 the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas. It's theCUBE, covering UiPath. Forward 4, brought to you by UiPath. Welcome back to Las Vegas, Lisa Martin with Dave Vellante. At UiPath Forward 4, we have had it all today, lots of great guests. We've had weather, we've had rain, we are outside, and lots of great conversations going on. Next up, we're going to be talking about automation at Healthcare Giant, Merck. Joining us from Merck is Dan Boyd, automation leader. And from CGI, partner of UiPaths, Bill Engels, senior automation architect. Guys, welcome to the program. Thank you for having us. Thank you so much. Thanks for having us. So Dan, let's go ahead and start with you. Let's talk about Merck and the implementation and the adoption of automation at such a history company. Yeah, thank you. Our journey started about two years ago and started with a small team and has evolved ever since. It's just a handful folks. We've evolved from the size of our team, matured operationally, and expanded our capabilities along that journey to where we are today, and it continues to evolve as technology changes. And it's been exciting to see the adoption at Merck over, you know, across the enterprise. It's been an educational process, but it's been exciting just to see that understanding of the power that automation can deliver to them and they see the value, and making it real to them has been key. Then once it's real, then they get excited and the word spreads, and they appreciate the value right before their eyes. And Bill, are you industry specialized or more automation specialized? Yeah, so I'm more automation specialized. But CGI, we partner with our industry experts to identify use cases for automation and I help kind of solution the best approach to automation. So I actually started with Merck a little bit earlier before it was really formalized and just CGI as a large partner of Merck and embedded within various areas of business. And I end up educating CGI on automation and here's what to look for in a great use case for automation. And really, we started to drum up some internal excitement and then came up with some actual real use cases within Merck, proved it out early and then we began to partner with Dan and his team. Can you share a little bit about some of those use cases? Yes, so the ones that we've worked on are really specific within various areas within the division. So Dan, you want to talk about some of the ones that you're working on? Yeah, I'll share one use case within a specific market of Merck and it's a commercial area where they were embarking on a revision in their customer engagement approach in this market and where they had a problem. They needed to get the invoices out of SAP for customers. So that was on the one side of the process. On the other was a customer portal where the customers needed access in near real time to those invoices. So when they came to us, they had the invoices kind of set up to be emailed out of SAP. So they had that process set up. The problem was how do they get them over here into this customer portal? So the backup plan was to have temporary workers come on and do that manually handle the open emails with the invoices attachments and get them loaded. So we came in, they called us in in the 11th hour and we were able to, fortunately the process was straightforward where invoices were coming through an email attachment and that was set up. So basically we automated the reading of the emails, the processing of the PDF attachments and saved them into a shared drive where there was another process to load them into SAP. So the volume was really large on a daily basis. Initially it was estimated at approximately 2,500 emails per day with these invoices. The estimated would take about 125 hours of people time to do that manually. So that's what we automated and in the end it was the average is, it's over 3,000 a day. So the solution really came in and we were able to deliver that and it's been really, they were static with what they could do and then they saw the art of the possible with this automation. So it's a good success story and it's exciting to see and they were thrilled. And it's not an uncommon story, right? Where you're automating mundane tasks that was pushing a lot of paper, a lot of copy and pasting. Do you, so how far away and maybe where they're already you think about Merck. It's a unique industry, got highly skilled scientists doing serious R&D, high risk trials, you got partners, you do some organic, some inorganic, you've got the manufacturing components, a lot of different parts to the business. And when you think about saving time, as you think about some of the scientists that are working on various pipeline products, highly paid, if you can save more of their time, wow. That even drops more to the bottom line. Are we at that point yet, we heard the stats this morning was 2% or some single digit percentage of our processes are automated. How far away are we from attacking those types of automations? Are we there today? We do automations for all the functions across Merck. In some places adoption is farther long than others in their journey, but yeah, from the shop floor and the manufacturing sites, we found opportunities to introduce automation there and even in the labs in various capacities. The use cases continue to grow and the adoption, we see that growing as well. Do you find that the highly skilled automations, targeted at highly skilled folks are harder to sort of get your hands around, but they give you bigger ROI, or is it not the case? Is it all sort of turn and burn on the ROI? For my perspective, I think it's use case by use case. If it's a complex use case, it requires more advanced capabilities, machine learning models, leveraging AI center within UI path. They can provide fairly sizable ROI, but I think is for those highly skilled workers, I'll give one example is out in the labs, we helped automate some things that just made their life easier, right? Test running overnight, if something failed with the test that was happening, then they wouldn't know about it and they lose critical data for these early tests that they're doing in the preclinical cycle. So we actually put in UI path robots to monitor and send alerts and provide recovery to make their lives a lot easier. So they don't have to worry about things failing in the middle of the night, you have a UI path robot supporting them in that aspect. What's an automation architecture look like? Where do we start architecting automation? Well, I think the journey, so where do you start with an automation, right? It's really understanding the use case. It comes down to what is the end and end process and then where can we automate within that process and what is the right set of automation capabilities? So RPA is great for where we need to interact with user interfaces, but if we can interact with APIs, we would do that preferably over UIs just to keep it more of a seamless integration. But I think it's about understanding the process, laying out the right solution. If there's an opportunity to improve the process prior to automating it, if there is that ability, then we'll look to do that and we've done that. We may change that process up a little bit just to make automation more efficient, more effective. And then just we build in and we deploy it and they start to realize the value. How hard is it to improve on the process versus just automating what's known? In other words, you've got dependencies and there are complexities there. What's your experience in terms of how you approached it? From my experience and what we found to be a best practice and Bill touched on