 The Cube presents UiPath Forward 5, brought to you by UiPath. Hi everybody, we're back at UiPath Forward 5. This is Dave Vellante with Dave Nicholson. Derek Muir series, automation product line lead for Merck. Thank you by the way for all you guys do. Thank you Dave for having us. In the vaccine area, saving our butts. And Bill Engel is back on the Cube. He's the director at CGI guys. Good to see you again. Good to see you. Thank you. Wow, it's been quite a few years for you guys. Take us through Derek, what's happening in sort of your world that's informing your automation strategy? Well, Dave, I mean, as you know, we just came out of the pandemic. We actually have quite a few products like a Gavrio antiviral pill. Obviously we worked, you know, continue to drive our products through a difficult time. But you know, it was during these last few years that we've accelerated our journey in automation. We're about four years plus in our journey. You know, so just like the theme of this conference, we're trying to move towards, you know, bigger automations, transformational change, continue to drive digital transformation in our company. Now Bill, you've been on before, but CGI, tell people about the firm. It's not computer graphics imaging. Sure, no, it's definitely not. So CGI, we're a global consultancy, about 90,000 folks across the world. We're both a product company and a services company, so we have a lot of different, you know, software products that we deliver to our clients, such as CGI Advantage, which is a state local government ERP platform. And so outside of that, my team does automation, and so we wrap automation around our IP and deliver it to our clients. So you guys are automation pros, implementation partners, so let's go back, Derek, you said four years, I think, right? You're in, so take us through, what was the catalyst? How did you get started? Obviously it was pre-pandemic, so it's interesting, a lot of companies pre-pandemic gave lip service to digital transformation. Sounds like you guys already started your journey, but I'll come back to that. But take us back to the catalyst four years ago. Why automation? We'll get into why UI path. Right, so I would say it started pretty niche in our company, started first in our finance area. Of course, you know, we were looking at technology, evaluating different companies, Luprism, UI path, ultimately we chose UI path, did it on-prem, just start to use automation in sort of our invoice processing, sort of our financial processes, right? And then from there, after, it was really when the pandemic hit, that's when sort of we all went to remote work, that's when the team, the COE, continued to scale up, especially during pandemic, we were trying to automate more and more processes, given the fact that more and more of our workers are remote, they'll be processes, how do you do events? Part of our livelihood is meeting with, engaging with customers, customers in this cases are doctors and physicians, right? How do you engage with them digitally? How do you, a lot of the face-to-face contact now have to kind of shift to more digital way? And so automation was a way to kind of help accelerate that, help facilitate that. I think you mentioned COE as in center of excellence. So describe your approach to implementing automation. It's that sounds like, when you say center, it sounds like something is centralized, as opposed to a bunch of what we've been hearing a lot about citizen developers. What does that interaction look like? We do have both, I would say in the beginning that it was more decentralized, but over time, we over the few years, as we built more and more bots, we're now at maybe somewhere between 400 to 500 bots, we now have sort of internal to the company, functional verticals, right? So there's an animal health, we have an animal health function, so there's a team building, engaging with the animal health business to build animal health bots. There's human health, which is what I work on, as well as HR, finance, manufacturing, research. And so internally, there's engagement leads, one of the engagement leads that interact with the business, then when there's an engineering squads that help build and design, develop and support and maintain those, as well as sort of a DevOps team that supports the platform and maintains all the bot infrastructure. So you started in finance, it's a common story, I'm sure you hear this a lot Bill. How did you decide what to target? Was it process-driven decision? Was it data-oriented, some kind of combination? How did you decide? Do you remember or can you take us back there? Yeah, so for CGI, how we started to engage with Merck is we do a lot of other business with Merck. We work in other different business lines and we understand the business process. So we knew where there was potential for automation. So we brought those ideas to Merck and really kind of landed there and helped them realize the value from automation from that standpoint. And then from there, the journey