From startup costs to implementation and maintenance, many small and mid-sized businesses assume that process automation is simply beyond their reach.Meet DigiAssist, the new RPA as a Service (RPAaaS) platform from Robocorp partner WM Promus. DigiAssist can automate repetitive tasks for businesses of all sizes.Built on Robocorp’s technology, DigiAssist brings the benefits of SaaS to automation—lower running costs, reduced time to ROI, increased scalability and ease of use.Join WM Promus architect Mindaugas Mejeras and WM Promus General Manager Eileen O’Mahony in a discussion about digitizing SME operations and putting an end to inefficient manual processes. They’ll be talking about:
How RPA is available to all organizations regardless of size
RPAaaS & automation for all businesses – transcript
Speaker: Peter Steube 00:00My name is Peter Steube, I am head of partnerships and alliances with Robocorp. I’m very excited to host one of our key partners here today in WM Promus, represented by Mindaugas Mejeras, chief architect, and Eileen O’Mahony, General Manager. And also our yes, General Manager and go to market lead as well. We are excited to reveal their RPA as a service offering in the form of DigiAssist. So Eileen, I’m going to hand things off quickly to you, we’re going to move fast today and make a lot of progress and share with everybody the future of automation. So I’m excited to be hosting you. Thanks for joining us, and looking forward to the discussion. Speaker: Eileen O’Mahony 00:45That’s great. Thanks, Peter. And, we’re hoping people are gonna have lots of questions for us, or maybe some comments. So you’ll notice that there’s a Q&A section on your zoom login. So please post any questions you have in there. Or maybe you’ve got something you want to chat about. But you know, do get involved here, we’d love to see a collaboration. And at the end of the webinar, we’ll have time to answer your questions and tell you how you can get more information from us. So I’m just going to quickly talk for a second about Promus and our journey. So how we ended up in the RPA space. So we’re going for over 10 years now. And we started off in the IT Asset Management space, you know, what are IT assets? You own, what they’re worth, you know, the state of your software compliance and stuff like that. And we moved on into like service management, configuration management, and so on. And once we’re in configuration management, what we realized is, automation is key. So we ended up in this sort of DevOps automation space and doing lots of integrations to big systems. And what was really interesting for us was, as we were talking to our clients, and our client interfaces used to generally be technologists, as we’re talking to them, what they were keen to know about was how we could make improvements for the other members of the organization. You know, for those people who aren’t necessarily tied to technology, the non IT people, you know, HR, finance, legal departments and all of that. So that’s when we started getting interested in RPA. Because we saw that as a sort of suitable technology to deliver what those non IT people wanted. Now, having said that, there have been plenty of use cases where IT people love RPA, too. So let’s talk really quickly for those of you who don’t know what RPA is, what it’s about, okay. So RPA, basically, it’s just software. Okay, so it’s software but what it does is, it does a series of tasks, it executes something, some part of a process that normally is done by an acumen employee. So if you just think of the obvious stuff, like invoicing, payroll, client onboarding, all of that kind of stuff, where they process the task, what you normally have to do is to enter data into computer application. So the differences with RPA, instead of the human logging into the computer, and going through the series of tasks, click here, click there, and so on. There’s a piece of software known as a robot or a bot that tackles those tasks. So your bot there is basically supporting what your employee activities are. Now bots are capable of mimicking pretty much most computer interactions. So it doesn’t really matter what the process is, you know, it could be HR process such as onboarding an employee, it could be a financial process, like generating an invoice, you know, it doesn’t really matter, because RPA is cross functional. Now, the other great thing is, it doesn’t actually matter what the computer application is that you’re using for the process, you can build a bot to work with Salesforce, but with Sage, with SAP, whatever it is, okay. So you know, whatever, whatever your accounting software is, whatever your CRM system is, what but you know, RPA is both cross functional and cross application. So you just need to think of RPA, don’t think of it in terms of technology, just think of an RPA bot, as a co-worker. It can read, it can click, it can type, it can enter information into applications, it can grab information from one programme or application or website to another place. But the really nice, the sweet spot is that the bot does it better. And Okay, so what do I mean by better? Well, the thing is that your bot is never going to need a coffee break, and your bot is never going to get ill, your bot isn’t going to go on holiday. So your bot is run 24/7. So we’re talking 24 hours a day, 365 days a year. And as well as being able to be so continually available to you, bots are very efficient. They do things at a rate much, much faster than a human can. And they’re accurate. Bots don’t make mistakes typing data, they don’t make mistakes where they copy and paste stuff to. Now you can include steps for your bot to pick up on data that has been provided, but that has got errors in it. Because the bot will run as directed. So you can in your bots specify what you want your bot to do for example, if there’s data that isn’t exactly what you want. So your bots are always reliable, always consistent. Now, when