October 4, 2022 • 20 mins
In this episode, Maxim Ioffe (Intelligent Automation Leader, WESCO Distribution) and Andreas Welsch discuss why a pragmatic approach to process automation is critical. Maxim shares examples of successful automation projects and provides valuable advice for listeners looking to achieve results from their automation program quickly.
Key topics:
- Take a pragmatic approach to AI & automation
- Build and maintain an idea pipeline
- Succeed in real-life projects
Listen to the full episode to hear how you can:
- Build a culture and awareness for automation
- Develop a use case pipeline with your business stakeholders
- Create momentum and cycle of ideation and implementation
Watch this episode on YouTube: https://youtu.be/GUWVTD6ny1Q
Questions or suggestions? Send me a Text Message.
***********
Disclaimer: Views are the participants’ own and do not represent those of any participant’s past, present, or future employers. Participation in this event is independent of any potential business relationship (past, present, or future) between the participants or between their employers.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Andreas Welsch (00:00):
Maxim, thanks for joining.
Maxim Ioffe (00:01):
Thanks for having me.
Pleasure to be here.
Andreas Welsch (00:03):
Awesome.
Hey, why don't you tell us alittle bit about yourself?
Maxim Ioffe (00:06):
Sure.
So my name is Maxim and I leadthe global intelligent animation
center of excellence fordistribution.
We are a Fortune 200 company.
We are in 50 plus countries.
We are about 18,000 employeesstrong, and our mission is to
build, connect, power andprotect the world.
And in doing so, we arepartnering with about 50,000
(00:28):
suppliers, hundreds of thousandsof customers selling millions of
products.
And if there is one thing toknow about wholesale industry
and our indu and our company inparticular, the way we stay
relevant to the market is we aretrying to provide the extra
services, the customizedservices, the additional value
that is going strictly againstthe RPA mantra and the
(00:51):
intelligent automation mantra,finding highly repetitive
process with as few variationsas possible.
We adjust the opposite.
We have a ton of variations, andthat's how we do the business.
And that what sort of drives usto be as pragmatic as possible
in order to stay successful.
Awesome.
Andreas Welsch (01:10):
Awesome.
So great to see how you're doingthat at scale in the last, in,
in the business and scaling thatas well.
Usually we would run the buzzerin that question.
But I'll ask you straight away.
If AI were a book, what would itbe?
Maxim Ioffe (01:35):
Good question.
I am kinda thinking of thenonfiction aisle that I'm.
Okay let's do this.
You know those coffee table sizeart books that you see in museum
gift shops or the bookstores,and they have a lot of high
quality pictures printed on theglossy paper and they have a lot
of text, and sadly, a lot of usopen that book and go right
(01:57):
straight to the pictures, lookat the pictures get the
emotional response from it,whether it's excitement, whether
it's a little bit scared,whether it's a little bit
upsetting or making us happy,whatever that is.
There's a lot of great text inthose books, but not too many of
us read through it and very fewof us read the entire text.
I think AI is that book.
Andreas Welsch (02:18):
Awesome.
So definitely a lot of text, butwe love the pictures.
I feel automation already soundspretty straightforward.
It's a way of having a machinedo some tasks that otherwise so
in it, that already soundspretty pragmatic.
(02:39):
But why do you stress that wordpragmatic?
Why, what doesn't matter so muchto you?
Maxim Ioffe (02:45):
To me, again, sticking to that book analogy.
We are looking at the automationprograms, whether it includes AI
or it doesn't from the from manydifferent lenses.
One of those lenses is trying toevangelize, trying to ultimately
generate the pipeline, trying totalk about the capability, and
those are those pictures in thebook, and that's super important
(03:07):
to have great pictures, right?
It's super important to generatethe pipeline.
Anybody who found themself oncewithout the pipeline, who drives
the animation center.
Knows the feeling and it's not agood feeling to have when you
sit in there saying, okay, I gotthis great technology.
I got this great organization.
I hired the people.
Everything is great, but I haveno project to work on.
(03:29):
So evangelizing is a key, butthen it comes to how do you
evangelize what you can actuallybuild?
How is that text that's in thatbook?
Going to connect with the usersand with the pipeline that I can
generate.
It's great to generate theexcitement, but how can I
execute it?
