 From the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, it's theCUBE covering UiPath. Forward 4, brought to you by UiPath. Live from Las Vegas, it's theCUBE. We are here with UiPath at Forward 4. I'm Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante and a lovely setting at the Bellagio. We're going to be talking about automation from the CFO's perspective. Our next guest is Rajesh Garg, Group Financial Officer at Landmark Group. Rajesh, welcome to the program. Thank you so much, thank you. Before we dig into your transformation strategy and how automation is a key to that, help the audience understand a little bit about Landmark. Absolutely. So Landmark is one of the largest non-food primarily retailer in the Middle East and Asia India and now increasingly in Southeast Asia. So we've got about 50 brands, more than half of them which are homegrown, our own brands and some franchise brands. So about 2,200 stores across 20 countries, 55,000 employees, 30 million square feet of retail space. Big company, when was the company founded? 48 years ago. So a legacy institution. You were mentioning before we went live that you guys have been working with UiPath since 2017. So talk to me about that legacy institution embracing cloud digital transformation and automation as from a visionary strategic perspective. So look, I mean, you know, you get so many technologies that are being thrown at you. So I would say UiPath or robotic process automation was just another one like that. So I wouldn't say it was like part of a grand strategy. You know, it comes as it looks like, hey, this is cool. You know, in the back office when somebody showed me first 10 desks with nobody sitting on them, it's kind of spooky. So he said, hey, this looks very interesting. So it started off like that, but then it has just grown because we've stayed with it. So we were amongst, I think, in the early part of UiPath's customers. And it's been phenomenal, you know, what we're able to do with robotic process automation. I mean, you know, I've been in this industry with my past employers like Procter & Gamble and Cadbury Shwebs and all. And essentially we used to follow the path of, you know, you eliminate all the non-value add. You then try and automate whatever your ERP system then all allowed you to automate. Then what's left, you consolidate and then you find the right shore, right? It can be offshore or wherever. So that was the sequence. But I think a lot could not be automated because there are huge gaps in the systems that are being offered. And you have a mosaic of systems every company will have, right? And then we would end up doing a lot more offshore or, you know, other kinds of tactics. But then once RPA showed up on the scene, it's suddenly disrupted everything because now whatever the systems can't do or when you have to move data from one system to the other or make sense out of it, that's where this technology sits. And so that's where we are. You know, we've now got a pretty large robotic process automation practice. And then, you know, we are touching, started with finance and now we are pretty much enterprise-wide. So all these technologies are coming together, automation, RPA, cloud, AI, they're all sort of converging. And as a retailer, I'm curious as to what your cloud strategy is and how that fits. And there's always a lot of sensitivity from retailers that don't want to be on Amazon. Maybe some do and they say, hey, we compete in other ways. What's your posture in that? So we've also been an earlier adopter of cloud. Both, if I talk within the UAPath thing, we were, I think the first ones to put it on the cloud because we just saw, even before UAPath, we saw how people could tamper with, you know, attended robots, you know, on the desktop one. So we went on the cloud and that was good way back. But overall, the company also has a very, you know, well-defined cloud strategy. So we are, you know, pretty much all large part of our systems are on the cloud with Azure. Yeah, so, which makes sense, right? As a retailer, go with Azure, plus somebody Microsoft, you know, such a lot of Microsoft expertise out there that you can leverage. And I got to ask you, because everybody's freaked out on Wall Street about Power Automate, you know, competing with UAPath. And I've told people, they're kind of different parts of the spectrum, but I've talked to a lot of customers this week to say, yeah, well, we use both. We use UAPath for end-to-end automation. We use Power Automate for a lot of our personal productivity stuff. How do you guys, do you use Power Automate? How do you see those two complementing? Look, it's inevitable. A lot of technologies will keep evolving. I think Microsoft is a fantastic company. I mean, the way they perfected teams, right in time, you know, when COVID hit, a year before COVID hit, teams was not ready, you know? So I think, you know, Power Automate is good. We use it, but not as, you know, it's not ready for enterprise-wide. So I think more, I'm not an expert in Power Automate yet, you know, but it kind of seemed more like when it's linked to the office automation versus linking major enterprise-wide, you know. Which is really where you're headed. Talk about the results that you've seen. How are you measuring the return and the whole business case when you evaluated as a CFO? See, A, being a CFO, I wear two hats, right? I'm trying to help the digital transformation. Although I must say, I'm not the only one. Our company has every function is these days talking digital, right? Because it's almost like table stakes. You can't be in business, a leader. And we are like a leader in all the markets we are and there's no choice but to be fully digital, right? But being a CFO, absolutely, you know, you do look at the hard dollars, right? And initially when you're pushing any technology to any functional head or your colleague or the CEO or the board, they do want to see the dollars because a lot of softwares