we use the term non disruptive, what we really like is, you don’t have to go out and buy new accounting package to get your bot to do stuff, you don’t have to go out and buy a new CRM system, that’s all fine. And what we really like is the concept of, which is what we’re talking about today. RPA as a service, you don’t even have to go out and get tons of infrastructure to get the whole thing working for you. So, you know, we’ve talked about RPA, delivering so many benefits. And for us, it honestly has made a huge difference to our clients businesses, you know, driving huge improvements in terms of efficiencies, because you have these bot workers that never go sick. They’re superfast, they’re super accurate. And honestly, hand on heart, it makes life better for those employees that are human workers. So how come everyone’s not furiously just embracing RPA? How come we’re not, you know, seeing everybody rapidly moving towards a workforce that’s augmented by bots. And so we are seeing that, we are certainly seeing traction in lots of organizations. And currently existing clients we have where we might do DevOps, or cloud work or whatever for them, they very happily listen to our story to say, you know, this is the future, this is the future and let us show you what it can do for you. But for other people, this caution around, you know, some stuff like I don’t know what process to start with, or there’s caution around vendor technology, they’re worried about who they should choose what RPA technology they should choose, or there’s caution around, and they’re concerned about paying out a license fee, and not seeing a return on that investment. So or it might be infrastructure, you know, so you might have somebody in HR, who really relishes the idea of having a boss do some of the manual repetitive jobs they have to do. But now they feel they have to get IT people involved because they need to have some infrastructure which hosts this technology, and so on. So and that’s even if you have, even if you think about having, you know, those vendors that provide, you know, a cloud solution for whatever they’re selling, even still your concern is, well do I need some internal people or do I have to upskill a bunch of internal employees around RPA, so I can get to this. And that’s where DigiAssist comes in. Because what we’re really talking about is RPA is a type of outsourcing what we’re saying is DigiAssist is an RPA as a service. So you just think about it as just as you would maybe engage with a temporary agency to get contractor or outsource your some of your workers. That’s what you’re getting, you’re getting workers on demand. I mean, the other thing is, you’re not tied into a long licensed contract, because you’re paying for the service. So what we do, we see this is, with DigiAssist, we offer a monthly billing arrangement. So you pay for what you use. In fact, it’s a bit like a mobile phone, it’s actually that simple. And I can’t wait to get to show you the demo later. Because that’s really what we’re talking about, we’re talking about you being in great control of what you’re using, and how it’s been used. The fact that you pay monthly, you’re not tied in forever, you know, you’re in for as long as you’re happy, basically. So with that sort of arrangement, what you’re really accessing is a service as opposed to a technology. And you will see a far quicker return on your investment in this way. Because you haven’t paid it for, you know, a three year arrangements with a vendor or whatever. Now, the other thing is, in terms of scaling up, it’s all handled for you, you just need to ask what you want. You know, so basically, you approach in fact, your approach Promus via the DigiAssist platform or portal, and you say, you know, I’m really happy with this one bot I’ve got, I’d now like to scale up, I’d like to get a second bot. So maybe I had my first bot handle the expenses, let’s say I’m a legal firm. So I’ve got my bot currently running and handling expenses, that are being submitted by my professional staff. And now that’s worked out so successfully, maybe I’d like to have a boss that does something around resourcing. So if you want to request a new bot, you basically just ask for new bot via the existing DigiAssist portal that you have. So you’ve got all of this great stuff. On top of that, you’ve got all the stuff I already said that RPA provides; your 100% accuracy, your processes being 100% compliant, and so on. So what DigiAssist is actually giving you it’s the benefits of RPA. It’s your digital workers on demand, your improved efficiency, that really ramp up in productivity and accuracy, your timeliness, your 24/7 availability, all this great stuff. Do you have data confidentiality, that’s another thing you’d get with a bot that you can’t have with the human. You’ve got all that, plus, you’ve got the additional benefits of SAS, you’ve got lower running costs, reduce time to ROI, the ease of use, scalability, all of that. So, you know, it really is the way forward. And when you know, when we had this vision, so our vision was, you know, some people are seeing challenges and obstacles, you know, what can we do to get rid of those challenges for them? You know, we envisage a workforce that includes RPA bots. It’s something every organization can aspire to, regardless of their size, and that was our vision. And we looked around to say who could we partner with to build this out? And this is a really good time to hear from you, Peter to reach out to you because Robocop were the people we reached out to. Speaker: Peter Steube 09:56Yeah, thanks so much, Eileen. And that was a very, very thorough and great overview of RPA as a service, and what I’ll say is that Robocop is very proud to support this business model. You know, when it comes to aligning with WM Promus, we saw the same thing that you all saw. Customers are cautious to move forward with RPA because of the necessary infrastructure and overall