Keep It Pragmatic with Automation & AI (Guest: Maxim Ioffe)

Andreas Welsch: 0:21

Maxim, thanks for joining.

Maxim Ioffe: 0:23

Thanks for having me. Pleasure to be here.

Andreas Welsch: 0:25

Awesome. Hey, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Maxim Ioffe: 0:27

Sure. So my name is Maxim and I lead the global intelligent animation center of excellence for distribution. We are a Fortune 200 company. We are in 50 plus countries. We are about 18,000 employees strong, and our mission is to build, connect, power and protect the world. And in doing so, we are partnering with about 50,000 suppliers, hundreds of thousands of customers selling millions of products. And if there is one thing to know about wholesale industry and our indu and our company in particular, the way we stay relevant to the market is we are trying to provide the extra services, the customized services, the additional value that is going strictly against the RPA mantra and the intelligent automation mantra, finding highly repetitive process with as few variations as possible. We adjust the opposite. We have a ton of variations, and that's how we do the business. And that what sort of drives us to be as pragmatic as possible in order to stay successful. Awesome.

Andreas Welsch: 1:32

Awesome. So great to see how you're doing that at scale in the last, in, in the business and scaling that as well. Usually we would run the buzzer in that question. But I'll ask you straight away. If AI were a book, what would it be?

Maxim Ioffe: 1:56

Good question. I am kinda thinking of the nonfiction aisle that I'm. Okay let's do this. You know those coffee table size art books that you see in museum gift shops or the bookstores, and they have a lot of high quality pictures printed on the glossy paper and they have a lot of text, and sadly, a lot of us open that book and go right straight to the pictures, look at 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 in those books, but not too many of us read through it and very few of us read the entire text. I think AI is that book.

Andreas Welsch: 2:40

Awesome. So definitely a lot of text, but we love the pictures. I feel automation already sounds pretty straightforward. It's a way of having a machine do some tasks that otherwise so in it, that already sounds pretty pragmatic. But why do you stress that word pragmatic? Why, what doesn't matter so much to you?

Maxim Ioffe: 3:06

To me, again, sticking to that book analogy. We are looking at the automation programs, whether it includes AI or it doesn't from the from many different lenses. One of those lenses is trying to evangelize, trying to ultimately generate the pipeline, trying to talk about the capability, and those are those pictures in the book, and that's super important to have great pictures, right? It's super important to generate the pipeline. Anybody who found themself once without the pipeline, who drives the animation center. Knows the feeling and it's not a good feeling to have when you sit in there saying, okay, I got this great technology. I got this great organization. I hired the people. Everything is great, but I have no project to work on. So evangelizing is a key, but then it comes to how do you evangelize what you can actually build? How is that text that's in that book? Going to connect with the users and with the pipeline that I can generate. It's great to generate the excitement, but how can I execute it? And the third component to it, when we sell a book, when we talk about those book items, the question becomes how do we, what's the roi? You write the book. You create the book in order to sell the book, in order for people to. The roi, the utilization, the value it creates is what ultimately matters. Those are the three components that drive our pragmatic approach. I was just at UiPath forward event last week, and there was a big room. Dedicated to how to evangelize and how to theater, and there was a really big room, very well packed. I had a pleasure to present from stage and that room, and that was great. There was equally big room dedicated to technology, and again, tons of folks, really great examples, really great success stories. And then there was a workshop on how to measure the ROI of the program. And that workshop was in a much smaller room, a lot less attendees, and a lot. Excitement about it. And that was what sort of drove me to say, Hey, we gotta be pragmatic. We gotta make sure that it's important to talk about it. That ultimately our success is in how pragmatic we are in being able to deliver the results. When we deliver results, if they resonate with the business, we guaranteed to get more pipeline. And in a nutshell, that's what pragmatic approaches to me.

Andreas Welsch: 5:32

Fantastic. Keep it also relevant to the business then. I think that then aspect of building the pipeline or maybe even your CoE finding yourself with a dried up pipeline or no pipeline, it's a very important and relevant one. How have you gone about building that pipeline specifically?