just continued to expand. Looking for those use cases that fit the mold for RPA to start and now the evolution is to go to broader hyper-automation. And was it CFO led into the finance department and then sort of more bottoms up? So I think it started in finance but we actually really started out in the business line. So out in regulatory, clinical, that's where we have the life science expertise that are embedded and so I partnered with them to come up with, hey, here's a real solution we could do to help streamline, say, submission archiving. So when submissions come back from the FDA they need to be archived into their system of record. So those are the types of use cases that we helped automate. Okay, you're saying a human had to sort of physically archive that and you were able to sort of replicate that. Okay, and you started with software robots, obviously RPA and now you're expanding into, we're hearing from UiPath this platform message. How does that coincide, Derek, with what you guys are doing? Are you sort of adding platform? What aspects of the platform are you adding? Yeah, no, I mean, we are on-premise, right? So we have the platform but some of the cool things we just had another colleague of mine presented earlier today. Some of the cool things were doing ephemeral infrastructure. So infrastructure as code, which essentially means instead of having all these dedicated bot machines, because these bots only, in some cases, run 10 minutes and they're done. So we're sort of doing on demand, start up a server, run the bot, when it's finished, kill the server. So we only pay for the servers that we use, which allows us to save a whole lot of money. Serverless bots. So you're doing that on-prem? So that's cloud? We're doing it on-prem, but our bot machines actually run the, let's say SAP process, right? We spin that machine up, it's on the cloud, it runs, it finishes, let's say it's processed in one hour and then when it's done, we kill that machine. So we only play for that one hour usage of that bot machine. Okay, so you mentioned SAP, you remember earlier you mentioned Blue Prism, when you probably looked at other competitors too, you pulled the Gartner Magic Quadrant, blah, blah, blah, with the way people evaluate technology. But SAP's got a product. Why UiPath? I mean, is it that a company like SAP too narrow for their only SAP, you wanted to apply it other ways? Maybe they weren't even in the business that back then, four years ago, they probably weren't, but I'm curious as to how the decision was made for UiPath. Well, I think you hit it right on the nail. SAP sort of came on a little later and they're specific to sort of their function, right? So UiPath for us is the most flexible tool, can interact by UI to our sales and marketing systems, to Workday, to ServiceNow, it cuts across every function that we have in the company, as well as you're the most mature, I mean, you're the market leader, right? So, definitely you continue to build upon those capabilities, and we are exploring the new capabilities, especially being announced today. And what do you see, Bill, in the marketplace? Are you kind of automation tool agnostic? Are you more sort of, all in on- I would say we are agnostic as a company, but obviously as part of an automation practice lead, I want to deliver solutions to my clients that are going to benefit them as a whole. So looking at UiPath, this platform is, it covers the end-end spectrum of automation, so I can go really into any use case and be able to provide a solution that delivers value. And so that's where I see the value in UiPath, and that's why CGI is a customer as well. We automate our internal processes. We actually have, we just launched, you probably saw it in the market last week, an expanded partnership with UiPath. We launched CGI Excel 360. That's our fully managed service around automation. We host our clients' whole UiPath infrastructure and bots. It's completely hands off to them, and they just get the value out of automation. Nice, love it. Derek, you mentioned this ephemeral infrastructure. Sounds like it's also ethereal, possibly. You're saying you have processes that are running on premises, but then you reach out to have an automation process that's running, that's happening off-prem, and you're sort of on the cloud. So we have an in-house orchestrator, so we're not using your sort of on-the-cloud orchestrator. So we brought it in-house for security reasons. But we use, so inside the VPN, we have these cloud machines that run these automations. So that's the ephemeral side of the infrastructure. But is there a financial angle to that in terms of when you're spinning these things up, is it a pay-by-the-drink or a buy-by-the-CPU hour? Yeah, so if you can imagine, like I mentioned, we're somewhere between four to 500 bots, and every bot has a time slot to run and take a certain amount of time. And so that's hundreds and hundreds of bot machines that we, in the old days, have to buy and procure and staff and support and