David Biden - Robotic process automation (RPA)

David Biden: Hey Tim, very nice to meet you. No, I think that's fine. We'll get into some great conversations today; talk about robotic process automation and tell you a bit more about human+ as well.

Tim Butara: Awesome. I'm looking forward to learning more about it and I suggest we start with the basics. So what exactly is robotic process automation?

David Biden: So robotic process automation or RPA. It's actually got many names, it's often termed intelligent automation, digital workforce, digital workers, it goes under many names. So robotic process automation is the-- it's effectively robotic software that allows companies, organizations to transact automatically. So what does that really mean? Well it allows you to push and pull data between systems within your organization in an automated way so normally instead of a human doing it. It's often-- for a lot of organizations we work with it's the first step towards AI. It is not AI, that's a whole field of technology which this doesn't sit into. But what it does is it gets organizations thinking about how they can work differently, how they can have machines in quotes or sort of software doing tasks and whole jobs for them instead of humans. Normally what happens… I’m going to get into this quite a lot a bit later on so I won't go into the detail now but it often doesn't replace humans. That's a slight myth I would say. It often augments them.

Tim Butara: Oh nice. I think we got three of the common misconceptions out of the way right at the beginning; so it's not AI because I think many people would kind of just automatically equate it with AI, but it's also the same as digital workforce which probably people would think is something else, and you have to have both humans and software kind of working together otherwise you can't have the best possible outcome.

David Biden: Yeah exactly. So how we normally see it on a sliding scale is robotic process automation in its most basic form: push and pull the data from different systems and things like that. Intelligent automation is another phrase you'll commonly hear. And what that is that's robotic automation… sorry, robotic process automation but with elements of artificial intelligence added to it, so natural language processing, optical character recognition, and then moving on further from that you sort of do get into your sphere of AI.

Tim Butara: Interesting stuff. And how exactly does RPA aid digitalization or digital transformation?

David Biden: That's a great question. So often some companies will come at it from digital transformation versus RPA. Totally in my opinion the incorrect way to do it and they should really be going hand in hand. So, if you're doing it correctly then what you should really be doing is as you're doing, going through your digital transformation is using RPA to make efficiencies on the back end.

We often start in HR, in finance, in areas like that. So take a look at your internal processes, how you can do them better, how you can reduce your risks, how you can reduce your errors, how you can do things faster internally. What you should then also be doing is looking at the front end as well so the customer service element within customer service teams but from the moment that the customer starts to transact with you and what that will do is that then that improves your customer response times.

So, if you've got a trigger of a customer, I don't know, filling out a form or sending an email or whatever it might be and then you've automated that process through your organization resulting in a customer output but then obviously you've just drastically improved your response time to your customer if it's been fully automated as opposed to jumping between different human teams as it were. What we like to do is couple robotic process automation with service design.

So obviously service design looks at the redesign of end-to-end services within an organization and we do a very similar thing. It's just that we use automation within that service redesign. To give you a bit of an example of that, what often happens in organizations we had a company we were working with and they do rent arrears as their housing association.

Tim Butara: Sorry I didn't catch that, can you repeat that? What do they do?

David Biden: They rent arrears, they're a housing association.

Tim Butara: Oh cool. Okay thanks.

David Biden: So what they wanted to do is completely transform the way in which they obtain the rent from their tenants and they've got tens of thousands of tenants. They wanted to make it more digital, easier to pay, easier to transact, less of a burden on the current organization but that was a big sort of 12 to 18 month project.

It's one of the most important processes in their entire organization. It goes across almost every team in the organization in some way shape or form and it was a big undertaking. And normally the standard path for them would be to go out and hire an external consultancy to come in to analyze and review the process and then effectively take that 12 to 18 months to transform that process… oh sorry, that service.

Now what they're looking to do is effectively hire somebody like us. What that we would then do is we'll automate as many parts of that process as we can. That will probably take more like three months to do and the objective of that is to free up the people that currently carry out this process now from multiple different teams.

They will then become the internal team that then does the service redesign of their own internal service. What that means they don't have to spend the money on external consultants that will take a bunch of time learning their organization and learning their business and things like that. They might have to draft in a few contractors for some of the more nuanced points of service design and things like that but they'll really be able to do it themselves.