commitment. So you know, looking at why Robocop ourselves was launched, you know, we dug deeper than the positive headlines that you read about with the RPA industry. We sought out an improved model that prioritizes true universal access, and more sensible plan to align closely with the business value that automation drives. And I think that that’s exactly what you’re talking about with RPA as a service here. So what that means in practice for us is that technologically, we’re engineers and software developers by trade. It’s a much longer and separate discussion, but it’s one of our tent poles is that the nitty gritty of building, maintaining automations should be left to professionals like Mindaugas and his team and the business results are what should be prioritized when it comes to delivery to the customer. And more importantly, for today’s discussion in the market, you know, the vision of a bot for every person, something that has been floated around the automation industry for quite some time now. Quite frankly, in our mind, we don’t really feel like the industry is doing a good job on delivering that. The first generation of providers are more or less riddled with barriers to entry. It really only makes it accessible for large organizations to have access to automation. And we think that small and medium sized businesses should have the right to compete with their large, their large counterparts. And worse yet, there’s also barriers to exit with the generation one providers of RPA. They are built on a foundation of expensive per bot and upfront payments. They are also proprietary tools that lock their users in and limit them to that specific offering. And when it comes to actual delivery and thinking about the future of technology, they’re most frequently doing it in an antiquated way. So whether it’s on premise(Promus, not clear) you’re not utilizing the power of cloud, that’s something that Robocorp enables our partners with as well. And lastly, you know, what we see robotics as a service through DigitAssist doing right, is bringing the focus again on delivering those business results first. There’s flexibility and low upfront commitment, followed by sustainable and simple maintenance on. And what we like to say here is that the success of automation isn’t about dropping an RPA tool into the lap of your business users and hoping that they figure out a way to build, run and maintain it all on their own. It’s about creating an experience where every person can be impacted positively by automation, without necessarily giving them the burden of again, building it and maintaining it, etc. So, you know, that’s where digit assist comes into play. And we’re very excited to you know, have Mindaugas go through this demonstration. The final thing that I’ll share in terms of you know, benefits that are passed through to the DigiAssist platform, you know, Robocorp users are not locked in to us as a vendor, our code lifts and shifts, our consumption is cost based, or our costs are consumption base and tied directly to the value that we are driving. And our billing is also month to month as well. So DigitAssist users may never realise that they are attached to Robocop and that’s okay. But that’s not to say that we don’t take our obligation to ensure things run smoothly, very seriously. In just the past two years, we’ve raised over $32 million of venture capital funding, and we’re heavily invested in this future. Our tagline is automation without boundaries. And we’re proud to support Promus on this journey of delivering that to their customers of all shapes and sizes. So Mindaugas, we can’t wait to see the demo, we’re going to hand things off to you now, sir. And looking forward to it. Speaker: Eileen O’Mahony 14:26Yeah. Great. Thanks, Peter. So Mindaugas DigiAssist, let’s see what it’s all about. Speaker: Mindaugas Mejeras 14:33Thanks. Thanks Eileen. Let me just set that up. And let’s just have a look. Yeah, so DigiAssist. Here we are at the login page, you can see the obvious options that you usually see with a solution such as resetting your password and signing up for the very first time. And as you would expect, DigiAssist has some built in roles that allow access to the various parts of the solution. So for this demonstration, I’m going to log in as a fictional character named Mindaugas, who is the owner of a team and has access to all the team features. So let me just log in, I ended up in the dashboard. Currently, I will skip explaining the dashboard and I will talk a little bit later about the roles that access to, but now let’s have a look at what Mindaugas is most interested in, which is his robots. I go to robot processes, and our fictional character Mindaugas works in finance, and his job is to handle invoices. For that purpose he has several robots that allow him to perform various activities related to his job. So I have a robot that processes PDF invoices and puts data into an Excel spreadsheet. Also, there is a certain website that he wants to monitor for various changes. Additionally, he may want to process Excel spreadsheet and generate invoices from the PDF. He can perform various activities on these robots, he can edit them, run them, archive, if he doesn’t need them, he can view the reports. So let’s have a look at the PDF at the Excel processor. Robot which, as the name suggests, reads data from the PDF folder, from the folder where PDF files are located, reads the data and puts the data into the Excel spreadsheet. What usually Mindaugas does each Monday is to instruct the PDF to excel processor bot to do his job by clicking the run icon. I’m going to do that now. Speaker: Mindaugas Mejeras 16:54And here you go, you can see the robot running. So there are three invoices that for this demo are going to be processed. This is going to take about 50 seconds to process. The bot takes data from PDF files located in my own laptop, extracts data and puts the extracts of data in the Excel spreadsheet