Achieving Your 2021 Strategy Using No-Code Automation

foreign guys I'm gonna go ahead and get started welcome to today's webinar um hosted by checkbox my name is minwoo or Min it's very nice to see you all and it's uh thank you so much for taking time out of your you know lunch to to come along to this I hope you're able to get something out of it um so um yeah looking forward to it and before I get started I might just mention this is very much sort of a you know one directional I guess discussion very much conversational and so if you've got any questions please feel free to pop it in the Q a box in the zoom panel below if I don't get around to answering a question I promise I'll I'll respond to it by email um afterwards so I'm going to do my best there is some content I want to get through so I'm if I'm not able to answer it I'll on the Fly then I'll um get back to you right after this session so again quick introduction my name is min I'm one of the customer success and delivery managers here at checkbox what that means is I get to be on the Forefront of seeing checkbox implemented uh inside uh all of our sort of customers in a you know wide range of Industries and different different teams and different functions and I got the pleasure of doing that and so I'm really on the ground seeing all of that play out and in particular if you haven't heard of checkbox before we're an automation platform um particularly or using no code to enable non-iit users to actually build out automation software for their team or for their sort of uh industry and and organization and so I get the pleasure of of seeing automation come to life and seeing and Achieve sort of strategic Milestones in our in our customers and so that's kind of the basis by which we'll kind of um go through to today's webinar and I hope today's webinar will be helpful in uh thinking through for yourself uh the type of automation opportunities that exist and the ways that it can achieve your strategic goals for 2021 and in fact that's probably the first question that I have it's more of a rhetorical one maybe um you haven't thought about it yet but what is your 2021 strategy we've had a pretty crazy uh last 12 months of 2020 um I like to think that we've come out of it um pretty well at least here in Australia and so if you haven't had the chance yet to really reflect and think about it now's a chance for you to actually have a think what is your 2021 strategy what are the type of pillars that you're thinking for your organization for your team that really helps set up today's uh framework so have a think about that and uh if you'd like you can share with me uh you know through q a comments or whatever you'd like but keep that in your back pocket now in today's session what I want to do is first kind of cover um the general realm of professional work and how automation fits in with that giving us a bit of a framework to help navigate some of the stories that I'm going to share uh in today's session and then I'll look at four common strategic goals that we've seen over the last 12 to 18 months um and they're pretty pretty kind of um common uh strategic goals and I will use real life examples um to kind of share how our customers have gone about achieving their strategic goals in relation uh to uh so using automation to achieve those strategic goals and then have sort of a q a session I'll explain sort of how this is going to look like because today is obviously 2021's first checkbox webinar so there's a whole slew of other webinars that are coming up so super excited to share that with you cool so the first thing that I start off with is a very helpful framework that I always share with um you know really whoever I work with and it's this idea of the elements of professional work and it's just trying without use to describe the three facets of um kind of work in general and then how automation fits to that so there's sort of people process and technology and and work is driven by these three elements all sort of kind of moving together and collaborating with each other and it can seem pretty high level just from from a from a you know from a objective view but why I like to kind of set this framework up is because it then helps us understand how technology actually helps people and how it actually improves processes sometimes those can be quite detached or or sort of separated in the consideration process so when we think of automation we immediately jump to what's the technology we're considering instead of going okay who who do we have from a people and capability side of things and what processes do we have in place to help work drive um you know the people to to output and where does technology in the grand scheme case so I thought I might share that first so that I'll be referring to this triangle sort of throughout the stories I'll be sharing and the other helpful thing to kind of understand is where automation fits in the grand scheme of professional work now some of you guys I see some common names I mean names that I've seen before here but I might just go through this together uh um because this is a nice again framework to kind of think through where automation fits in the grand scheme of things in the realm of professional work we like to say that there are you know broadly stuff that can be automated and stuff that can't be automated and obviously for the things that can't be automated we defer to human uh judgments as human insight and these are things that obviously it's not it's not easy for a machine to do but obviously if a human it's actually quite easy to do now within the realm of stuff that can be automated work that can be automated there's broadly two sort of mobs so one arm is called you know one arm is where um the the work does not require a human to be involved it might be system to system communication it might literally just be you know numbers being calculated in the background using AI or machine learning we call this robotic process Automation and this is the realm of um automation where no sort of human judgment is required now there is another arm where you do actually require an expert judgment you do actually require at some point and next we have to step in and say yep that's correct or that's not correct and um to give you sort of a a classic example you know would you trust a robot to do your surgery I mean sure uh to a certain level of degree the the robot will be able to