What we keep talking about at human+ is whilst automation is awesome, the technology is awesome and things like that the real success that you get with an RPA project or an automation project is when you focus on what the humans are going to be doing after you've automated the processes or the services or the tasks that they're currently doing now. That is the gold, that is where you should focus all of your attention or as much of your attention as possible.

Yes, it's super important to choose the right tech but there are five to ten very good low-cost solutions to choose from out there. Choosing the right one for your organization, to be honest it shouldn't take more than two to four weeks to be able to do that but yeah focusing on what the humans do once you've carried out the automation is really where you get the organizational change piece that's where you get the real return on investment. Often what we'll be brought in to do is automate some HR processes or some finance processes or some customer service or something like that then that's 50% of the project.

The other 50% of the project is redeploying these people into other areas of the business and that could be; we've redeployed people into fundraising for some charities that we work with so they generate more revenue, we deploy people more into sales positions. We've redeployed people into pharmacy teams and we've sort of done it into customer services, RND, design. All the front-end areas of your business that drive revenue that drive growth and drive customer or citizen satisfaction really.

Tim Butara: Well yeah, that's a key point because the way I understand it is the main goal of automating all these processes is to enable humans to work better and to streamline their work. So it should be kind of the end goal, you couldn't have one without the other.

David Biden: Yeah very much so and look you will be able to save through natural attrition in your organization. If you've got an idea of sort of wiping out teams of 30 people through the use of robots it's so rare that that actually happens. That's not the right way to approach it in my eyes, that's why we're called human+ because we believe in sort of augmenting the humans rather than replacing them.

You need to look at RPA from a strategic whole business enterprise-wide view not just siloed into these different departments that I’ve mentioned. Once you do that, you get into that really game-changing stuff of how you redeploy resources within the organization.

Tim Butara: Yeah it's an organizational initiative not just an initiative of a single team, the team that's responsible for certain processes, stuff like that.

David Biden: Yeah exactly. When you get that high level view that's where you start to see all of the opportunity and see all the savings. So there's a project that we had not so long ago where there's a massive higher education institution here in the UK and we were brought in to automate a bunch of finance processes and a bunch of HR processes as well. Now what they wanted to do is they were looking to get rid of the people that we had, that were doing the tasks that we had automated in the HR department and that's because they were only looking at it from a HR perspective, HR team perspective, sort of very siloed view of the world.

When we went on their website there's sort of 47 open vacancies that they've got. As I said they're a huge organization with tens of thousands of staff. So we were like well hang on a minute, if you were to get rid of these people then you're going to have to pay the exit fees, the redundancy costs and things like that. You’re then going to have to go and pay more recruitment fees to hire in people to go and fill these vacancies in other areas of the business. How about the project looks like this; how about we come in, we automate the tasks and processes that we originally brought us in to do but then we also work with you to redeploy these people into those job vacancies that you've got in other areas of the business.

And part of that is nothing to do with robotic process automation. Like yes it is the catalyst that allows us to free these people up but the rest of it is sort of just a good transformation of your organization.

Tim Butara: And yeah that's where the human part of your company's name comes in, right, as you said.

David Biden: Exactly that, exactly that.

Tim Butara: And so besides kind of being human-centered what other key elements or kind of best practices are there to the RPA implementation and operation?

David Biden: For me without doubt the number one thing to get right is communication and comms. So this sort of robots, digital workers, call it what you will, is-- it can be a very emotive subject. People get very scared. You mentioned that we're going to hire a digital workforce so we're going to get some robots and bots and people think that these robots are going to burst through the door and take all their jobs and that's it, they are no longer required and that the robots will run the organization.

Obviously that's totally not true. The robots can't run an organization by themselves. You need the humans in which to do it, it's about getting the optimum balance between the two. Humans have evolved beyond doing, for want of a better word, grunt work.

A lot of what we do starts off very basic so it can start with… I don't think I’ve got a single client that we're not doing the automation of invoice processing for. I mean nobody went to university to learn how to process invoices or sort of joined the finance team I imagine to learn how to process invoices but it is a stepping stone to further things in the career so we need to make sure that we don't wipe out all of these lower level jobs when we're doing this, that's something that we're very conscious of.

