 Live from Miami Beach, Florida, it's theCUBE, covering UiPath Forward Americas, brought to you by UiPath. Welcome back to the former home of LeBron James. I'm Dave Vellante, this is Stu Miniman. We're here at South Beach at the Hotel Fontainebleau. This is UiPath Forward Americas, and this is theCUBE, the leader in live tech coverage. Leo De Silva is here. He's the process excellent leader for best day travel and Arnold Sheeman, who's the vice president of Latin America and Spain. You get to go to all the fun places for a symphony. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you. Thank you guys for an invitation. You're very welcome. Leo, let's start with you. Best day travel, travel site, specializing in Mexico and other parts of the region. Tell us about the company. Well, we have a leadership in Mexico, all right? We are, the last year we have like 5.4 million travelers, okay? And there's a lot of people, okay? We've been in a business for 35 years, 34 years actually, okay? So we're pretty solid, okay? And well, 75% of the all the transactions, we have online, okay? And 25% we have offline. And that's what we're doing, you know, like all the transformation that we're doing is under this 25%, all right? Just to get the digital transformation and everything. Yeah, so 35 years. So you started before the internet, right? So this should be 100% offline. You obviously successfully made that transition. That's correct, that's correct. Okay, and Arnold, symphony is the solution provider, right? The implementation partner in this case, right? Tell us about symphony in your role. Well, symphony is probably the, it's a boutique that is totally concentrated on RPA management and RPA design and RPA process robotization. We were invited by a best day travel group to look at the process, to look at the project. And we embarked in a very interesting transformation for them so that they could move into the RPA arena with a clear roadmap. So you guys are both process experts, right? I mean, you've got process in your title. Yes. Talk more about your role, if you would. Yeah, well, I'm a green belt, okay? I'm a lead six sigma. And, well, we use this methodology actually. And we are, well, like two years ago, we implemented like a BPM department, you know, inside the company just to lead this transformation, okay? So that's what we're seeking right now to lead this transformation. And it's a very good challenge, you know? It's not easy, but yeah, we're trying to do our best. With your six sigma background, I think it would really tie right into what RPA is because you can really understand what has variance and what is pretty standardized. And that would seem, you know, is that that direct correlation with things that you can have, the robot and the automation, based on really the variance piece? Yes, totally. You know, well, when you start, when you start all the implementation, but right before we start to like to do a benchmark and you're able to see which technology we wanted to use. And, well, we found the UI path, all right, in which we found Symphony. And, but it's not exactly, I think the technology is the last thing, right? So the technology is enabling, right? To do all the things that happen. If you don't have like a process management, you know, if you don't have that, it's kind of difficult to reach the target, okay? So yeah, it's pretty much, I think it's just, when you, I think the most challenging is, let people know what they're doing wrong, you know, what they're doing like, you know, repeating tasks, right? So when you do like the process walkthrough, people just get amazed, you know, like, what? Are you serious? We're doing that? Yeah, but- You start. We're starting in February. This year? Yeah. 22. Okay, so take us back to February or January, whatever, December, when you were, maybe even before that, thinking about the business case, how did it come about? And then how'd you guys meet? Take us through the sort of initiative. Yeah, well, right before, it was six months before, I think it was on July of last year, we started the conversation, right? And when I found that we did like six months of benchmarking and we reached out like new iPad, and we started to try to get something different, you know, to do something different in the price. And we have this need, okay? Like from inside, you know, from back office to transform it because it's, you know, operation, sometimes it costs a lot, right? So the first step that we did was like a future of work accelerator, okay? Which is, it's a scan, it's a total scan of the area, and to see how big are the opportunities, okay? To transform it, things, right? So, yeah, it was the first step, and after we had the pilot, you know, we have three or four projects online. And you were involved from the beginning? Yes, it was last July? Yeah, one thing which was really very interesting about the project is that the client was the CEO and the CFO was totally the C-suite involvement. So, and since we believe that RPA is about the business, is about the process, it was ideal. So we had really, I believe it was really not work, was really a good time that we spent together integrating very closely with the team from Best Day Travel Group to the point that you couldn't tell who was from Best Day and who was from Symphony. And then we were able to present to the C-suite the results of the roadmap to move forward with a very clear business case per process that was going to be robotized. Simultaneously, Best Day wanted a proof inside, say, let's develop a robotized version of one of the processes, and we did one which had been quite successful. We were just talking that the amount of work that that robot is handling today live is such that if the robot doesn't operate, he wouldn't know what to do because there is so much work to do behind, in the past, and he doesn't know what he did, but today it is almost impossible to recreate that. Yeah, that's correct. Singularity is here. Yeah, one of the things, maybe you can help me understand because I'm a little bit new to this technology. How do you figure out, how do you size this? How do you know how many things a robot can do? We heard one of the customers has a thousand robots. How does this scale and how does this build out inside of a customer? One of the things that we do is that we look at the company, we identify those processes with heavy, I'd say, headcount, with lots of repetitive tasks that can be partially or totally robotized, and then we present it as a roadmap because the first question they have is, how do we start? I mean, this is the company, 3,000 people, 4 million passengers, where do we start? How we get good advantage of the robots, and that's how we did it, and then it's going on the project. We just did the first part, we continue now with the second part, which is going to be even more interesting. Yeah, what