for further processing. This is my local folder and you can see that I have three invoices and invoices Excel spreadsheet has just been placed into my local folder. So this means that the data has been processed from PDF into an Excel spreadsheet. For now we’ll just have a quick look at the PDF invoice as a sample. So there’s for example, an invoice number or the number balance. And the data from this PDF has been extracted and placed into the Excel spreadsheet with the balance, with the invoice number or the number. Having said that, I’ve configured my robots to also place files not only in my laptop, but I have also placed the files to be accessible from DigiAssist itself. Just have a look at the run report. Here we can see the detailed report of my last run. I have attached a sample error warning messages to my robots just to demonstrate that if there is an error or a warning in the robot, or any information message, you would see what the robot is outputting and telling you so we can react to that. And most importantly, as you can see, I can also download the same Excel file that has been generated, I just would click the Download button it would download the Excel file. So let me get back to the robot processes for now. Obviously, logging in into DigiAssist and running the robot manually is easy enough job to do. But if my character Mindaugas wants to, he can schedule the robots to run, he can edit the robot process. Click the schedule robot. And you can see that I can change the time and frequency of when I want my robot around. Speaker: Mindaugas Mejeras 19:28And the great thing is that I do not even need to touch any line of code, log into remote service to manage the robot or ask anyone else to run and manage my robot for me. Mindaugas remains in charge of the whole process, IT is not his role so he performs activities on the robot itself which is, I just saved this And the schedule has been done. With this, I want to also outline that in the dashboard Mindaugas can manage his bots just like real employees, it’s easy enough to go and ask the bot what is happening, what is either wrong or if there are any warnings, we can look at the dashboard and to see if there are any problems with any of the bots. The dashboard provides me a summary of what my digital employees or bots have been doing. So for example, if there is a failing bot, or the ones with a warning message, the failing warning bot would be captured in the bot’s failures or bot waning cards. So I’m just going to go and drill down and see what it was. So we’ll just have a look quickly. So it just tells me which robot failed when I can go directly into the run report if I want. Going back to the dashboard, the dashboard tells me also how many times certain bots have been run. How many minutes have been consumed in a selected time period, so for today it’s 15 minutes. But for example during yesterday it was 26 minutes. Additionally, it shows me what is my consumption of minutes as compared to my minute allowance indigency. So I have used up 43 minutes and I have 457 remaining of my monthly 500 minute allowance. And in the bot runs you can see which ones they were and how many times they ran, you can also drill down into the bots. So actually Mindaugas is so happy with having a bot help him with the workload that his manager has agreed to Mindaugas using the second bot to do the tests. So what should he do if you want more? Mindaugas goes to the marketplace to locate a bot to do what’s needed. He goes into a marketplace, he can see robots that WM Promus can currently develop for him. He wants to do CogHR to sage processing, he can click just order. He can describe what is his requirement and just click Place Order. So Mindaugas now is able to track the progress of his request, receive and ask updates from WM Promus. So the process discovery and robot development process is as usual with RPA, WM Promus receives this request talks through with the customer directly to capture what’s the process to automate is and then WM Promus develops the robots and assigns the robot to Mindaugas account. So Mindaugas will be able to use the new robot by creating a new process around in the robot processes. So let’s just have a look how that seemingly new robot that has just been developed by the WM Promus after say a week can be employed. I go to robot process and click new process run. I choose which process I want to run. I can provide various inputs that drive how the bot will behave. So for example, if I provide this very simple, it may say that go and pick up certain files from a predefined location and place the files that are generated into this location. So Mindaugas is planning to take an annual leave soon. And this is where Eileen will take over from him during that time. So what’s needed is that Eileen has access to the bots that Mindaugas is working on. To facilitate this, team management can be used. So in team management as the name suggests, I as the team owner can have team members that will do jobs for me. So at management, Mindaugas as the team owner can invite other users to join the team and assign the roles to them. When inviting new users, he can see, he can set what permission level this users will have, which will allow or deny certain actions to them in DigiAssist. In this example, Eileen has already been invited and accepted the invitation to join Mindaugas team and Mindaugas now assigns the robots that he wants Eileen to run while he’s away. Let’s have a look at how that’s done. I click the Edit symbol, go to the assigned robots, click the Assign robots on the top right. Then Excel to PDF, and click Assign. The robot now is assigned to Eileen. Eileen will have now permissions to run the robot that Mindaugas wants her to. I’m going to log off and log in as Eileen. I just have a look Speaker: Mindaugas Mejeras 25:29So currently, since Eileen has not been running any robots, there are no, there’s no data in the dashboard. But in the