And the third component to it,when we sell a book, when we
talk about those book items, thequestion becomes how do we,
(03:54):
what's the roi?
You write the book.
You create the book in order tosell the book, in order for
people to.
The roi, the utilization, thevalue it creates is what
ultimately matters.
Those are the three componentsthat drive our pragmatic
approach.
I was just at UiPath forwardevent last week, and there was a
big room.
(04:14):
Dedicated to how to evangelizeand how to theater, and there
was a really big room, very wellpacked.
I had a pleasure to present fromstage and that room, and that
was great.
There was equally big roomdedicated to technology, and
again, tons of folks, reallygreat examples, really great
success stories.
And then there was a workshop onhow to measure the ROI of the
(04:35):
program.
And that workshop was in a muchsmaller room, a lot less
attendees, and a lot.
Excitement about it.
And that was what sort of droveme to say, Hey, we gotta be
pragmatic.
We gotta make sure that it'simportant to talk about it.
That ultimately our success isin how pragmatic we are in being
(04:59):
able to deliver the results.
When we deliver results, if theyresonate with the business, we
guaranteed to get more pipeline.
And in a nutshell, that's whatpragmatic approaches to me.
Andreas Welsch (05:11):
Fantastic.
Keep it also relevant to thebusiness then.
I think that then aspect ofbuilding the pipeline or maybe
even your CoE finding yourselfwith a dried up pipeline or no
pipeline, it's a very importantand relevant one.
(05:32):
How have you gone about buildingthat pipeline specifically?
Maxim Ioffe (05:37):
That's a great question.
And I think for us, the pipelinecomes from three different
directions.
Again, we are trying to makesure that we always have plenty
of pipeline and plenty ofexcitement.
And if there is one thing forsure is that pipeline does not
build itself.
You got work it, you got toconstantly engage.
We do it from three differentdirections.
Top down approach is having theleadership.
(05:59):
Identify the opportunities,bring the opportunities to us,
and a big chunk of that iseducating that leadership team
so they know what's possible.
They know what kind ofopportunities we can toggle.
They know what the technology iscapable of doing.
This is where that booklesspictures come into play again,
to get the employee, get theexecutive team excited and give
(06:19):
us the.
The other approach that we takeis bottom up approach.
How do we work with citizendevelopers?
How do we work with folks on thelevel of doing the tasks to help
us to generate the pipeline?
Ultimately, they're the ones whocontrol utilization.
If somebody is bringing us anidea and says, Hey, can we
automate that?
(06:40):
Three things are guaranteed.
One.
They're way past the fear ofautomation.
They're not feared to bring anopportunity to us, and that's
great.
The second part that isguaranteed is that they are
going to use that animation.
They're the ones who created it.
They're the ones who advocatedfor it.
They're the ones who are goingto promote that animation.
And the other thing that'sguaranteed.
(07:02):
The third thing is that they'regonna be pretty flexible about
building this animation.
And that's where I've seen CoEsthat are driven strictly by the
specs.
You have a lot of layers inbetween the users and the
developers.
And developers build to the specand we measure success and
building into the spec.
We don't do that.
We measure to the need of thebusiness and our developers are
(07:24):
not trade and actively comingback to the business saying, Hey
guys, if we could tweak yourprocess a little bit, it would
make the automation that muchmore effective.
Can we talk about it?
Can we see it?
And guess as users feel, Own theanimation as user feel that
they're the ones who are makingthe recommendations in the query
in charge.
They're much more flexible aboutchanging the project, coming to
(07:47):
the team saying, Hey, I'm fromcorporate.
I want change your project.
I wanna automate your project isnot gonna get us there.
This is where for us, this topdown and GU map approaches are
the key, but equally importantas going to the horizontally.
We are lean company, we.
Speak focus on lean ouroperations as well as digital
(08:09):
transformation teams.
I work very closely with BOT tomake sure that we can design for
animation, where if we do leanguys and if we look at the
process, if we're trying torebuild the process from
scratch, what tweak the process,we are doing it in animation
friendly way.
Maybe we'll not put animationinto it right away, but if we
are designing the process withan understanding that this is
(08:30):
the area where an automation caninject itself and make a
difference.
So by hearing the pipeline fromall three of those angles, and
by creating the excitement, weare able to move forward fairly
well.