maintain. So in this new model, and we're just beginning to kind of move from pilot into implementation, we're moving all the bots to this ephemeral infrastructure. So these machines, these bot machines are spun up, they run their automation, and then they spin down. But just to be clear, they're being spun up on physical infrastructure that is within your purview. They're spun up on AWS, and then they spin down. Okay, got it, got it, interesting. Four to 500 bots, Daniel, one point, you play out this vision of a bot. Chicken in every pod, I call it a bot for every employee. Is that where you're headed, or is that kind of in this new ephemeral world? Not necessary, it's like maybe every employee has access to an ephemeral bot. How are you thinking about that? That's a good question. So obviously the four to 500 is a mix of unattended bots versus attended bots that we also have a citizen developer sort of a group team. We support that as well from the COE. So we see the future as a mix. There's a spectrum of we are the professional development team. There's also we support and nurture the personal automation, and we provide the resources to help them build smaller scale automations that help reduce the mundaneness and the hours of their own tasks. But for us, we want to focus more and more on building bigger and bigger transformation automations that really drive process efficiencies and savings. And what's the business impact been? You mentioned savings or maybe there's other sort of productivity, how do you measure the benefit, the ROI, and do you want to find that? I don't think we have all the right answers, but simple metrics like number of hours saved or other sort of excitement, sort of like an NPS internal NPS between the different groups that we engage. Well, we definitely see automation demand coming from our functional teams going up, driving up. So it's continued to be a hot area. And hopefully we can, like what the key message and theme of this conference, essentially we want to take and build upon the good work that we've done in terms of RPA. We want to drive it more towards digital transformation. So Bill, what are you seeing across your customer base in terms of ROI? I'm not looking for percentages. I'm sure they're off the charts. But in terms of, you can optimize for fast payback, maybe lower the denominator, or you can optimize for net benefit over time. What are customers after? They want fast payback and little quick hits, or are they looking for sort of a bigger enterprise-wide impact? Yeah, I think it's the latter. It's that larger impact, right? Obviously they want an ROI, and just depending upon the use case, that's going to vary in terms of the benefits delivered. And a lot of our clients, depending on the industry, so in life sciences, it may be around compliance, like GXB compliance is huge. And so that may not be much of a time saver, but it ensures that they're running their processes and they're being compliant with federal standards. So that's one aspect to it. But to a bank, they're looking to reduce their overall costs and so on. But yeah, I think the other part of it is impacting broader business processes. So taking that top-down approach versus bottom-up, doing the ones you choose, the tasks, is not as impactful as looking at broader across an entire business process and seeing how we can impact it. Now, Derek, when you guys support a citizen developer, how does that work? So, hey, I got this task I want to automate, I'm going to write a software robot, I'm going to go do an automation. Do I just do it and then throw it into the fence? So you guys send me a video on how to do it, hold my hand, how's that work? Yeah, I mean, good question. So we obviously direct them to the UIPath Academy, get some training. We also have some internal training materials to how to build a bot sort of internal inside Merck. We go through, we have write-ups and SOPs on using the right framework for automations, using the right documentation, PDD kind of materials. And then ultimately, how do we deploy a bot inside the Merck ecosystem? But maybe I'll just add, I think you asked the point about ROI before. I'll also say, because we're a pharmaceutical company, I think one of the other key metrics is actually time saved, right? So if we have a bot that helps us get through the clinical process or even the getting a label approved faster, even if it's eight days saved, that's eight days of a product that can get out to the market faster to our patients and healthcare professionals. And that's immeasurable benefit. Yeah, I bet. You can compress that elapsed time of getting approval and so forth. All right guys, we've got to go. Thanks so much. Congratulations on all the success and appreciate you sharing your story. Thank you so much. Appreciate it. All right, thank you for watching. This is Dave Vellante for Dave Nicholson, The Cube's coverage, two day coverage. We're here in day one, UI path forward five. We'll be right back right after this short break. Awesome. Great.