robot processes, I can create a new process run together with that there were some robot processes that Eileen used to run previously, but these have now been archived, so they are no longer running. Eileen, since she has just received a new robot to her account, can choose the Excel to PDF invoices and that’s very similar. It’s actually the same robot I’ve shown before within Mindaugas account, where you can say what the robot can do with the info you provided. And that’s exactly the same process that Mindaugas followed when creating his own robot. So they’re like sharing the same robots. They can schedule them in such a way that they are, they have different inputs, and they have different outputs too. And yeah, this wraps up the shorts digital demo. I’m happy to answer any questions at the end of the webinar. Eileen was that what you wanted to see? Speaker: Eileen O’Mahony 26:43Thanks Mindaugas, that was terrific. That was absolutely terrific. I was loving it. And for me, what I was getting out of that was and the great stuff was about the fact that Mindaugas used to produce invoices and used to produce the expenses from CogHR to sage, but now Mindaugas had bots doing it. I love that because it means Mindaugas is now free to answer other questions that might come in to HR, like questions about their pension plans or stuff like that. So it really frees Mindaugas up to do stuff that adds human value. And the other thing I loved was how easy you made it seem to scale up, so when you wanted to introduce a second bot. And also what I liked was that in terms of scaling up, you just went to the marketplace. You know, you didn’t have to go out and buy new tech and stuff because of course it’s all a service. Now what you should see now is a slide that I’m showing called Be prepared to change and this is my call out to the world. This is my call out which basically I’m saying things change Get ready. So the two shots I have here are and I’ve nicked them from someone else. In 2011 Morgan Stanley came out with a really huge sort of bullish report on Tesla and in the report they had these two pictures of Fifth Avenue in history and it was to illustrate how rapidly things change. Now I think it’s a great visual in terms of keeping at the forefront of your mind technology moves fast. Now technology makes business improvement move fast and that means the competitive landscape changes, which means you have to move with it. So my call out is basically with RPA driving down costs by you know the figures now are 20 to 40%, it delivers your 100% data accuracy, it slashes processing time for 50% and increases your capacity by 35%. This really is a huge opportunity here to redeploy your human employees to do higher value activities. And you know if not now when? You know today is the day to do it. Right. Lastly I just want to display here some other ways that you can get in touch with us. You’ve got us now, you’ve got us now on the zoom and you can ask stuff in the chat and in the Q&A but also we’ve got an email address here displayed and our website and phone numbers. So you’ve got lots of ways that you can reach out to us. And I leave that displayed while I hand back to you Peter because I believe you’ve got some questions for us, am I right? Speaker: Peter Steube 29:03Yeah, definitely. That’s a good call out for everybody on the line now here to please feel free to submit to the chat. We’ll keep an eye on that as we go through these ones that were submitted in advance. And I think Eileen, you did an incredible job today kind of going over this question but I’m still gonna ask it here and I might take a different approach you know. For people who haven’t heard of RPA they’re entirely new to it you know the benefits of DigitAssist you know, I think again you went over it in great detail but maybe let’s you know specifically as you bring this to market what is the primary pain point that is resonating most t with people? You know, we mentioned cost savings, accuracy, but also we hear things about you know, I really need to expand my business as well too. So, maybe from your perspective, like what’s been the most interesting thing that has driven people towards DigiAssist? Speaker: Eileen O’Mahony 29:58Okay, so you’re saying people who haven’t heard about RPA. Okay, so if you haven’t heard of RPA, in terms of DigiAssist, you don’t have to actually distinguish RPA, and RPA as a service or pass. If you haven’t heard of RPA, just think of DigiAssist as a way to increase your efficiencies without increasing costs. It’s an opportunity to have a new workers, they’re digital, they’re bots, they’re a new type of worker who’s going to augment your current human workers activities, it’s going to let you be more efficient. It’s a non-disruptive approach to improving your business. And you don’t have to be concerned with the same level of caution. Because you’re not adopting a new technology in the way that you have to get IT security IT, infrastructure training department involved because people have to be internally scaled up and so on. What you’re actually doing is embracing the future, embracing new technology without having those worries that a lot of people have, especially if you’re a small medium enterprise to say, I really want a piece of that but I’m very concerned about the expense. Because as Mindaugas showed you, it’s more like adding a mobile phone, it’s a monthly expenditure, you’re not into long licensed costs. And also, Peter, as you were saying, you know, Robocorp is built on the concept of everyone should have a boss, you know, we’re not tying you to us forever. So that’s what I’d say to those who haven’t heard of RPA before. Speaker: Peter Steube 31:30And, you know, I think it’s a great question or a segue to say, okay, well, if you have heard of RPA, maybe you’ve tried to implement it in your organization, you failed to do so. You know, what is DigiAssist doing here to make that experience just, you know, all the