The other thing on the pipelinefront is that we are really
trying to shift the paradigm ofwho owns the a.
A lot of times you would come inand say, Hey, I build the
(08:52):
animation, I got the spectrumfrom the users, and then I take
it from there.
I build it, I own it.
I try to own myself on it.
We're trying to approach it alittle bit differently.
We're saying, look, ultimatelyevery animation is built for a
reason.
It's built for an employee toexecute.
It's built for the business tobe success.
Let them be the winners.
Let them be decision makers.
(09:13):
Let them be the drivers.
We're just there to help them tobuild their animation as a
global center of excellence, weare jacks of all trades and
masters of none.
We get pipeline from accountingand finance, and I'm not a C P
A.
We get pipeline from HR and Idon't know.
Too much about that aspect ofit.
We get pipeline from salesseparations, inventory, and all
(09:34):
the other things.
Yeah, we have enough commonsense to get a gist of what
they're trying to do, but we'renot experts, right?
So let the experts drive us.
Let the experts tell us whatthey need.
Let the experts decide whatmakes sense.
We'll follow the experts.
We will allow them to be theleaders and the drivers.
And what it.
It creates a success story forthe expert.
(09:56):
The folks in accounting,finance, or sales or operations
or Aria build the animation.
They feel great about thatanimation.
They claim that success to theirmanagers.
Does success story end uppresenting to the greater
organization, not by us, but bythose?
And of course they mentioned whobuild it, and of course we get
(10:17):
more pipeline and more accoladesfrom it.
But the most important part forus is to make sure that the
business build the ownership,the business have it and the
business can drive that.
That's what sort of becomes abig part of our pragmatic call
is it's not about.
I'm good, I'm great.
It's not about feeding my, it'snot about bringing the
(10:39):
technology to the company.
It's about solving the realproblems for real people.
With their help, with theirengagement, with their guidance,
with their leadership, we arethere to help and support, and
that approach allows us to haveno shortage of the pipeline and
very comfortable sitting heresaying Pipeline is not an issue
for us as far as generation.
Pipeline is more of an issue forus in terms of how quickly we
(11:02):
can implement.
Andreas Welsch (11:04):
That sounds like when you can pick and choose or
have a backlog of things to, youmentioned this implicitly I
feel.
But what does success look likeif you say you want the business
to be the driver and the owner,how are you measured?
(11:24):
What does this look like for youand for the CoE?
Maxim Ioffe (11:29):
There are multiple metrics of success.
One of the success stories thatwe had is we were smart to
define the success early on inthe journey.
We started out by say this ishow we measure the value.
Our key indicators are going tobe time saved where somebody
used to do the work manual andthey don't know no longer cap to
plus value created where we havetasks that were not done
(11:52):
manually because nobody has theresources and time to do it.
And we were able to create thatcapacity and address those task.
and then what we do is we have aframework that validates that
success.
We are going to the stakeholdersand do freeway validation.
One part of the that validationis, does the business, the
smooth read to that number do Igave, is the number.
(12:15):
Does the CFO organization existwith this number?
So we have the framework and wehave these checks.
And I've had instances whenfolks come to me and say, we're
a team of four and we are goingto build the elimination that is
going to save us 10,000 hours.
And I say, 10,000 hours islovely, but you're a team of
four.
You don't have 10,000 hours tosave.
And what are you going to dowhen you implement that?
(12:36):
So maybe it's not saving time,maybe it's extra capacity.
Maybe we need to go back.
It gives us the ultimatecredibility to.
And those numbers and the ROI isa big part of our success.
The other big part of oursuccess is employee education,
making sure that folks trust usto automate.
There's no fear of losing drops.
There is no fear of automationand ai, and that's super
(12:59):
important for us.
We try to make it as accessible,as user-friendly as possible.
And ultimately it's the changeof business.
The mission of our company is tobuild, connect, power, and
protect the world.
How does our program help that?
How do we stay aligned with thestrategy and the mission?
That's a big part of our successcriteria as well.
Andreas Welsch (13:20):
Fantastic.
I think that's always good tomake it tangible.
It sounds great to say, thebusiness and work closely with
them or even give more and moreownership to them, but then,
translate into some measurableobjectives and maybe savings on
other parts.