Maxim Ioffe: 5:59

That's a great question. And I think for us, the pipeline comes from three different directions. Again, we are trying to make sure that we always have plenty of pipeline and plenty of excitement. And if there is one thing for sure is that pipeline does not build itself. You got work it, you got to constantly engage. We do it from three different directions. Top down approach is having the leadership. Identify the opportunities, bring the opportunities to us, and a big chunk of that is educating that leadership team so they know what's possible. They know what kind of opportunities we can toggle. They know what the technology is capable of doing. This is where that bookless pictures come into play again, to get the employee, get the executive team excited and give us the. The other approach that we take is bottom up approach. How do we work with citizen developers? How do we work with folks on the level of doing the tasks to help us to generate the pipeline? Ultimately, they're the ones who control utilization. If somebody is bringing us an idea and says, Hey, can we automate that? Three things are guaranteed. One. They're way past the fear of automation. They're not feared to bring an opportunity to us, and that's great. The second part that is guaranteed is that they are going to use that animation. They're the ones who created it. They're the ones who advocated for it. They're the ones who are going to promote that animation. And the other thing that's guaranteed. The third thing is that they're gonna be pretty flexible about building this animation. And that's where I've seen CoEs that are driven strictly by the specs. You have a lot of layers in between the users and the developers. And developers build to the spec and we measure success and building into the spec. We don't do that. We measure to the need of the business and our developers are not trade and actively coming back to the business saying, Hey guys, if we could tweak your process a little bit, it would make the automation that much more effective. Can we talk about it? Can we see it? And guess as users feel, Own the animation as user feel that they're the ones who are making the recommendations in the query in charge. They're much more flexible about changing the project, coming to the team saying, Hey, I'm from corporate. I want change your project. I wanna automate your project is not gonna get us there. This is where for us, this top down and GU map approaches are the key, but equally important as going to the horizontally. We are lean company, we. Speak focus on lean our operations as well as digital transformation teams. I work very closely with BOT to make sure that we can design for animation, where if we do lean guys and if we look at the process, if we're trying to rebuild the process from scratch, what tweak the process, we are doing it in animation friendly way. Maybe we'll not put animation into it right away, but if we are designing the process with an understanding that this is the area where an automation can inject itself and make a difference. So by hearing the pipeline from all three of those angles, and by creating the excitement, we are able to move forward fairly well. The other thing on the pipeline front is that we are really trying to shift the paradigm of who owns the a. A lot of times you would come in and say, Hey, I build the animation, I got the spectrum from 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 a little bit differently. We're saying, look, ultimately every animation is built for a reason. It's built for an employee to execute. It's built for the business to be success. Let them be the winners. Let them be decision makers. Let them be the drivers. We're just there to help them to build their animation as a global center of excellence, we are jacks of all trades and masters of none. We get pipeline from accounting and finance, and I'm not a C P A. We get pipeline from HR and I don't know. Too much about that aspect of it. We get pipeline from sales separations, inventory, and all the other things. Yeah, we have enough common sense to get a gist of what they're trying to do, but we're not experts, right? So let the experts drive us. Let the experts tell us what they need. Let the experts decide what makes sense. We'll follow the experts. We will allow them to be the leaders and the drivers. And what it. It creates a success story for the expert. The folks in accounting, finance, or sales or operations or Aria build the animation. They feel great about that animation. They claim that success to their managers. Does success story end up presenting to the greater organization, not by us, but by those? And of course they mentioned who build it, and of course we get more pipeline and more accolades from it. But the most important part for us 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 a big part of our pragmatic call is it's not about. I'm good, I'm great. It's not about feeding my, it's not about bringing the technology to the company. It's about solving the real problems for real people. With their help, with their engagement, with their guidance, with their leadership, we are there to help and support, and that approach allows us to have no shortage of the pipeline and very comfortable sitting here saying Pipeline is not an issue for us as far as generation. Pipeline is more of an issue for us in terms of how quickly we can implement.

Andreas Welsch: 11:26

That sounds like when you can pick and choose or have a backlog of things to, you mentioned this implicitly I feel. But what does success look like if you say you want the business to be the driver and the owner, how are you measured? What does this look like for you and for the CoE?

Maxim Ioffe: 11:51

There are multiple metrics of success. One of the success stories that we had is we were smart to define the success early on in the journey. We started out by say this is how we measure the value. Our key indicators are going to be time saved where somebody used to do the work manual and they don't know no longer cap to plus value created where we have tasks that were not done manually because nobody has the resources and time to do it. And we were able to create that capacity and address those task. and then what we do is we have a framework that validates that success. We are going to the stakeholders and do freeway validation. One part of the that validation is, does the business, the smooth read to that number do I gave, is the number. Does the CFO organization exist with this number? So we have the framework and we have these checks. And I've had instances when folks come to me and say, we're a team of four and we are going to build the elimination that is going to save us 10,000 hours. And I say, 10,000 hours is lovely, but you're a team of four. You don't have 10,000 hours to save. And what are you going to do when you implement that? So maybe it's not saving time, maybe it's extra capacity. Maybe we need to go back. It gives us the ultimate credibility to. And those numbers and the ROI is a big part of our success. The other big part of our success is employee education, making sure that folks trust us to automate. There's no fear of losing drops. There is no fear of automation and ai, and that's super important for us. We try to make it as accessible, as user-friendly as possible. And ultimately it's the change of business. The mission of our company is to build, connect, power, and protect the world. How does our program help that? How do we stay aligned with the strategy and the mission? That's a big part of our success criteria as well.

