Outsourcing to Digital Shore Part 2

Part 2 of the interview with Chieng Moua, Vice President of Innovation at Blue Prism, a company that provides Intelligent RPA solutions to accelerate automation at enterprises across the globe.

To read Part 1 of the interview, click here.

Chieng, Blue Prism is the top player in the RPA market. How do you differentiate yourself from the competition?

The key differentiator for us is that while many of our competitors look at automation as a Desktop automation per se, which Blue Prism can do, or they look at specific task automation such as checking email, doing spreadsheets, we are looking at it from a very different perspective. We’re saying, what if you could automate the entire process?

We have been able to separate the work from the digital worker. That is a massive differentiator because how we train our digital workers is unique because you can share that knowledge across all the Blue Prism, not just one specific customer. And that’s what we’re doing.

I think our RPA will quickly evolve from an automation capability into a knowledge management capability.

Because as you learn and as you create, as you start to model different business processes for different industries, you begin to create a knowledge library that enables any business based upon best practices.

Another differentiator is that we are very secure. We are very stable and scalable. All the things that have made us a billion-dollar company. But the focus here is how do we take that billion-dollar company to be a ten to a hundred billion-dollar company? The only way is to inject knowledge, digital talent, and creativity into that digital worker.

What kind of talent are you personally bringing to your teams to create the innovation culture?

I always look for three things when I hire – people who can learn, people who’re willing to accept feedback, and people who are willing to fail because that’s the only way you’re going ever to innovate. 

The most important thing that innovators can do when hiring people to come to work for them is hiring people who ask questions.

The other approach is learning from making mistakes. We have many projects that start inside the Innovation Center that do fail. Many times, they failed because of the resources, complexity of systems, or maybe because we didn’t measure the right metrics for success. But many of the initiatives that we promote into the product and amongst the teams throughout Blue Prism are highly successful because we learn from our failures and listen to feedback from our customers, partners, employees, and prospects to fuel our ideas. 

Maybe you could share a successful case study with us?

A year and a half ago, we had a study done on one of our customers in the banking finance organization who had deployed RPA Intelligent Automation in their business unit and with just a few processes, that is both checking credits, validations, underwriting, as well as loan risks and originations. They facilitated a positive over 53 million dollars of risk management and savings within twelve months. So, a few digital workers working out of a high-risk piece of their business, facilitating a risk factor, reducing that risk by 53 million dollars. 

I can share another story of an airline company that had changed their business models specifically to incorporate ‘just-in-time’ shipping that concept of being able to understand how much room is left on the underneath of a passenger airplane so they can sell that cargo space at a premium because there’s maybe a cargo that needs to be on that flight to a destination immediately. 

It took about ten days to model the business process and another twenty days to validate and test the business model. Within a month, this airline company was able to create a new business model that generated revenue.

Now that airline company is not only shipping passengers but also just-in-time shipments at a premium that they never even thought about doing. It created a whole new revenue line, and that’s in the hundreds of millions of dollars that generate revenue for them. So, intelligent automation is not just about saving money. It is also about creating value for many of our customers. That is top-line growth.

How can smaller companies keep up with the progress?

It is exciting that if you are a small business today or even a startup, you have a much better chance of success than you were 10, 15 years ago. The reason is that access to technology for your business is much cheaper today than it was in the past.

At the same time, the challenges of a small company adapting to the needs of a customer are much, much faster than compared to like a GE or a GM. Because if you compare a Tesla who is fairly new to GM or Ford, their market capitalization is the highest in the automotive business. Why is that? The reality is that GM and Ford can only innovate so much with their current technology and with their current customers.

That is unique because if you are a small business and how you want to leverage RPA, Intelligent Automation is a unique value proposition. After all, if you are able to automate some of your business processes, you may not have to incur the same expense the large businesses require. If you are able to do so, you can operate at a lower cost, enabling the relocation of investment and resources to succeed.

At Blue Prism, we are thinking about how we can engage the mid-market and small businesses specifically to expand our footprint.

Blue Prism has been traditionally targeting the enterprise markets, the global 2000 businesses, but there are discussions on how do we address the mid-market and the smaller business.

Chieng, thank you for taking the time to talk with The Prime View and sharing your thoughts on innovation and the future trends in Robotic Process Automation.

Stay tuned to the next interviews!