(13:41):
So thanks for sharing that.
You had already mentioned somethings when we spoke a couple of
weeks ago.
How this come together?
What's a great example from thework that you're doing well,
what can others learn from it?
Maxim Ioffe (13:57):
One of the examples I can bring is within supply
chain.
If anybody has been away for thelast couple of years, supply
chain has been in use all thetime, and between supply chain
disruptions, supply chaincrisis, and whatever else it's
being.
We're in the middle of that andagain, trying to stay pragmatic
and consistent with the mission.
(14:18):
We were trying to figure out theways to help our partners to get
a little bit better visibilityof the product, where the
product is, and where we areable or unable to meet the
commitments that we make to ourpartners.
Part of that was building aframework where we are trying to
figure out where the product isby pulling the data from our
partners and in injecting itinto our own.
(14:42):
We're a company of multipleERPs, so it got to be injected
into multiple places and thenreporting back to the customers,
explaining here's where we couldbe jeopardizing their orders and
here's what we can do to helpstarting the conversation, not
after the fact and it's too lateand we already missed the
commitment, but way before thefact where we can still make a
difference.
(15:03):
In order to do that, wemagnetize the suppliers into
multiple categories.
We figured those that can.
Data from EDI, API and otherintegrations.
That's great.
We don't need to change that.
But out 50,000 suppliers that wepartner with is not everybody is
capable of doing it.
So what we did is we startedlooking at one supplier at a,
(15:25):
trying to, what's the best wayto.
Extract the data.
In some cases it would be goinginto their web portal.
In some cases it's receiving thereport from their sites and
doing something with it.
So we en enlisted our citizendevelopers to build those little
bots that connect to individualpartners and extract the portion
of the data.
(15:45):
Each one of them is fairlysimple.
The steps to get to the data areusually 10, 20, 30 clicks and a
bunch of types.
Not that difficult, but thereare a.
And those are exactly the thingsthat citizen developers can do
very effectively.
So we build a framework where acitizen developer can plug in
any partner they want veryeasily.
We have over a hundred partnersplugged in that way, but then
(16:08):
our center of excellence buildother animations that would take
that data compared to what wecurrently have.
An hour systems identify theirmaterial change as occurred.
Put that data back into oursystem.
So again, think about 10, 15, 20different processes embedded
into the steps just described,and then create the.
(16:28):
Data and prescriptive analyticsthat our team need to engage
with customers and solve theproblem.
We build all that as acollaboration of many citizen
developers, many as well ascenter of excellence and
departments.
And the cool thing about it, wedidn't build it all at once, we.
Rolled it out as it was ready.
(16:50):
So the first point piece wasrolled out to just update the RP
system.
Great.
And then we have more data toupgrade the RP system even
better.
And then there is a bot thatextracts the data from e r P
report.
Let's do that.
By taking this phase approach,we were able to deliver the
results rather quickly, and wehave a framework where we can
(17:10):
partner with hundred, thousand,however many partners we need to
partner with to extract the dataand get the results.
Again, it's all about thescalability.
It's all about doing it atspeed, not waiting for the
perfect process that will nevercome, not waiting for the most
complicated solution, just doingwhat we can and getting those
(17:32):
tangible results as quickly aspossible.
If that's not keeping itpragmatic, I dunno what would
be.
Andreas Welsch (17:38):
Again, thanks for sharing that example.
Always good to hear howcompanies are going about these
things and whether theopportunities lie.
Thank you.
Maxim Ioffe (17:52):
Thank you very much.
Pleasure.
Andreas Welsch (17:54):
So maybe can you quickly summarize the top three
takeaways for our, and thenwe'll wrap it?
Maxim Ioffe (18:04):
For me, the three key takeaways are would be,
first of all, the pipeline,right?
You've got to have the pipeline.
And in order to have thepipeline, you gotta to have the
culture and awareness.
And the culture and awarenesscomes from educating the
employees.
That comes from doing the gatepresentation.
We started with the booklets andthen as well, having that book
ready where the text is solidand the pictures are solid,
(18:28):
really helps to evangelize.
And then deliver on that.
And it's a circle where youevangelize the ideas, you
implement those ideas, you havethis solid way of measuring
value and results.
And that value and results is asuccess story that helps with
culture and awareness that helpswith the pipeline.