Andreas Welsch: 13:42

Fantastic. I think that's always good to make it tangible. It sounds great to say, the business and work closely with them or even give more and more ownership to them, but then, translate into some measurable objectives and maybe savings on other parts. So thanks for sharing that. You had already mentioned some things when we spoke a couple of weeks ago. How this come together? What's a great example from the work that you're doing well, what can others learn from it?

Maxim Ioffe: 14:19

One of the examples I can bring is within supply chain. If anybody has been away for the last couple of years, supply chain has been in use all the time, and between supply chain disruptions, supply chain crisis, and whatever else it's being. We're in the middle of that and again, trying to stay pragmatic and consistent with the mission. We were trying to figure out the ways to help our partners to get a little bit better visibility of the product, where the product is, and where we are able or unable to meet the commitments that we make to our partners. Part of that was building a framework where we are trying to figure out where the product is by pulling the data from our partners and in injecting it into our own. We're a company of multiple ERPs, so it got to be injected into multiple places and then reporting back to the customers, explaining here's where we could be jeopardizing their orders and here's what we can do to help starting the conversation, not after the fact and it's too late and we already missed the commitment, but way before the fact where we can still make a difference. In order to do that, we magnetize the suppliers into multiple categories. We figured those that can. Data from EDI, API and other integrations. That's great. We don't need to change that. But out 50,000 suppliers that we partner with is not everybody is capable of doing it. So what we did is we started looking at one supplier at a, trying to, what's the best way to. Extract the data. In some cases it would be going into their web portal. In some cases it's receiving the report from their sites and doing something with it. So we en enlisted our citizen developers to build those little bots that connect to individual partners and extract the portion of the data. Each one of them is fairly simple. The steps to get to the data are usually 10, 20, 30 clicks and a bunch of types. Not that difficult, but there are a. And those are exactly the things that citizen developers can do very effectively. So we build a framework where a citizen developer can plug in any partner they want very easily. We have over a hundred partners plugged in that way, but then our center of excellence build other animations that would take that data compared to what we currently have. An hour systems identify their material change as occurred. Put that data back into our system. So again, think about 10, 15, 20 different processes embedded into the steps just described, and then create the. Data and prescriptive analytics that our team need to engage with customers and solve the problem. We build all that as a collaboration of many citizen developers, many as well as center of excellence and departments. And the cool thing about it, we didn't build it all at once, we. Rolled it out as it was ready. So the first point piece was rolled out to just update the RP system. Great. And then we have more data to upgrade the RP system even better. And then there is a bot that extracts 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 we have a framework where we can partner with hundred, thousand, however many partners we need to partner with to extract the data and get the results. Again, it's all about the scalability. It's all about doing it at speed, not waiting for the perfect process that will never come, not waiting for the most complicated solution, just doing what we can and getting those tangible results as quickly as possible. If that's not keeping it pragmatic, I dunno what would be.

Andreas Welsch: 17:59

Again, thanks for sharing that example. Always good to hear how companies are going about these things and whether the opportunities lie. Thank you.

Maxim Ioffe: 18:14

Thank you very much. Pleasure.

Andreas Welsch: 18:16

So maybe can you quickly summarize the top three takeaways for our, and then we'll wrap it?

Maxim Ioffe: 18:26

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 the pipeline, you gotta to have the culture and awareness. And the culture and awareness comes from educating the employees. That comes from doing the gate presentation. We started with the booklets and then as well, having that book ready where the text is solid and the pictures are solid, really helps to evangelize. And then deliver on that. And it's a circle where you evangelize the ideas, you implement those ideas, you have this solid way of measuring value and results. And that value and results is a success story that helps with culture and awareness that helps with the pipeline. that gives you more things to implement, present more value and cycle continues. Staying in that cycle and having a consistent model, keeping it very pragmatic where we don't go up to technology, we go after results and technology is a way to get there, is what I think helped our success and I think that's a very scalable example that can help anybody.

Andreas Welsch: 19:32

Thanks so much for joining us, for sharing your expertise Maxim.

Maxim Ioffe: 19:36

Thank you very much for having me.