all the better and make it show a positive one? Because we hear so frequently, the negative experiences and you know, that’s what Robocorp was built on a lot here to, you know, not that we’re pessimistic people. It’s just our eyes and ears are open to the negative experiences. Speaker: Eileen O’Mahony 32:02Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And so Promus too, we are, you know, and that’s, I think one of the reasons we partner so nicely with you guys, is we always say, and if you check our website at, we’re vendor agnostic. You know, there’s lots of fantastic RPA technology out there. But what we focus on, the same as you guys, as we say, okay, so there is fabulous technology out there, but what’s gone wrong for other people? What’s gone wrong for the people we’re meeting? So one of the things is, and people want, they liked the idea of having bots, what they want is they’d like the control over who works for them. So they’d like to control the bots just as Mindaugas did, you know. I can tell my bot when I want it to run, but they don’t want those people don’t have to have coding or technical experience necessarily. So if you’ve got bots that look after your invoicing, you really don’t want to have to have IT help you do that. So that’s a big plus, if you go for something like you know, if you go for what we’re proposing you do, DigiAssist, if you go for something as an RPA as a service, you’re saying, you guys can still control those workers but we’re not asking you to then engage with your own IT departments to keep them running, you know. So the other bit we would sort of say is, and if you’re a small medium enterprise, and you are probably more intensely desperate to see a return on your investment faster, and that is something you will definitely see if you can reach out and have your bots working fairly quickly. Like Mindaugas saying we’re talking about weeks instead of month long projects. Because you haven’t got that whole thing of so are we going to do this on Promus? Are we going to go for a cloud offering, okay, if we’re doing this on Promus, we now need to talk to the guys in the server, it’s, you know, you haven’t got all that. So if you like the idea of RPA, and you understand what RPA is, but you’re saying okay, but my reluctance to get involved is I don’t want to have to upskill workers, I’m a small business, I can’t all of a sudden start turning around to my IT department saying right, who’s going to be the guy who knows a lot about RPA, you know. Our account already, I’ve got a stretched bunch of you know, Linux and Windows, guys who look after my servers, I really don’t want to have to lean on them further, to stand up platform so that I can run these bots. And that would be what I would say, you’ve got no infrastructure works, you’ve got no technical concerns, you’ve got no training concerns. You’ve just got workers, you’ve got these software workers. And that’s what I say to those people out there who are going I want a piece of that pie, I want some RPA. You know, come grab some DigiAssist. Speaker: Peter Steube 34:28You I think, what caught my eye in the demonstration was the marketplace. And I think that could be a very powerful tool for just onboarding new opportunities and expanding, you know, the use cases of automation within your organization. So I guess the question there would be, you know, what is the onboarding experience when you have a new process or a new idea? You know, can you guys talk a little bit about, you know, what might be, quote unquote, pre-built versus customized? I think, you know, there’s a question in the chat right now about, you know, it seems that the focus here is more on generic processes. But maybe you could confirm or deny that to what do you guys thought? Speaker: Mindaugas Mejeras 35:07Yeah, so I think I’m going to answer this one. And I’ll be providing the answer to your question, Peter and to Iman as well, which kind of will be related. So just start with DigiAssist, as we have seen, it’s very simple. After you’ve signed up, you are provided a free plan that includes 50 bot run minutes. Obviously, we will, there are no robots deployed into your account, because your processes are yours, we first need to develop the bots board. But WM Promus via the marketplace can take in your request of which robot you want to build. Obviously, you know, building the robot, the time to build it depends really on the complexity of the robot itself. So it could be you know, from a couple of days to a couple of weeks or even a month, depending on you know how long the robot is. So during the development phase, after you’ve submitted the requests, WM Promus is with you all the way, we are the service providers who are going to, you know, understand what your process is, what are your systems that are involved in this, any access that the board may need, all of that stuff is ironed out during the discovery phase. And obviously, during the development phase, we keep contact with you to see how can we test the robots that we’re going to deploy in your systems. And really it’s us being kind of upfront with you just to ask you the questions, to ask the questions that we have, and make suggestions for process improvements and any automation. So obviously, one may think that if you are using the marketplace, and this is where I’m coming for the answer for Iman is that, you know, you only can buy or ask the robots that are only so pre-built, or they may not be customized. That’s obviously not the case, though, is that because, as I’ve said, we can tailor the process to you now regarding access, because since DigiAssist is a SAS solution that’s, you know, hosted say, on one of the cloud providers, and it seemingly may not have access to your internal systems. During the development, we can decide what are the access requirements that DigiAssist will need to perform the tasks. So if there is a requirement to access your internal system, what we can do is