do your surgery um with Precision but the Judgment aspect of I'm sure you'd like as humans to be involved in so that sort of um work you would require some expert decision making in that process and we call that EPL extra process Automation and the goal of expert process automation is to really enable the continuation of work from sort of systems through to humans and vice versa and really enabling that smooth flow between uh people and Technology um and that kind of back and forth that you saw on the in the previous slide there cool so what I'm going to do today and hopefully that kind of paints a picture of how professional work typically we like to think of professional work in terms of Frameworks and where automation fits in that kind of uh kind of Realm of what work can be done and what I'll do is I'll share four common strategic goals so the first one is around reduction of cost the second one is around minimizing risk the third one is increasing digitalization and the last one is right improving customer experience or customer service so potentially some of you guys may be thinking about um strategic goals for 2021 and what may be one of those for uh maybe your strategic goals for the year ahead so hopefully this will be helpful and I will share some real live uh cases with you so let's go to the first one the first one is around reducing cost it's no surprise that after a rather tumultuous here that a reduction in cost is a common theme across many of our customers and in particular looking at saving costs one way to look at it is um automation can help reduce costs around people and technology and there you have our customers typically use technology to maintain uh sort of high levels of strategic output and so what I'll show you later about later down the line is a way that we sort of categorize different types of work so that automation can capture really what is not required for for sort of human intervention or human judgment so one example here is we've got a large Telco with a legal team who is going through a structuring process and really consolidating and dense uh making uh sort of their talent density tied up and what that meant was the amount of work that their legal team was doing was still the same it just happened that they had less people or less lawyers on their legal team and so you can kind of tell sort of that um the the Paradox the the difficulty of having to on one hand have less people resource and yet at the same time have to service the same number of people within the business because legal functions are typically sort of power or functions or supporting functions that that serve the rest of the business so what this particular legal team did was they looked to technology to leverage that sort of capability um the voiding capability where you know people were potentially doing low value repetitive work and removing that out from the legal team and automating that and allowing the legal team to instead focus on high value High strategic work and so you have this sort of um sort of mutual kind of relationship between on one hand technology taking away the repetitive work and automation sort of removing the the tediousness of low value work and humans or people really focusing on valuable complex and and I say enjoyable work that is probably a bit better than the road work that machines can do and so this is an example of potentially using a fraction of your budget to actually focus on new technology to drive high efficient output what I'd like to show you on the next slide is uh strategic work quadrant we like to think of it and this is very specific to this particular graph is for in-house legal teams but it can really be applied to any kind of service-based organization so you have on the kind of y-axis strategic value and on the x-axis you have sort of risk and so it's often a great exercise when you're thinking about automation to actually plot out where your different types of work sit on this um two by two grid you know in the top right hand corner you have very high value High strategic work but it's also quite high risk and then you have in the sort of bottom left sort of low value low risk work and so when anyone comes and says hey is an automation scary for people because it takes away work from them it effectively replaces them well what we like to say is actually it actually pushes the work towards the top right hand quadrant or you know the uh the top quadrant top left top right quadrant from people they can focus on more high value in-house work or anything that's sort of low risk but High strategic work can potentially be outsourced to an external sort of legal service provider and then sort of the low value work that is repetitive can potentially be outsourced to law firms and then finally um sort of the low value low strategic work that's you know the road work the manual stuff can just be automated can can use automation to take that that burden away and then um kind of shift the cost from from the human resources side to the technology side now coming back to the previous slide another example of how automation kind of helps reduce cost is around technology consolidation so we had a top 400 kind of company in the hospitality space which had around 50 separate Solutions all sort of dispersed around the organization you know you typically get different teams purchasing solutions that are specific to their team without necessarily thinking about how that communicates with the rest of the organization so where automation can potentially provide value is actually consolidating that and and for this particular organization they wanted to move from 50 to around 10 to 15. and so why that's also important is is to consider the sort of manual admin overhead that automation can remove particularly when systems don't interact with each other very nicely you end up having a person come in to facilitate the process of communication between those two technologies so you know even though you do buy technology to sort of create efficiencies it ends up becoming slightly less efficient and for this particular hospitality company they ended up using Tech new technology to actually consolidate and phase out uh old Tech to drive low cost on the technology side of that sort of professional work triangle that I showed you earlier and so we see that the two cost sides all right strategic goal number two so number two we have sort of minimizing