So, communications it's about communicating with the people whose lives are going to be affected by automation from day one. Preferably, from before day one actually but what we do is we work with people on the front line as it were so those people whose tasks and roles and jobs are going to change because of automation. We work with senior management to advise and guide them that RPA is not a silver bullet. Done incorrectly you will create more technical debt than what you're going to release.

And then we work with middle management effectively on how you can approach managing a partially digital and partially human workforce going forward. How do you get them to work best together? How do you get-- how do you schedule things for the digital workforce to do throughout the year that the humans will no longer need to do and then how do you ensure the humans aren't scared of the technology and they work with it but then also what are you going to get the people in your team to do now because you've just freed up x amount of hours per week, month, year, if you see what I mean. What is on that to-do list that you've always wanted to do as a team that you can now get to doing?

So it's-- so that I would say is that the absolute number one. Number two I would say is the up-skilling of your workforce. So if you don't up-skill the workforce… this isn't new technology and not to go off on a tangent but this technology has been around sort of 12 to 15 years, I would say. It's practically invented by a company called Blue Prism, they're now one of the major vendors over at Barclays banks it's kind of got bank grade security and things like that to go with it, so it's been around for a while but it's only been used in anger say the last three to five years and it's a massively grown market.

Look at any Gartner report or Forrester report and it will show you the sort of crazy numbers of growth that we're seeing in this market at the moment but that does mean that there isn't a huge swathe of people trained and very knowledgeable in how it works.

So if I was investing in RPA and automation now I’d be massively ensuring that my workforce were being up-skilled at the same time and that's something that we try to make sure we have as part of every project that we do. So yes we'll come in, we'll do the first I don't know one to five projects or something like that but give us some of your staff especially some staff that are being freed up through the use of this technology and we will upskill them in how it works.

Not only in pure technology but in how to write project definition documents in how to do business analyzing, how to go and find processes across the rest of your organization that are right for automation because some are and some aren’t so sort of train them up. And what you should really at the end of a really good RPA program, you should have a bunch of processes that have been automated and are running with few to no exceptions but you should also have an upskilled internal center of excellence as well and that can be two people, for some organizations it could be 20 it depends on your size and complexity but you should really be leaving that program with a bunch of people internally that know how this stuff works to ensure again the companies like mine haven't created black box solutions that only they know how to operate and you need to pay us forever more to make sure it continues but also it can be very exciting for the staff internally.

So, if you're going to go from being an administrator or a developer or something like that to an RPA developer, that's a great career progression that you can move into. So they're getting to the opportunities that RPA is creating rather than the jobs that it's removing, if you see what I mean. So ensuring that your workforce is upskilled and communication are definitely the big two for me.

Tim Butara: And they also go hand in hand kind of because you said earlier that a massive part of the communication is kind of helping your employees and your workforce embrace the technology, so RPA, automation, and this is exactly what upskilling your workforce is about. It's not just about helping them to effectively use automation, but to actually embrace the whole mindset of automation and kind of incorporate the mindset into all of their other operations and all of their other business processes as you said. So they're able to optimize other areas of the business that maybe haven't been taken care of in this way so, yeah.

David Biden: Exactly. You want to be sort of left with your own mini consultancy internally. You can go off and hunt all these other processes and calculate the return investment and then it's iterative, it won't ever stop, if you see what I mean. So it should be seen as something that you invest in now and it will continue to pay dividends if done correctly.

Tim Butara: Yeah that's an excellent point. And okay, you've mentioned one particular human+ project before but have you had any that were particularly challenging or super hard to tackle? Can you tell us a bit about that and maybe some key lessons that you got from that?

David Biden: Oh yes we've definitely had those, definitely had those.

Tim Butara: Okay I’m eager to hear more.

David Biden: I think… to sort of link it to the previous point, where we've had challenges has probably come down to a lack of skills and a lack of correct communication. So it's been with a lot with stakeholders not really understanding the tools, understanding the software, understanding what RPA is and digital workers are. A lot of people… we're seeing less of this but especially last year a lot of people would dabble in RPA.

So it sounds really cool if you're going to get some bots to do some work and they can sort of tick their innovation box with it and things like that. So what they'll do is they'll spend sort of 50k or something on a POV or a pilot project that gets one bot to do some thing in one area and then it dies a death and sort of doesn't really go anywhere.