(18:48):
that gives you more things toimplement, present more value
and cycle continues.
Staying in that cycle and havinga consistent model, keeping it
very pragmatic where we don't goup to technology, we go after
results and technology is a wayto get there, is what I think
helped our success and I thinkthat's a very scalable example
that can help anybody.
Andreas Welsch (19:10):
Thanks so much for joining us, for sharing your
expertise Maxim.
Maxim Ioffe (19:14):
Thank you very much for having me.
Maxim, thanks for joining.
Maxim Ioffe (00:01):
Thanks for having me.
Pleasure to be here.
Andreas Welsch (00:03):
Awesome.
Hey, why don't you tell us alittle bit about yourself?
Maxim Ioffe (00:06):
Sure.
So my name is Maxim and I leadthe global intelligent animation
center of excellence fordistribution.
We are a Fortune 200 company.
We are in 50 plus countries.
We are about 18,000 employeesstrong, and our mission is to
build, connect, power andprotect the world.
And in doing so, we arepartnering with about 50,000
(00:28):
suppliers, hundreds of thousandsof customers selling millions of
products.
And if there is one thing toknow about wholesale industry
and our indu and our company inparticular, the way we stay
relevant to the market is we aretrying to provide the extra
services, the customizedservices, the additional value
that is going strictly againstthe RPA mantra and the
(00:51):
intelligent automation mantra,finding highly repetitive
process with as few variationsas possible.
We adjust the opposite.
We have a ton of variations, andthat's how we do the business.
And that what sort of drives usto be as pragmatic as possible
in order to stay successful.
Awesome.
Andreas Welsch (01:10):
Awesome.
So great to see how you're doingthat at scale in the last, in,
in the business and scaling thatas well.
Usually we would run the buzzerin that question.
But I'll ask you straight away.
If AI were a book, what would itbe?
Maxim Ioffe (01:35):
Good question.
I am kinda thinking of thenonfiction aisle that I'm.
Okay let's do this.
You know those coffee table sizeart books that you see in museum
gift shops or the bookstores,and they have a lot of high
quality pictures printed on theglossy paper and they have a lot
of text, and sadly, a lot of usopen that book and go right
(01:57):
straight to the pictures, lookat the pictures get the
emotional response from it,whether it's excitement, whether
it's a little bit scared,whether it's a little bit
upsetting or making us happy,whatever that is.
There's a lot of great text inthose books, but not too many of
us read through it and very fewof us read the entire text.
I think AI is that book.
Andreas Welsch (02:18):
Awesome.
So definitely a lot of text, butwe love the pictures.
I feel automation already soundspretty straightforward.
It's a way of having a machinedo some tasks that otherwise so
in it, that already soundspretty pragmatic.
(02:39):
But why do you stress that wordpragmatic?
Why, what doesn't matter so muchto you?
Maxim Ioffe (02:45):
To me, again, sticking to that book analogy.
We are looking at the automationprograms, whether it includes AI
or it doesn't from the from manydifferent lenses.
One of those lenses is trying toevangelize, trying to ultimately
generate the pipeline, trying totalk about the capability, and
those are those pictures in thebook, and that's super important
(03:07):
to have great pictures, right?
It's super important to generatethe pipeline.
Anybody who found themself oncewithout the pipeline, who drives
the animation center.
Knows the feeling and it's not agood feeling to have when you
sit in there saying, okay, I gotthis great technology.
I got this great organization.
I hired the people.
Everything is great, but I haveno project to work on.
(03:29):
So evangelizing is a key, butthen it comes to how do you
evangelize what you can actuallybuild?
How is that text that's in thatbook?
Going to connect with the usersand with the pipeline that I can
generate.
It's great to generate theexcitement, but how can I
execute it?
And the third component to it,when we sell a book, when we
talk about those book items, thequestion becomes how do we,
(03:54):
what's the roi?
You write the book.
You create the book in order tosell the book, in order for
people to.
The roi, the utilization, thevalue it creates is what
ultimately matters.
Those are the three componentsthat drive our pragmatic
approach.
I was just at UiPath forwardevent last week, and there was a
big room.
(04:14):
Dedicated to how to evangelizeand how to theater, and there
was a really big room, very wellpacked.