it, but every use case is of course different and the corresponding process very varied, but really what's key I think is to right up front understand the end to end process. And in a lot of cases, my team, it's new to us, but the process owners, they live it every day. So understanding, partnering with them, to really understand the end to end solution in the form of like a process map. So you can kind of echo back your understanding of their process and get that nod of the head from them and say, yes, you understand that this is an accurate representation, then we can with the spirit of trying to get it right the first time. But it really I think is incumbent upon us to really get that in-depth understanding up front and in a lot of cases, if there's time sensitivity and then it's just more efficient and saves a lot of rework, so. So working backwards, sorry, working backwards from the known existing process and then implementing an automation is probably the best starting point as opposed to trying to work backwards from some kind of outcome that you envision. But I would think there's attractiveness in the ladder so that you're not just repeating a process that may be outdated. Yeah, so it comes down to a couple of things. So when you're initially looking at a process, should we automate this or not? And how complex is it? You need to understand what is the potential benefit? So how much time am I able to have those workers reinvest into other areas of work? Or what are some other benefits? There may be some compliance fines that we're experiencing through automation. We're able to make sure we're meeting SLAs and so on. So there's a lot to defining the benefits of the automation, putting a value to that. And then the process of going through the actual process to understand the complexity, right? And then you can come up with, here's what it's going to take to build this thing. Here's the potential value. And then we have ways where we track, how's that ROI trending once it's in production. So hopefully that gives us more insight. Dan, I got a question for you. One of the conversations that Dave and I had earlier on the program was about automation as a boardroom topic. I'd love to get your perspectives. Merck is a history organization. Been around for a long time. Cultural change is incredibly challenging. But I'd love to get your perspective on where is automation at Merck's board? Is that something that is really key to transformation? I'd say automation falls under our strategic initiative just around digital transformation, right? So it's a sub pillar of that. So that is a strategic imperative and very important and just being more efficient and leveraging technology effectively just to make Merck more efficient and optimized and RPA and automation plays a part in that. I mean, that's what I suspected, Lisa, this morning when we have in that conversation. It seems to me that you wouldn't necessarily create an automation stovepipe at the board meeting. You might want to report on how these automations have affected whether it's the income statement or the health of the company, et cetera. But it seems to me to be a fundamental part of the digital transformation, which involves a lot of different things, data and cloud and strategy and et cetera. So is that pretty common, Bill? Yeah, yes, it is. I mean, when an organization is looking to automate, there's various angles are coming out. They're coming from the top-down approach where management's saying, hey, we need to automate. Let's look across all the divisions and figure out where we should go. But then it's also bottom-up where folks out and out within the various lines of business they know the problems, they know the business processes. So there's a couple different angles where you're able to discover new opportunities to automate. But those smaller ones open the door to understanding much larger processes where we can look, automate more of the upstream or downstream in that process, other variations of the process. Was Merckmore bottom-up or top-down or middle-out? I would say it started bottoms-up, shortly after it came from the top-down. So as Bill touched on, I think it's really key that we do have from this coming from the top, from our leadership is endorsing it and advocating it, but also we're on the ground floor and educating. So the people with the hands-on doing the process, they understand it and the word is spreading. They see we've made it real for them. Now it's real for them and they can appreciate the value and they're happy to be able to be freed up from the TDS task and do more interesting work. So when it started in the department, there was a champion with a budget who said, hey, I'm going to try this and then look what I got. You definitely need the champion. So part of that is just creating champions out in the different business lines to really own the pipeline and understand the opportunities that are out there and say, yeah, this is a good opportunity. This one, let's look at it later. So you definitely have to have those folks out there that understand the technology, but also understand the business. How has that changed in the last 18 months with healthcare undergoing such, I mean, my goodness, the things that have happened in the healthcare organization, how has that accelerated the need for things like automation? Right. Question for both of you and for Merck as well. Yeah, good. You want to go first? Sure, yeah. So Merck initiated like most companies, a digital transformation three plus years ago and this just became an extension of that and it's a must, right? Just to stay up with the digital transformation and everything that's happening in this world and obviously COVID accelerated, helped accelerate it in certain areas and made it real for a lot of people and appreciate the value and the need for it. Yeah, within CGI, just across all of our clients, it's automation is really towards the top of the list of strategic priorities. So we've seen this massive acceleration of needing to automate more and more and more, which is great. What's it like inside of Merck these days? You guys must be really excited with all the, I mean, I know it's early days and nothing's been fully blessed yet, but some of the big farm has got a lot of headlines and obviously we've been taking jabs, et cetera, but now here's Merck in the headlines. It's got to be an exciting time for you guys. Yeah, it's great to be a part of a company whose mission is to save and improve lives. And with today, it's really becoming real and more relevant of that mission and vision. So it's exciting. Are there any gotchas when you go into this? I'm sure there are into this automation journey. What kinds of things would you advise people? Hey, make sure that you deal with these, whether it's an out of scope consideration or things that you definitely don't want to do or do want to do. Yeah, it just comes down to the, choosing the right use case to start with. Making sure that if you're just starting out in your automation journey, start with those use cases that you can quickly prove value for and then tackle the more complex ones. That's great advice, great for folks to know where to start, especially when there's still such a tumultuous environment that we're living in. Dan and Bill, thank you for joining Dave and me today talking about automation, the innovation that you're doing at Merck, partnering with CGI. Really appreciate your time. Thank you so much. Thank you for having us. For Dave Vellante, I'm Lisa Martin coming to you from Windy Chili-ish, Las Vegas. We are at UI Path Forward 4. Stick around, Dave and I will be right back with our next guest.