And that's normally because the senior stakeholders haven't fully understood the opportunity that is in front of them with the use of this technology. So that's a common problem with RPA never getting further than one department or sometimes even just one process and going enterprise wide but we are seeing less of that.

Some of the other projects that we've had trouble with have been down to a lack of understanding and a lack of skills. So these guys have sort of gone, oh well you know we've got some, we've got some devs and we've got some BA’s we'll just buy some RPA software and we'll do this stuff ourselves.

And I totally see why people think that that is a thing and it's not so out of the realms of possibility by any means and there's some organizations that can definitely do that. But what often ends up happening is they get there but they get there a lot slower than if they were to use a partner or something like that. Now obviously I’m going to say that, I’m an RPA partner to all those big RPA vendors but it's true in what we see that people can go a lot faster if they do use a partner because you're not doing the full upskilling of an internal team before you've seen a return on investment and this is where the return on investments can get dwindled because it takes so much longer for them to claim them. The board gets bored, the stakeholders get disengaged. It's just another tech project. It sort of didn't knock our socks off and it didn't really wow us and it was okay but not great.

Whereas we're able to come in and make changes very quickly. We've had projects completed within eight weeks before so that's a complete return on investment within a eight week period and often that really helps politically. If you can do a pilot or something like that… oh sorry, if you have to do a pilot and you're able to do it with a partner then you want to pick something that is sort of politically an organizational-wide problem.

So we had a workshop not long ago where we were sort of going through about 20 processes and we've got various tools we used to map the return on investment per process and we'd gone through them and some of them were sort of up at hundreds of thousands of pounds of returns on investment for a single process.

Some of them were down at sort of 50k and then there was one for five and a half thousand pounds return on investment and they were like that's the one we want to do first. We were like, really? They said yeah. That is the most annoying politically-- annoying bugbear in this organization. If we fix that we'll be allowed to automate anything.

So that for them was the biggest win because what happens is they go and do that and then everyone in the organization is like, oh my god! You fixed expenses with this stuff and they're like yeah we did and then they suddenly want it and allow it into their bit of the organization.

Tim Butara: Yeah because they see the immediate return upfront and it's not always, it's not exclusively a return in finances in numbers in this case it was a kind of a structural, organizational return.

David Biden: Yes exactly.

Tim Butara: Right yeah, those are some very good examples. Thanks.

David Biden: Not a problem.

Tim Butara: Okay maybe moving a bit into the future, what do you think the future holds in store for RPA?

David Biden: I think we're going to continue to see the growth trend. I think it will wane slightly. People talk about the growth curve of hyper automation and things like that. I think there's a lot of basic stuff that still needs to be done. There's millions and millions of organizations out there that aren't using any form of RPA at the moment so I think we'll see them take it up.
In terms of the vendors, I think there's some really interesting stuff going on at the moment. You're starting to see Microsoft coming to the RPA space. They've recently purchased a small... medium-sized RPA company, they're hurriedly integrating that into their product and that is going to be one of the most serious and interesting things to happen to the industry because what we can see happening is what sort of Power BI did to Tableau.

I mean it didn't destroy it but it certainly stopped their growth, I would say. Once Microsoft are able to start offering RPA solutions at six pounds per person per month, for instance then that's going to be a huge shake-up for the RPA vendors out there and the way in which they license and sell their products. And then we've got rumors circling around that  Salesforce might be buying Blue Prism so that's another massive player coming into the space and a lot of these things get rumored for quite a while but I can see how that one might work.

So, I think Salesforce coming into the RPA space hot on the towers of Microsoft is going to be really interesting again. It's going to see changes to how things are licensed, changes to how things are sold. It will be sold as obviously… I mean an enhancement to the Salesforce platform or to the dynamics platform in Microsoft's case. So yeah some really interesting times and I think what that does seeing the likes of Salesforce and Microsoft move into this space is add validity to the whole of the market because what we've seen before is sort of UiPath, Automation Anywhere and Blue Prism really coming out of three different countries, massive growth as organizations over the last 10 years, just astronomical, but this will really turn that on its head if it's done right and it's sort of seen through.

So I'm interested to see what that, how they then respond because hopefully what this will do is drive further innovation in the RPA space for them to improve their products, to push them more towards using more AI-based technologies and integration with that so that they are sort of market leaders that differentiate themselves over some sort of standard, as it were, RPA that maybe a Microsoft or Salesforce could offer.