talk about the soft benefits. I think they got to pay for themselves. So I think it's like, yes, if I can get the hard dollars and then I can demonstrate softer benefits, whether it is the quality of work, less errors, better compliance, right? Or I think employee work-life balance, right? I mean, we are a growing company. We've been growing for the last four decades and there's a constant struggle to help colleagues maintain better work-life balance. So I think once the basic return is off the table, everyone's talking about the quality of work enabling. And I think now we are proudly talking, you know, that, hey, we've got a lot of people, we've hired them, but what we are using of them is their fingers, their eyes, ears, and that's about it. Can we now get them to use their brain? So it's like, hey, it's a freebie. You've got so many people, let's start using the gray matter and that's, I think, what this technology does. It takes away the wrong, and you can then tell them, hey, analyze the data, look at it, better business outcomes, and I think that's where the real value is. And so you look at that as, so we've heard a lot about time saved, hour saved, that's kind of the A key metric. And you look at that as hard dollars? How do you translate that to the income statement? So let's put it, you know, I was looking at applied materials presentation and they had 150,000 hours saved. I just did our math, I mean, so we've so far saved 342,000 hours per annum, removed out of the system, right? But I would say not all, I can say I took them to the bottom line. Probably 70% of that, because the rest is probably gone back to people doing more value added stuff. So how does it hit the income statement? Is it hit it as new revenue or cost savings? Cost savings. Or reduction in workforce? Or you don't hire as many as you needed to. So that's the key. Yes. That's the missing link. Yeah, absolutely. Is I was going to need to hire a thousand people, a hundred people, hire 10 or whatever it is. Okay. Now, sorry, does that, does that get into a debate? Like, cause I can see a lot of people, if we don't do this, we're going to be, you know, and then there's a CFO, you might say, let's defend that a little bit. See, cost avoidance is always debated. Yeah. And that's why I said, as long as you can prove that the hard dollars taken to the bottom line are visible and you can put your finger on them, then people become more comfortable saying, okay, as long as you know, I've got my payback, I've got something I can, you know, make sure that my cost line is not going up because it's very easy to, to, you know, kind of say, hey, look, all these soft benefits and now your cost has also gone up. So I think once the hard dollars that you can bank are out of the way, then you can talk about costs avoided and then you can talk about the softer benefits. Yeah. Which are there, there is no doubt because you try, and what we do is we tell people if they are, you know, say, okay, we'll shut it down. And then they say, hey, wait. Well, right, then you know. But so you have four years of data on this. So you can prove it. And by the way, soft dollars are where the real money is. I don't mean to denigrate that, but I get into a lot of discussions with CFOs. Like, okay, show me the hard dollars first and then the hard, the soft dollars are telephone numbers. Yes. Yeah. I think I look at it as an inverted pyramid. Yeah. Where you start with the cost saved, which is the smaller part of the pyramid. And then you get speed, right? Because speed is actually a big thing which is very difficult to measure, right? I mean, I'll give you an example. In one of our largest markets, right in the middle of COVID, they announced all products that are being imported, which is for us about 80,000 of them, need to have a whole bunch of compliance forms on the government portal, import certifications. And you got like a month to do all that work. So now you get an army of 20, 30 people, train them. We did nothing. We built the bots. And we were ready ahead of competition. And I think, and life continues. Now the supply chain officer will sign on the dotted line for you saying he would have had to hire 30 people and he, it's not easy to hire suddenly, but we were compliant and now that's cost avoided. But I would say a big business benefit because we were the first ones to have all our products compliant with the market requirements. That's a great example. What did you think about some of the IDC data that was, did you see that that was presented this morning? I did. Looking at, you know, the positive outlook as RPA being a jobs creator over time. Talk to me a little bit about how you've navigated that through the organization and even done upskilling of some of those folks so that they're not losing, but they're gaining. I think there is, you know, you have to take all these projections with a pinch of salt. You know, I mean, saying you will, the world will save $150 billion and all. I mean, if you add all the soft dollars, yes. But in reality, you know, I always joke about it. If you take all the technology initiatives in a company and you add all the NPVs that they have submitted, that would be larger than the market cap of the company. It's so true. All the projects add up to more value than the company's worth. So I think, you know, we don't get like carried away by these major projections, but I think some of it is true. I mean, you know, I kind of talk about the Luddites, right? I mean, when the first, you know, weaving machines came in Northern England near Manchester and these Luddites that they were called, they were going around breaking down these machines because they were supposed to take away jobs. Now, reality is a lot of people did lose jobs who could not make the transition, could not retrain themselves. It is inevitable, it will happen. But over time, I would say yes, there have been a lot more employment. So I think both go hand in hand. But