 theCUBE presents UiPath, Forward 5, brought to you by UiPath. Hi everybody, we're back live at the Venetian, formerly the Sands Convention Center, Dave Vellante with David Nicholson. UiPath's forward 5, this is the fourth forward conference that theCUBE has done, so we've seen the ascendancy of UiPath, the growth of customers. UiPath is one of the first companies to actually come back post COVID last year, 2021 at the Bellagio. It took a chance and it actually worked out great, had a couple of thousand people there, lots of customers. We're here with Lauren Joyce, who's the Global Automation Lead at Whirlpool. She's joined by Regendra Prasad, RP, who is the Global Automation Lead at Accenture. Good to see you again. Lauren, welcome to theCUBE, first timer. Yes, thank you. So, you're relatively new to automation, but you, as we were talking, you're a process whiz. Talk about the center of excellence that you're building out, what's the importance of that to Whirlpool? Absolutely. So, we were first looking at automation from our finance organization, and they were coming to us with, hey, here are 12 things you want to automate. And really what we are finding is that, not all of these things were suitable for automation, so we started on the COE journey of, well, how do we make sure that we're getting the most ROI for our business, starting with discovery, making sure that what we're automating makes sense. It's the right process versus just an upgrade or a retooling set. So for us, especially being a global company, making sure that we had that governance in place, that mindset, and what should be automated and when really made sense and helped us on our journey of pursuing. And I presume that's where Accenture comes in. I mean, RP, you got deep industry expertise, you got automation expertise. What role do you play in that prioritization exercise? So, the way we approach any automation implementation is similar to what we did here in Al Ghul. First step is, I call it as knowing where you are in the automation journey. Like what Samfri always says, if you don't know where you are on a map, a map won't help you. So, baselining the current automation maturity and the current journey where they are. And once you do that, you identify your north star and prioritization and the goals that are required, and then you build a plan. And exactly how we approach in establishing a center of excellence that drives the automation with rigor, knowing where you are and where you want to get to. What's the team look like in a setting? Who's on the bus, who's in the circle, if you will? How do you come, Bill, you've written about this. It's like a sports team, you put it together. You need your quarterback, you need his linemen, you need wide receivers. Who's on the center of excellence team? So the way you always build the center of excellence is making sure that your business partners and the senior leadership team is committed to the entire automation journey. That's the key ingredient for success. Then you build, one of the critical aspect is the talent. The quarterback, you said, the talent. In today's world, automation talent is just not about knowing RPA techniques or process optimization. But it is an end-to-end technology stack starting from cloud to data to analytics and entire platform capabilities of automation. That combined and coupled with change management and how do you drive an enterprise change management is very, very critical in terms of implementing automation. Lauren, I'm curious, did Accenture bring UiPath to Whirlpool? Or did you bring Accenture in and UiPath in together? How did that interaction? Yes. So we brought Accenture in and they really helped us along with that journey and they brought UiPath to us. Our European business was actually using Blue Prism and that's when we said, no, we want to standardize specifically on UiPath and make sure from a global standpoint we're using the same tooling and that really helped that as we were building our team we leaned on their expertise and then even we're retooling people within our corporation of, hey, we took our SAP lead, our GCP lead to be our technical architect and people that could help speak the language and translate from process and explain that it doesn't have to be a large project and explain what automation is to help drive return on investment for sure. Now you're early in, but have you seen results so far? Can you talk about that? Quantify it in any way? Absolutely. So we started our journey December of 2020. We've automated about 60 or so bots but really everything that we've done is based on hours saved. So we're at about 60,000 hours automated and with some of our biggest like our big box stores and our KitchenAid small appliances we've even had hard dollar savings we had a bot that went live about in 60 days we had a $3 million return and took out 3,000 hours of human interaction that was great for us. So the world's kind of a mess right now. You got supply chain issues, you got inflation, you got a recession, you got the United States anyway you got the Fed trying to figure out oh they're slingshotting, you know some people are really hurting stock market is starting to show that there's a lot of confusion out there the world has changed quite a bit obviously in the last few years how do you guys see it? What role has, I wonder if both of you could answer what role has automation played in helping like for instance role pool with maybe supply chain problems or maybe better forecasting and what are you seeing across organizations but Lauren if you could start. Absolutely so for us being able to show improvement in a six to eight week development cycle and instead of saying here's a heavy dollar investment or a new tooling that you got to get people resources up to speed on we can take where we are today automate, save hours where we're getting our employee engagement scores I'm overworked, I have too much on my plate how can you help me and automation is there to support and that's really helped our business one take unnecessary work off their plate and show very quick value add to the business without having to have huge dollar investments while we're trying to save money What are you seeing in terms of some of the problems that people I see a sign out here inflation