Something else I’d like to see is a bit more innovation on that front end of what intelligent automation can do. So there are some great products out there so that the Blue Prism Cloud one is one that is probably my personal favorite and that's because what they're doing is they're, that truly is intelligent automation and they're moving into starting to use a lot more of these AI-based technologies on top of the basic RPA stuff.

Tim Butara: Cool. Yeah it sounds like exciting times are ahead and a lot of potential as you said for a lot of kind of different scenarios.

David Biden: Yes very much so.

Tim Butara: Okay, I kind of… that does it for my RPA-related questions. Is there anything that you'd like to point out that maybe came to your mind while we were talking, something that we haven't discussed yet?

David Biden: I think one of the main takeaways for this is about focusing on the people within your organization. Probably spend… as a general rule try and spend more time focusing on what the people within the organization will do once you've automated things and slightly less time on which technology you're going to use, choose to do it with because there's a bunch out there that are very good and that shouldn't take up too much time really.

But allowing the sort of yourself the time to think about what the humans are going to do allows you sort of the creative thinking of; right what can we-- if I magically had 10 people more people in R&D or design or customer services, what would I do with them? What new products would we start to look at? What new capabilities on our platform do we start to develop? All of that stuff. And maybe I’m being a bit simplistic there because what often happens is the people that we freed up will need an element of retraining to go and do these different roles so that needs to be considered as part of it as well.

Tim Butara: And so you kind of need to see, take a look at not only what RPA or automation takes care of but also what it enables, what promises… I mean what potential it introduces for further innovation and optimization.

David Biden: Yeah exactly. And for me this RPA technology is technology that's the most closely aligned to humans than any other technology I can think of. A CRM system or an ERP system, a CMS or something like that doesn't look to mimic a human whereas often this does, so that’s why it's very emotive. You’ve got to consider that when you're speaking to your staff and your people about it. But again that's why it opens opportunities for organizations that haven't been there before.

Tim Butara: Yeah exactly. Great. Before we finish and before we do the closing remarks I only have one more kind of current question and you know 2020 has been a very difficult year so far but also one full of new opportunities. Do you have any words of advice to business owners, decision makers kind of as we're moving towards the very end of this super strange year?

David Biden: Yeah so not to sound like a stuck record but for me it would be to focus on my people. So how people treat their staff over the next 12 months as we come into probably a huge recession here in the UK but probably worldwide is what will differentiate them. We're all going to be under the same pressures, it's how you react to those pressures which differentiates you. It's how people will remember you. It's how your staff that do remain in the organization - they will remember how you treated their colleagues.

žOne of the initiatives we're looking at with one of our clients at the moment. They are not for profit, they're in a particularly tough sector, they've seen hundreds of thousands taken off of their revenue almost overnight and we're looking at… they are looking to remove staff from the organization because they just simply cannot afford to have them anymore. They want to look at automation for filling some of those gaps but what we're looking to do is work with them on off-boarding those staff before we start the project.

And what that means is as part of taking us on as a partner, we will help to upskill and train the exiting staff in elements of robotic process automation so at least they leave with some modern relevant skills that can hopefully help them on their next venture in the workplace. It's thinking differently, doing innovative things like that that will allow you to not only survive but when things have sort of turned the tide then start to thrive again.

Tim Butara: Man I just love your approach from what you've told me so far about human+, it seems like you really stand out in this space as a company. I mean, this particular example really shines out. It's helping businesses off board their employees. I mean that's so counterintuitive but so awesome really, great to hear it. It's so cool that you mentioned this.

David Biden: Yeah, thank you very much, thank you. It's kind of it obviously given the name it runs through absolutely everything that we do. I love technology, I’ve worked in technology for 20 years but none of it works without humans and one of the biggest things I’ve learned is that if you look after the humans the sort of technology takes care of itself really. They are without doubt the most important part of any technology project.

Tim Butara: Yeah and also you’ve worked with humans for longer than you’ve worked with technology, right?

David Biden: Yeah very much.

Tim Butara: Okay thanks so much David for having this great chat with me today and to our listeners that's all for this episode. Have a great day everyone and stay safe.

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