, so the processes with low cost, low complexity and high benefits, then it starts a phase when it's necessary to understand how to automate the end-to-end processes. Because it happens in some of our countries that the second phase is very difficult because the situation is that you have very, a lot of very fermented processes. And so before automating it is necessary to apply operational efficiency methodology, Lean Six Sigma, business process engineering, and then automated. So it's a long trip and our aim as group of office in general is to give this kind of methodologies and best practices for all kind of level of maturity in our countries. So finally, what is the customer's, the employee response in terms of you're talking a lot about the streamlining, getting rid of these tedious tasks that took forever. How are employees reacting to the implementation? So we actually launched the, and announced our PA, Robotics and Automation with a hackathon in our company. And we invited 40 colleagues from various functions end-to-end, everybody from the business was there. And they participated actually in gathering ideas and prioritizing what matters most to the company. And we looked at customer, we looked at compliance, we looked at employee. And we actually, during the hackathon, UiPad team helped us to go live with one of the robots. They were mesmerized. They couldn't believe that this could happen. I think that's where we kind of engaged them. And going forward, everyone who generated the idea was part of the building of the robots. So they continued to be engaged. And we allowed them to name their robots. So they start naming. And once the robots were live, we literally had some of our teams who were dancing from happiness. And I think that said it all. That was the strongest voice of our business partner when we published that video. So our business partners became our advocates. And that's really our, how we won the Robotics and Automation within CCI. We have so many advocates right now. They are coming to us, our business partners are coming to us with more use cases. And they are actually, they are sharing with the rest of the system within Coca-Cola and with the group that we are part of locally in Turkey. They are sharing their stories. So now we have a hype going on in the system. Yes. And in general, at the beginning, we faced some fears in our employees. Fears of losing their job. Fears not be able to use this kind of technology. But also with the help of HR, because HR is driving a huge program of upscaling and rescaling of people. Nowadays, also hand users are very happy to use robotics because when they realize that they can really help in their activities, in their very boring and not useful activities, they are very happy to enjoy this program. But so it was a trip, a journey with the employees to make them understand that it's not something that is affecting their job. So at least in general group, we are programming this employee's journey in order to make them to have more awareness about robotics and not be scared about it. Laila and Christina, thank you both so much for coming on theCUBE. It was wonderful having you. Thank you very much for having me. Thank you. Thank you too. I'm Rebecca Knight for Dave Vellante. Please stay tuned for more of theCUBE's live coverage of UI Path Forward.