I had a pleasure to present fromstage and that room, and that
was great.
There was equally big roomdedicated to technology, and
again, tons of folks, reallygreat examples, really great
success stories.
And then there was a workshop onhow to measure the ROI of the
(04:35):
program.
And that workshop was in a muchsmaller room, a lot less
attendees, and a lot.
Excitement about it.
And that was what sort of droveme to say, Hey, we gotta be
pragmatic.
We gotta make sure that it'simportant to talk about it.
That ultimately our success isin how pragmatic we are in being
(04:59):
able to deliver the results.
When we deliver results, if theyresonate with the business, we
guaranteed to get more pipeline.
And in a nutshell, that's whatpragmatic approaches to me.
Andreas Welsch (05:11):
Fantastic.
Keep it also relevant to thebusiness then.
I think that then aspect ofbuilding the pipeline or maybe
even your CoE finding yourselfwith a dried up pipeline or no
pipeline, it's a very importantand relevant one.
(05:32):
How have you gone about buildingthat pipeline specifically?
Maxim Ioffe (05:37):
That's a great question.
And I think for us, the pipelinecomes from three different
directions.
Again, we are trying to makesure that we always have plenty
of pipeline and plenty ofexcitement.
And if there is one thing forsure is that pipeline does not
build itself.
You got work it, you got toconstantly engage.
We do it from three differentdirections.
Top down approach is having theleadership.
(05:59):
Identify the opportunities,bring the opportunities to us,
and a big chunk of that iseducating that leadership team
so they know what's possible.
They know what kind ofopportunities we can toggle.
They know what the technology iscapable of doing.
This is where that booklesspictures come into play again,
to get the employee, get theexecutive team excited and give
(06:19):
us the.
The other approach that we takeis bottom up approach.
How do we work with citizendevelopers?
How do we work with folks on thelevel of doing the tasks to help
us to generate the pipeline?
Ultimately, they're the ones whocontrol utilization.
If somebody is bringing us anidea and says, Hey, can we
automate that?
(06:40):
Three things are guaranteed.
One.
They're way past the fear ofautomation.
They're not feared to bring anopportunity to us, and that's
great.
The second part that isguaranteed is that they are
going to use that animation.
They're the ones who created it.
They're the ones who advocatedfor it.
They're the ones who are goingto promote that animation.
And the other thing that'sguaranteed.
(07:02):
The third thing is that they'regonna be pretty flexible about
building this animation.
And that's where I've seen CoEsthat are driven strictly by the
specs.
You have a lot of layers inbetween the users and the
developers.
And developers build to the specand we measure success and
building into the spec.
We don't do that.
We measure to the need of thebusiness and our developers are
(07:24):
not trade and actively comingback to the business saying, Hey
guys, if we could tweak yourprocess a little bit, it would
make the automation that muchmore effective.
Can we talk about it?
Can we see it?
And guess as users feel, Own theanimation as user feel that
they're the ones who are makingthe recommendations in the query
in charge.
They're much more flexible aboutchanging the project, coming to
(07:47):
the team saying, Hey, I'm fromcorporate.
I want change your project.
I wanna automate your project isnot gonna get us there.
This is where for us, this topdown and GU map approaches are
the key, but equally importantas going to the horizontally.
We are lean company, we.
Speak focus on lean ouroperations as well as digital
(08:09):
transformation teams.
I work very closely with BOT tomake sure that we can design for
animation, where if we do leanguys and if we look at the
process, if we're trying torebuild the process from
scratch, what tweak the process,we are doing it in animation
friendly way.
Maybe we'll not put animationinto it right away, but if we
are designing the process withan understanding that this is
(08:30):
the area where an automation caninject itself and make a
difference.
So by hearing the pipeline fromall three of those angles, and
by creating the excitement, weare able to move forward fairly
well.
The other thing on the pipelinefront is that we are really
trying to shift the paradigm ofwho owns the a.
A lot of times you would come inand say, Hey, I build the
(08:52):
animation, I got the spectrumfrom the users, and then I take
it from there.
I build it, I own it.
I try to own myself on it.
We're trying to approach it alittle bit differently.
We're saying, look, ultimatelyevery animation is built for a
reason.
It's built for an employee toexecute.
It's built for the business tobe success.
Let them be the winners.