at five to seven percent go after productivity and make it in twenty percent gains I mean what are you seeing in the field? More than ever automation is more relevant now given the current economy environment that we are operating because automation always free sub optimizes the capacity that every enterprise has optimizing capacity is very important so that you can take your talented employees and the talented resources to do more strategic transformation program which helps to sustain and stay and scale in your business so I see that automation playing a significant role to impact business impediments What are some of the common misconceptions I mean we talk a lot about people's fear of automation you know I don't think that's necessarily a misconception I think a lot of times people are fearful of automation you know maybe they shouldn't be we had Densu on today Densu's like you know this giant global branding firm and they got a lot of young kids they're like no bring it on I don't want to do all this Monday stuff but you know a lot of folks are concerned but so that maybe is one misconception other others Lauren that you found that you can share I think we were lucky that we didn't necessarily have that fear of being replaced by automation I think our change management plan really helped drive that we included some fun things of any time a bot went live you got almost like a birth certificate of here's the process we saved for you here's how it's grown over 6 months 12 months 18 months but I'm not sure you've had any other major gaps like that or pitfalls or anything so my philosophy is automation is human plus machine combination you can't run just you know people can't think that you know if my task get automated I lose the I lose my jobs that's not how it works because you do need human expertise competency skills to kind of argument what you do with automation and most important thing when you do this change is that most of the enterprises do not believe do not understand that you have to get your process right you don't want to you know have an inefficient process and put automation on the top of it then you just made your inefficiency run more faster so you need to kind of make sure that you address inefficiency optimize your process then infuse automation then have human plus machine capability to strengthen your automation is it really that easy sounds easy right sounds easy so from an from an extension perspective if you're looking at the market as a whole or looking at industry verticals what's the difference between an organization that is leveraging automation and an organization that is not leveraging working leveraging automation a range of percentage of efficiency that you can put on that what does it mean for their bottom line you must have data on this today today's world in the technology world every organization understands the importance of automation that's given that's a table state now where an organization is in the journey differs some of the enterprises maybe at the beginning of the maturity spectrum in my book I talk about automation maturity framework where in there are the initial stages of automation some of them are quote and quote intelligent automation at the end of the spectrum where they are using data cloud and AI to drive the automation journey but in every enterprise the key success of automation depends upon whether you do automation and enterprise wide not in a silo in the organization but if you do enterprise wide apply across you get a lot more benefits a lot more efficiency to drive does automation being more strategic or key does it does it in a way make investments in automation more scrutinized or more circumspect I would use the term discretionary Bobby Patrick today say this is not discretionary it's strategic to me if it's strategic it might be a mandate but it might be something like you kick down the road what are you seeing there in the field just in terms of overall demand and sentiment automation today as I said is a table stake when it becomes an integrated DNA of enterprise it is always you know whether you want to call one pillar of strategy key DNA of your strategic roadmap your investments have to be directly proportional to what you want to accomplish as your business KPI is to drive and deliver your business otherwise if you do it as like a one-off thing you know you won't get the benefit Lauren from your standpoint where do you want to take the automation initiative inside a whirlpool how are you thinking about scaling it what have you learned that you can apply to driving scale so we put some strict governance in place we weren't just automating everything under the sun Wild West I can't support that right so we made sure that everything had at least less than a one-year investment return on investment and 500 hours worth of automation for us to even consider it as part of our COE so because of that we do have some automations that would make sense but that's why we're looking at a citizen development program or low code no code what other types of options are there to make sure that it does become a part of our culture and DNA that you can automate those even small parts of your workflow to make your day better when you're looking at those workflows are you literally looking over someone's shoulder with a stopwatch and measuring how time and motion studies is it time and motion studies is that sort of the entry level data that you use or is it more automated than that I would say it's a little more automated than that but we do sit down and we ask our business process show me what and then from that we can take some task mining and look at how long did it take you to do this how often are you doing it and then based on how long the automation would take see how many hours are saved and how many people are doing that same task on a monthly daily weekly basis alright guys thanks so much for coming to the CUBE sharing your story and whirlpool I always love to have Accenture on you guys got such a massive observation space global depth of industry so thank you very much both thank you you're very welcome alright keep it right there Dave Nicholson and Dave Vellante will be back right to the short break you're watching the CUBE's coverage of UiPath 4 and 5 live from Las Vegas