be it on a Unix machine or a Windows machine, what we can deploy what’s called an agent. So the DigiAssist will speak to the agent on that machine, it will tell the robot who actually uploads the robot into that agent and the agent will run the robot on that machine. That’s actually how the demonstration that I just shown with my local laptop, that it read invoices and generated an Excel spreadsheet on my own folder. So that’s how DigiAssist did it. So it sits on a cloud provider that without the agent wouldn’t have access to my local laptop, but I have an agent on my local laptop that allows me to have DigiAssist talk to the laptop and perform the actions. So just finishing off with answer the signup and requesting the robot is very easy. The rest is as usual robot development process where we take the lead and take you through the through the process. Speaker: Peter Steube 38:55That’s excellent. I’m sure your customers, your current and future will appreciate that white glove service. And, you know, in terms of, you know, okay, so people often ask Robocorp directly to like, Okay, what are the best processes to automate, right? And our response is, well, if you’re going fish in the ocean, what fish do you want to catch kind of type of thing, which presents a little bit of a challenge, but hopefully, you know, you all can talk a little bit about the process of figuring out what’s best to automate. Do you guys have a specialty? Is it you know, is there a particular target application? We saw a few of them on the page. Can you guys talk a little bit more about that, what you think is the bread and butter of DigiAssist platform? Speaker: Eileen O’Mahony 39:42Sure. I’m gonna grab this one Mindaugas. So I think that’s a really good analogy where you say, you know, someone says, what should I catch? Oh, but you know, it depends on what your needs are. So and I mean, WM Promus are a software consultancy, so providing guidance and advice is what we do. That’s what we do. So the answer is, you know, would you would we be able to help people, that’s a definite yes. In terms of sectors, we work across a lot of sectors. I mean, interestingly, over 10 years ago, where we started was the banking sector, a lot of finance and stuff. And I suppose there, we will often revert and some of the examples we had, in the DigiAssist demo, where around sort of financing and billing, invoicing, that sort of thing, expense management. And we also work across I mean, because we’re in business nearly 15 years now, we’ve moved in across a lot of other sectors. So we work in defense, we work, in fact, a lot of the parts we have been in public sector in healthcare, which is, you know, certainly a far cry from the banking sector. And because if you think about it, an awful lot of the processes that you do, there are the same, regardless of your core business. So typically, everybody is sending invoices, typically, everybody is managing suppliers, everybody has a payroll. You know, there is a lot of moving data from one system to another that everybody does. The only difference there is which applications they use to do it, how many people they have to do it, you know, where they click on the screen, you know, and so on. But as I said, RPA is cross functional and cross application. So you know, that’s not something people should concern themselves with. In terms of where should they start? So what we run for people is what we call a Discovery Service, where we spend time with you and we say, right, let’s see what you do. Let’s see which processes you run very often. Now, it’s actually and I just cracked myself here, it isn’t necessarily the ones you run very often, for example, one of the bot we’re currently building, again, it’s for an NHS Trust. And what they have is data in a legacy system that needs to be cleaned up. Now, the lack of quality data is impeding lots of the processes they run, they know what the rules are in their own head to clean up the data, you know, if this data is here, and it doesn’t match that date, that record should be deleted or archived. But the volume of the data would require dedicated human resources to do it, and will be hugely time consuming. So the obvious thing, and also it will drive human nuts having to do it, it’s a very tedious process. So a bot, we’ve built them a bot to do it. There’s another process we’ve done for somebody in the legal sector where they want to have, again, they have a legacy system and they want to run a once off task, which is to migrate data from one system to another. So again, with my bots to do that. So although we talk about processes being something that you know, you might run every day with, you might run it very often, and therefore there’s a high overhead. And in some cases, it can be a one off chore that you want to do, the repetitiveness of it is the number of records you want to process over and over again. And so the value of having someone like us talk you through which process is best to automate is that we have worked in multiple sectors, and we have worked across lots of processes. And we know what criteria you should use to make that judgement. So one judgement will be what’s the opportunity cost of not doing the process correctly? You know, what’s the issue with data accuracy? Is this process causing a bottleneck to other critical processes in the business? Is this something that you will only do once, but perhaps it will make an amazing transformation to how the business will operate in the future, such as moving off a legacy system? So I would say reach out to somebody who’s done it before, reach out to somebody like us who have. So even if it’s not Digi Assist, you know, even if DigiAssist hasn’t made you feel like yes, yes, reach out to us. Just open that conversation and talk to us more about why you should get started. I’m just a big, you know, I’m waving the flag here for get started with RPA today. Don’t let not knowing what process to start with