Let them be decision makers.
(09:13):
Let them be the drivers.
We're just there to help them tobuild their animation as a
global center of excellence, weare jacks of all trades and
masters of none.
We get pipeline from accountingand finance, and I'm not a C P
A.
We get pipeline from HR and Idon't know.
Too much about that aspect ofit.
We get pipeline from salesseparations, inventory, and all
(09:34):
the other things.
Yeah, we have enough commonsense to get a gist of what
they're trying to do, but we'renot experts, right?
So let the experts drive us.
Let the experts tell us whatthey need.
Let the experts decide whatmakes sense.
We'll follow the experts.
We will allow them to be theleaders and the drivers.
And what it.
It creates a success story forthe expert.
(09:56):
The folks in accounting,finance, or sales or operations
or Aria build the animation.
They feel great about thatanimation.
They claim that success to theirmanagers.
Does success story end uppresenting to the greater
organization, not by us, but bythose?
And of course they mentioned whobuild it, and of course we get
(10:17):
more pipeline and more accoladesfrom it.
But the most important part forus is to make sure that the
business build the ownership,the business have it and the
business can drive that.
That's what sort of becomes abig part of our pragmatic call
is it's not about.
I'm good, I'm great.
It's not about feeding my, it'snot about bringing the
(10:39):
technology to the company.
It's about solving the realproblems for real people.
With their help, with theirengagement, with their guidance,
with their leadership, we arethere to help and support, and
that approach allows us to haveno shortage of the pipeline and
very comfortable sitting heresaying Pipeline is not an issue
for us as far as generation.
Pipeline is more of an issue forus in terms of how quickly we
(11:02):
can implement.
Andreas Welsch (11:04):
That sounds like when you can pick and choose or
have a backlog of things to, youmentioned this implicitly I
feel.
But what does success look likeif you say you want the business
to be the driver and the owner,how are you measured?
(11:24):
What does this look like for youand for the CoE?
Maxim Ioffe (11:29):
There are multiple metrics of success.
One of the success stories thatwe had is we were smart to
define the success early on inthe journey.
We started out by say this ishow we measure the value.
Our key indicators are going tobe time saved where somebody
used to do the work manual andthey don't know no longer cap to
plus value created where we havetasks that were not done
(11:52):
manually because nobody has theresources and time to do it.
And we were able to create thatcapacity and address those task.
and then what we do is we have aframework that validates that
success.
We are going to the stakeholdersand do freeway validation.
One part of the that validationis, does the business, the
smooth read to that number do Igave, is the number.
(12:15):
Does the CFO organization existwith this number?
So we have the framework and wehave these checks.
And I've had instances whenfolks come to me and say, we're
a team of four and we are goingto build the elimination that is
going to save us 10,000 hours.
And I say, 10,000 hours islovely, but you're a team of
four.
You don't have 10,000 hours tosave.
And what are you going to dowhen you implement that?
(12:36):
So maybe it's not saving time,maybe it's extra capacity.
Maybe we need to go back.
It gives us the ultimatecredibility to.
And those numbers and the ROI isa big part of our success.
The other big part of oursuccess is employee education,
making sure that folks trust usto automate.
There's no fear of losing drops.
There is no fear of automationand ai, and that's super
(12:59):
important for us.
We try to make it as accessible,as user-friendly as possible.
And ultimately it's the changeof business.
The mission of our company is tobuild, connect, power, and
protect the world.
How does our program help that?
How do we stay aligned with thestrategy and the mission?
That's a big part of our successcriteria as well.
Andreas Welsch (13:20):
Fantastic.
I think that's always good tomake it tangible.
It sounds great to say, thebusiness and work closely with
them or even give more and moreownership to them, but then,
translate into some measurableobjectives and maybe savings on
other parts.
(13:41):
So thanks for sharing that.
You had already mentioned somethings when we spoke a couple of
weeks ago.
How this come together?
What's a great example from thework that you're doing well,
what can others learn from it?
Maxim Ioffe (13:57):
One of the examples I can bring is within supply
chain.
If anybody has been away for thelast couple of years, supply
chain has been in use all thetime, and between supply chain
disruptions, supply chaincrisis, and whatever else it's
being.
We're in the middle of that andagain, trying to stay pragmatic
and consistent with the mission.