the business case looked like? I mean, was it a saving money, presumably some of this was cost reduction right off the bat. Yes, yes. Let's talk about the business case. What's that framework look like? Actually, we have a pilot that we just did, we launched the wedding, the business case was to reduce cost. The operational cost is very high. So now we have just to have an idea, the situation before, we have six person working, like the eight hour shift, and doing our issue in tickets, and right now we have just one robot, and we built a capability of 126% on this, just with one robot, right? It's amazing, it's amazing. And 24-7, right now it's working pretty fine. Specifically, where do the cost savings come from? Well, the cost savings is not exactly the FTEs, but it's a customer's experience, okay? And also the capability that you can build to get more sales, okay? And well, there's another project that went before that we had the first one, we have to reduce the cost of the operation for 65 people, right? And for the transactions, it costs a lot of money for us. So that's how we're trying to understand that, and we try to eliminate this cost, or reduce as much as we can. It's a part of that, you redeploy people, you put them on other tasks, is that what we're doing? Yes, yes, we free them up, and you put another, add value task, right? So the CFO is one of the stakeholders here. It was. So many CFOs might say, okay, well, we're not going to cut headcount, so where do I get my savings? So the answer if I'm hearing it is, well, we're going to increase revenue because these people are going to be on other tasks. That's it, yes. And do you have visibility in line of sight as to how fast that can happen, whether is it already starting to happen? Yeah, already started to happen, already started to happen, like in, you know, this project was, like we have the Roy back in 15 days. I was going to ask you, what the break even was? Yeah, yeah. It was inside of a month? You know, it's already paid, you know, 15 days already paid, right? So, yeah, yeah, the CFO is broke. Now relatively small, first project was relatively small, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Proved it out, now you're going to throw a gasoline on the fire. That's it. That's it. That's great. Okay, so what's next for you guys? Well, where do you want to go? We're going to go to the customer service, you know, like, and the traceability. There's a traceability project that we have to do, all right, just to have the client in front of everything, you know, so that's our strategy right now. And we're going to do, well, Symphony is going to help us out with the RPA and with implementation and the process, because it's going to be a new process. It doesn't exist, all right? So it's going to be a new, brand new one. So we have to create from scratch. Yeah, Arnold, I wonder if you can go a little broader for us on this. Sounds like you've got a perfect partner inside the company with, you know, process in his title. You had the C-suite engaged. Is that a typical deployment? What are you finding? It is not typical, but that is something that we look for all the time. Because if the client is not engaged, we can do nothing. If the C-suite is not engaged, there is very little process people can do. And by being engaged, the C-suite, we are driving the cost reductions. But there is another point besides cost, consistency. And also we are eliminating silos that had existed for a long time. Because the companies started with one organization, then another one, another one, and all of them touched the customer. What the robot would be doing to them, hopefully before the end of the year, early next year, to be able to see the transverse of the customer. One and a half million passengers are arriving to Cancun and they are their passengers. But you don't know how many people will come back. So you better know that this guy came here. They like to go scuba diving. Next time he's around, we can offer him a scuba diving. We can pick him up at the airport. We can offer other services. And then the company is structured to be exponentially so that you can grow from 4 million to 8 million passengers without adding headcount. Adding, that is the future of best day travel group. And that's why we have engaged the management. Okay, so you're looking at the moonshot, double the number of passengers served with the same headcount. That's a huge productivity boost. So I'm hearing 15 day break-even. Some of that was hard cost reduction. There's revenue increase, it's proven. Now you're going to invest more consistency, better customer service, cross-selling. Hey, they like to scuba dive. Maybe we can make an offer here. And better data allows you to do that. That's kind of summarizes the business case. And we're talking, I mean, I don't want to squeeze the NPV out of it, but we're talking millions, hundreds of thousands, hundreds of millions, millions, right? Yeah, yeah, it's pretty much, it's a huge number. It's a huge number and we have a lot of opportunities and I think it's going to be a success. And presumably the employees want to be part of this ride, right, they want to get, whether it's retrained or become RPA experts, deploy this technology, drive their digital automation, and service those eight million customers with the same resources, you know, or invest in other resources, new growth areas. Yes, yes. Great story. Yeah, it is, it is. We're working hard to do that. We're privileged to have been working with them because they are, I say unique, that it was done for us from day one. Everything was put in place, engagement, people, and then the company itself is very easy to manipulate and transform because of the way it was structured 30 years ago. And why UiPath? I mean, you said, you sort of chose them last summer. Why, why'd they win? Well, because of, well, during the benchmarking, I see, I could see a lot of difference between them, you know, and we have concluded that, well, they actually, Symphony recommend us, right? So UiPath, you know what? So UiPath, for this situation, it's going to be the best solution, right? And after that, we're pretty sure that it's the best, it's the best choice, right? Because of the functionalities, because a lot of stuff that they have, they can bring to us, you know? Do you worry about shadow RPA? Like, you know what I mean? The division's going off and doing their own robots, or you guys got a handle on that. Yeah, you know, no, I'm not worried about that, you know, but yeah, it's going to help. Maybe that's a good thing. Yeah, yeah. All right, gentlemen, thanks so much for coming on theCUBE. It was great to have you. Thank you for inviting us. All right, keep it right there. Everybody, Stu and I will be back at UiPath Forward Americas. Right after this short break, you're watching theCUBE. We'll be right back.