process and organizational risk so how do we do that uh the kind of phrase that I like to use is automation technology allows organizations to operationalize procedures policy and ultimately minimize risk and I want to look at um sort of two examples here one is sort of a process based example and one is very much so a large sort of you know board risk kind of example so on the left hand side here you've got a large super fund who had a procurement process in sort of like a document form and many of you guys may be able to empathize with this your procurement policy may be sort of a document PDF or perhaps an Excel spreadsheet and what they found was even though the policy was sort of defined over time business users actually deviated from the procurement policy and in fact when you went and surveyed users within the business they were actually getting to a point where um they would you know follow the policy to a certain point but then defer to their own experience or perhaps to the experience of their teammates to make procurement decisions in the grand scheme of things that's obviously not ideal for an organization looking to minimize their risk and so what they did was they used automation to digitize the operation of their procurement policy so instead of having that as a PDF and having that sort of go back and forth as Communications sort of intangible communication they actually digitize the whole thing so that the risk of business users deviating from the process was minimized business users were effectively guided along that process and made to follow specific sort of thresholds and guidelines and more automated automatically roped in with the relevant stakeholders to facilitate that Journey so this is an example of where how technology can be used to operationalize process and policy and standardize it across the organization reducing sort of deviant risk as we call it so things tend to kind of deviate over time as you make it moment the other example that we have is around data breach incidents this is a obviously very interesting topic probably for many of you on call today like this is a legal team within a large fmcg company so they noticed very similar to the first example I showed uh shared with you that um you know the way that data incident breaches were being flagged uh ended up making the whole process um also the friction between the different interfaces so you you had someone who flagged the data incident breach it would then go sort of offshore and that team would then have to follow up and find out more details before it went through to the legal team and so all these different interfaces weren't digitized or automated they were really manual and it ended up creating a lot of friction between these different teams creating a longer than ideal process for addressing what is obviously a large risk data breach within the organization so similar to the first example that you've gone to the left this particular from CG company use automation to actually digitize their whole data reach reporting process and so it's all centralized and it actually again similarly ropes in the relevant stakeholders whether it's sort of legal or if it's risk and compliance or you know whoever it might be the automation technology that they use actually pulls them in and small incidents were able to be sort of self-served by the business perhaps it's just an email that you've sent out to the wrong person that can just you know have a list of items that the business user needs to go through and then and then on you go whereas large incidents sort of rope together large incident teams to to respond to the particular breach so this is an example of how technology can actually reduce overall organizational Risk by making the sort of incident flagging process a bit more seamless now before I continue you will notice that that a common theme across sort of process is the interface component of it and and I always like to say the more people involved in particular the more people in different teams that are involved the higher the level of complexity in can sort of making sure everyone's on the same page and so that in and of itself is another process to consider so for example you in in the first example I showed you may have a procurement policy but really there is a hidden almost invisible layer that sits across the top it's this admin overhead kind of you know very hard to describe a back and forth um process that never really gets described but everyone factors into their calculation when I say how long does this process take for you everyone everyone factors that into the procurement policy or whatever process they're thinking about but no one really addresses it as as what it is it's the sort of interfacing uh cost that you will find with most processes and technology is really good at sort of consuming that that admin overhead as we like to say yeah so the third one um we'll be looking at is sort of enabling digitalization so this is a fairly uh popular one um it doesn't you know it's more of a qualitative strategic goal but certainly within organizations that have a lot of manual processes um that will be it tends to be a quite a quite a high strategic goal for them so this is about applying technology usually to transform manual processes into digital Solutions again sort of coming back to the top 100 Australian company in the hospitality sector there were a lot of paper-based forms so they're really in the hospitality and gaming space and given the nature of their business they actually had a high number of reporting activities uh which were performed on paper paper forms that needed to be filled up by staff on the floor which then get kind of scanned and sent through to headquarters um you know via email which then again get printed out and get stored as a hard copy for for three to four years and so you can tell that the number of sort of manual processes um creates a burden for sort of the uh the person side of that professional work and having to execute those processes and and Technology can then come in and add value by automating all of that into a digital format and so for these guys they use automation to transform those paper-based activities into more digital interactive solution and it's just another way that we see um process changing from manual one uh into a digital one and so perhaps everyone on call if you know when you think about your situations and your