(14:18):
We were trying to figure out theways to help our partners to get
a little bit better visibilityof the product, where the
product is, and where we areable or unable to meet the
commitments that we make to ourpartners.
Part of that was building aframework where we are trying to
figure out where the product isby pulling the data from our
partners and in injecting itinto our own.
(14:42):
We're a company of multipleERPs, so it got to be injected
into multiple places and thenreporting back to the customers,
explaining here's where we couldbe jeopardizing their orders and
here's what we can do to helpstarting the conversation, not
after the fact and it's too lateand we already missed the
commitment, but way before thefact where we can still make a
difference.
(15:03):
In order to do that, wemagnetize the suppliers into
multiple categories.
We figured those that can.
Data from EDI, API and otherintegrations.
That's great.
We don't need to change that.
But out 50,000 suppliers that wepartner with is not everybody is
capable of doing it.
So what we did is we startedlooking at one supplier at a,
(15:25):
trying to, what's the best wayto.
Extract the data.
In some cases it would be goinginto their web portal.
In some cases it's receiving thereport from their sites and
doing something with it.
So we en enlisted our citizendevelopers to build those little
bots that connect to individualpartners and extract the portion
of the data.
(15:45):
Each one of them is fairlysimple.
The steps to get to the data areusually 10, 20, 30 clicks and a
bunch of types.
Not that difficult, but thereare a.
And those are exactly the thingsthat citizen developers can do
very effectively.
So we build a framework where acitizen developer can plug in
any partner they want veryeasily.
We have over a hundred partnersplugged in that way, but then
(16:08):
our center of excellence buildother animations that would take
that data compared to what wecurrently have.
An hour systems identify theirmaterial change as occurred.
Put that data back into oursystem.
So again, think about 10, 15, 20different processes embedded
into the steps just described,and then create the.
(16:28):
Data and prescriptive analyticsthat our team need to engage
with customers and solve theproblem.
We build all that as acollaboration of many citizen
developers, many as well ascenter of excellence and
departments.
And the cool thing about it, wedidn't build it all at once, we.
Rolled it out as it was ready.
(16:50):
So the first point piece wasrolled out to just update the RP
system.
Great.
And then we have more data toupgrade the RP system even
better.
And then there is a bot thatextracts the data from e r P
report.
Let's do that.
By taking this phase approach,we were able to deliver the
results rather quickly, and wehave a framework where we can
(17:10):
partner with hundred, thousand,however many partners we need to
partner with to extract the dataand get the results.
Again, it's all about thescalability.
It's all about doing it atspeed, not waiting for the
perfect process that will nevercome, not waiting for the most
complicated solution, just doingwhat we can and getting those
(17:32):
tangible results as quickly aspossible.
If that's not keeping itpragmatic, I dunno what would
be.
Andreas Welsch (17:38):
Again, thanks for sharing that example.
Always good to hear howcompanies are going about these
things and whether theopportunities lie.
Thank you.
Maxim Ioffe (17:52):
Thank you very much.
Pleasure.
Andreas Welsch (17:54):
So maybe can you quickly summarize the top three
takeaways for our, and thenwe'll wrap it?
Maxim Ioffe (18:04):
For me, the three key takeaways are would be,
first of all, the pipeline,right?
You've got to have the pipeline.
And in order to have thepipeline, you gotta to have the
culture and awareness.
And the culture and awarenesscomes from educating the
employees.
That comes from doing the gatepresentation.
We started with the booklets andthen as well, having that book
ready where the text is solidand the pictures are solid,
(18:28):
really helps to evangelize.
And then deliver on that.
And it's a circle where youevangelize the ideas, you
implement those ideas, you havethis solid way of measuring
value and results.
And that value and results is asuccess story that helps with
culture and awareness that helpswith the pipeline.
(18:48):
that gives you more things toimplement, present more value
and cycle continues.
Staying in that cycle and havinga consistent model, keeping it
very pragmatic where we don't goup to technology, we go after
results and technology is a wayto get there, is what I think
helped our success and I thinkthat's a very scalable example
that can help anybody.
Andreas Welsch (19:10):
Thanks so much for joining us, for sharing your
expertise Maxim.
Maxim Ioffe (19:14):
Thank you very much for having me.
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