impede you. Speaker: Peter Steube 43:42Absolutely. And you’re right. In terms of that, so we only have a few minutes left here. So we’ll keep our final questions brief. But, you know, maybe you guys can talk about, you know, there’s always limitations, right. But, you know, are there any specific to DigiAssists that, you know, people should be aware of, you know, is the scale of the process limited? So, like the number of steps involved? You know, is it only able to be distributed to a certain number of people? Like can you guys kind of talk about, you know, or is it, just let your imagination run wild and you could go nuts with it. But kind of just is there any framework that people should be considering to keep themselves in when they think of processes to bring to you? Speaker: Mindaugas Mejeras 44:28Yeah, so, there are no such limitations that are showstoppers. So really, for you to use the service or get your process developed, there aren’t any technical limitations that we can say that we have, there is no limitation on scaling. For example, if workloads require longer run times, or they require certain multiple robots to run concurrently, you can do that. You can have as many robots as you want, essentially. It really depends on the plan. With, DigiAssist cloud resources, we can run workloads for you if all you want is to, you know, perform robot activities against publicly available resources. Or if you want, if you have certain systems that are accessible internally, placing the agent, we can tap in into your own computing resources, and use your own service that we may need to run the robot. So, regarding that, perhaps the only limits might be the imagination of the customer, I think. Speaker: Peter Steube 45:40Excellent, excellent and in terms of, you know, RPA, I know, New York Times a few months ago, wrote an article that had in the headline that robots are coming for your job, and it sent a lot of, I guess, negative waves through the RPA industry, or people that were considering automation. So, you know, maybe we can wrap here is what’s Promus’s approach to dispelling some of those misconceptions about automation, right? Because as much as there’s, you know, positive things to be driven with cost savings and things like that, there is also of course, a human element to the involvement of bots and software robots. So, you know, what is you guys approach, what would you advise a customer say that would was bringing this to their board or bringing this to the executive to help dispel some of those, or put the rest some of those concerns? Speaker: Eileen O’Mahony 46:38And that’s, honestly, Peter we’ve seen that as well. And we’ve seen that sort of tone in the press and drama makes for a great story. And, I mean, the other thing is people sort of saying, oh, the bots are coming, that type of thing, I’m like the bots are here, you know, the bots. So yes, that’s the first thing it’s already happened. And I do get that people don’t like change but what people do love is a better life. And that is what RPA gives you. If you consider, you know, I mean, I go back to the hospital trust that I spoke of, the people who were building bots for are in the HR department, they are incredibly busy. Outside of the sort of normal description of you need to process this data, this data, this data, they are inundated with phone calls around people asking them, the intricacies around their maternity leave and some details about their pensions, so they have tons of work to do. That when we built a bot for them, this freed them up to do the role, to do the jobs that required their emotional intelligence, the type of stuff that a bot can’t do. So I suppose when we talk about limitations, that’s what bots don’t do. They don’t do the great human stuff, they don’t do the stuff like building relationships with your customers. They don’t hold someone’s hand while you walk them through which training course they should attend. But what they do is the mundane stuff that you don’t need a person to do. So what you’re saying to an organization when you go in, is let’s make life better for you and life better for your employees. You’re now giving your employees someone to work alongside of them, this person is going to improve your working life, it’s not taking over your working life. The bot doesn’t tell you what to do you tell the bot what to do. And that’s really what it’s about. It is it is to say to people don’t be frightened of this, this is a better life for you. You know, and obviously there’s the efficiencies improved in your organization and you know, more efficient organizations are much more pleasurable place to work. I’m an advocate, we have bots running here at Promus, it changes your life Speaker: Peter Steube 48:43Excellent. So well that brings us to the amount of time that we had set aside for today. Is there anything you know that we missed or should go over here in closing thoughts? Of course we have you know, ways to get in touch with Team Promus and of course it you know, happy to be a bridge in order to make that happen. If anybody just has the contact info for Robocorp or hasn’t written it down here on the screen. But with that said, is there any, you know, final words or things that we missed today? Eileen, Mindaugas, I’ll leave the floor to you and we’ll wrap up and hope that everybody gets in touch with you to learn more about the platform. Speaker: Eileen O’Mahony 49:23Oh, good from me. Peter was just really nice to get to chat to you again and to talk about our enthusiasm for RPA and for DigiAssist. Speaker: Peter Steube 49:30Excellent, excellent. Well, in that case, we’ll let everybody go for today and keep an eye out for the replay to be posted to our YouTube as well as a notification sent all the registrations and then of course any additional content or things like that that we are continuing to put out together with team Promus. Thank you all for dialing in today and have a great rest of your day.