yes, the more one can help retrain people, get them to, you know, say, hey, you don't need to spend the rest of your life copy pasting and just doing data entry, you can look at the data and make sense out of it. How much of that was a part of your strategic vision years ago? I think years ago, we knew it, but it was more, let's get these, you know, simple when you have hundreds of people in a back office, how do I get them to do more work or have slight, or meet my, you know, my productivity goals? I would say it starts with that. If you start deep down because I am, you know, I believe in technology, I knew it. It would happen that we would eventually go from, let's say, robotic process automation to intelligent process automation, right? Which is coming for us. We are able to see it. You try and sell that as the lead in, and people shut down. Because they've seen too many. Explain more about that. By intelligent process automation, what do you mean and? So, look, if I've got my robots and the tech, the RP infrastructure, which is processing a whole bunch of transactions, right? Now, if I'm able to add in some machine learning or AI or what have you on top of it, and then I can read the patterns, I can, for example, you know, we now have built on top of all the various security in our payment systems, we've got a bot, which then does a final check, which goes and checks the history of that particular vendor as to what is the typical payments being done to that. And then it flags if it's way out and it stops the payment, for example, right? So, or it goes and does a whole bunch of tests. So we're building constantly building tools. So that's kind of, you know, a bit more intelligent than just a simple copy paste or doing a transaction. And people are reticent because why? That's their job or because it's a black box. They don't know how that decision is made. I think a lot of these have been sold previously, similar technologies and things that would be, you know, the next best thing since sliced butter. And people have lost faith. So you got to show them the money and then take them along the journey. If you go too fast and try and give this whole, you know, people are smart enough and it turns them off. Makes sense. One of the failures of the tech industry is the broken promises. I can rattle many off. That's a big cultural shift. It is, it is. How did you help facilitate that? See, I mean, we took, you know, the bottoms up and top down approach, you know, the top down was I have my whole leadership team and as a joke, we locked them up in the boardroom and we got them to build bots a long ago. And we said, let each of you, you know, download your bank statement and send yourself, you know, if you say any transaction above 10,000, whatever, send a email to yourself. So as simple as that or download the electricity bill and send it to your wife, you know, something like that. And half of them were able to build a bot in that couple of hours. The other half looked at it and obviously there, you know, many of them are not as tech savvy, but it helped build the kind of, it's a ha moment three years ago that, wow, you know, I can build a bot. For some people, it was like, oh, they thought these metallic tin bots are going to walk into the room, which is kind of. I love it. The botathon. Who's responsible for governance? So we've got a, we've got a team across IT and finance. I mean, somehow I've kind of, you know, created this Kunk Works team. The center of excellence sits with me. But overall, it's a combination and they now run governance, you know, 24 seven. You know, I'm sorry, I got to get my crypto question in. I ask every CFO, when are you going to put crypto in the balance sheet? I know, I'm teasing. But what you see companies doing this, has it ever come up in conversation? Is it sort of tongue-in-cheek joke? Or what do you make of the crypto phrase? I think, personally, I'm a big believer, but not for a company. I think the benefit case of a company, we are not that, you know, we have enough other ways to, you know, I think it's a bit further out for a company to start taking balance sheet positions because that's then a speculation, right? So I'm a believer in the benefit of the blockchain technology. We actually did a blockchain experiment a couple of years ago, moving goods from China to Dubai and also making the payments through a blockchain. So we see huge benefits. We are working with our bankers on certain other initiatives. But I think on the balance sheet, it sounds like speculation. Better use of capital is elsewhere. So yeah, if it brings efficiency, if it brings transparency, which is what blockchains do, I think absolutely, it is here to stay. Last question and then the last 30 seconds or so, for your peers in any industry who are, we saw some of the stats yesterday, the amount of percentage of processes that are automated that aren't automated. What's your advice, recommendations to peers about pulling automation into their digital transformation strategy? I think digital transformation can be hugely aided and accelerated if you first put a RPA layer. Because that is the layer which goes between the humans and whatever technology is out there or whatever you keep buying. So I think because there will be in every area, new technologies coming up, it's better to put RPA first because you can then get more benefit from whatever other technologies you're bolting on. So I would say it's a predecessor to your broader digital transformation rather than just a part of it. Got it, a predecessor. Rajesh, thank you for joining Dave and me on the program today, talking about how you're transforming landmark. Good luck in your presentation this afternoon. I'm sure a lot of folks will get some great takeaways from your talk. Thank you so much, it's been great. Our pleasure. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin, live in Las Vegas, UI path forward four. We'll be right back after a break.