organizations are there manual processes that you interact with on a day-to-day basis or week to week month to month um where the opportunities that lie within your organization to actually apply technology to make digital Solutions you know kind of replace and make better the manual ones that you've got today so maybe have you think about that would be will be helpful for you now we're at the last strategic goal now and I know I'm flying through these on a in another life I would have been a wrapper so uh if you've got any connections let me know but if you've got any questions of course uh if you want any clarification or if you want me to share please always let me know more than happy to to kind of have a chat so the last one is around improving customer experience and this one is you know around using automating automation technology to improve the processes and customer experience for people within the business it's really more relevant for you know service-based organizations who are looking to serve their clients whether that be an in-house legal team or potential Law Firm you know you might be looking at different ways to use digital solutions to cater uh for a for a better Journey for your clients perhaps is something you guys are thinking about again coming back to the legal team within the large Telco they were looking to deliver legal services in a digitized fashion and sort of reduce the friction between the legal team and the business users that they serviced when following up on the progress of a particular process and this is uh not not you know specific to any one particular use case but certainly for any service provider you'll find that there is always going to be friction as I kind of describe that invisible admin layer as I was mentioning before where there's a back and forth between you know your client and yourself and giving them updates and giving them timely advice sometimes you need to wait a little longer so that that kind of you know Delta between what your clients expect in terms of velocity of you know your service as well as the quality and and what you're actually realistically able to provide um starts to become evident I think when like time kind of extrapolates itself and the complexity of the work increases and so automation can really be used to close that Delta uh to make it a bit more uh enjoyable and improve the customer experience for your end clients and in this particular instance automation was used to provide self-service Solutions uh and and they're really helpful because in a couple of reasons one is 24 7 access so you know obviously we've got sort of the workday um but you've got these automated tools that allow your customers to access that information at any time you then also have sort of the removal of the need for back and forth between legal team and the business so in this case uh they'll sort of updates integrated so hey your you know particular NDA let's say for instance has reached this stage it's been reviewed by this person and we're going to then head you know your one out of three stages completed hey you're not the second of three stages Etc so really uh kind of bringing the business user into that journey to to improve that visibility but also that that custom experience for from their Journey perspective and then the third one is around sort of being able to be given a faster turnaround on their particular query and alluding back to that strategic work Quadra and I talked about earlier sort of the low value low strategic work can really be self-served in an answer can be given straight away because it is low risk um but for sort of high value High strategic and at the same time high risk work can immediately be filtered out to the relevant subject matter experts for them to address straight away and so you have sort of that kind of dynamic as well now that kind of brings it to the end of the four strategic goals and to recap them again you have the reduction of cost via sort of um either consolidation of head count or consolidation of systems you have the minimizing of risk across process as well as organization you have also increasing digitalization uh as the organization moves manual to digital and the final one is sort of improving customer experience and using sort of automation technology to provide service around the clock with the same quality now we have covered this at a pretty high level I understand and then perhaps some of your strategic goals line up with this and we hope it would and and you're interested in that so what we're going to do for the rest of this year is actually kick off a series um sorry I said rest of the year but the rest of the kind of webinar series is actually start to kick off a sort of more practical series off the back of this first one around how you can you know look into your organization and say well where does automation fit in in the grand scheme of things does it fit with what we have right now or you know do we need to wait a little while what what you know elements of of our organization uh can be automated and that sort of practical aspect of automation will be shared uh in the following webinar series kind of sessions that are to come and they're going to be in 30 minute formats like this and so the next webinar is on the 24th of March same time as today same day it's a month from now and it'll be around how to ideate and validate your team's automation use cases it's a very common question get which is how do I know that I'm ready for Automation and so if you can't wait till the 24th feel free to email me more than happy to have a chat um but if you're able to and you're you're interested we will be sending out a link to you um in the coming few weeks for you to sign up to that particular webinar you can go ahead and jump on that and we'll do a presentation on how to actually practically go about navigating that or um if you know uh you you're not using the email link we'll be uh kind of sharing details on LinkedIn as well so make sure to follow check box AI there awesome well I hope that was informative and helpful for you we've got about five minutes left so I will open it up for some q a if you've got any questions feel free to send them through I will try my best to uh address them but if you need to hop off thank you so much for coming along to today's webinar I hope you were able to get something out of it and we hope to see you at the next one [Music]