UiPath - July 2020

UiPATH

DIGITAL REPORT 2020

INNOVATION IN AUTOMATION AND THE IMPACT OF COVID-19 IN ASSOCIATION WITH

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UiPath: INNOVATION IN AUTOMATION AND THE IMPACT OF COVID-19 WRITTEN BY

GEORGIA WILSON PRODUCED BY

BEN MALTBY

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Chris Duddridge, Area Vice President and Managing Director, UiPath (UK and Ireland), discusses automation trends, innovation and the impact of COVID-19

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rior to joining UiPath, Chris Duddridge spent the past 20 years working within the HR, payroll and ERP software sales

market. Chris has previously worked for Sage and Deltek, before joining UiPath a year and a half ago as RVP for enterprise sales and is now Area Vice 04

President and Managing Director.

“What initially drew me to UiPath was its people and being a part of a new emerging technology sector which was growing faster than any other I’d ever experienced. It also helped that RPA and intelligent automation had become pervasive across every industry and at every level within the business from the board agenda to the subject matter experts. I started off leading our enterprise sales team gaining a very quick and valuable induction to what was driving the agenda for automation from some of our largest clients. I’m now very lucky to represent UiPath UK & Ireland across all business functions from our sales engagements with new clients, but also our existing account management, Pre-Sales, Customer Success, and Partner

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“ Just four short years ago, it was a Romanian startup whose co-founders were driven by this vision of making work fun again. There were humble beginnings and this culture of staying humble, accepting feedback and seeking to improve, remaining obsessed with our customers’ success still permeates our present ethos” — Chris Duddridge, Area Vice President and Managing Director, UiPath (UK and Ireland)

channels. I’m incredibly fortunate to have an amazing team, who obsess over our customers’ projects and objectives, which makes it a great deal easier for me when we work to amplify

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our approach across our marketing and PR channels,” says Duddridge.

“UiPath is very different to other companies,” comments Duddridge.

“Just four short years ago, it was a Romanian startup whose co-founders were driven by this vision of making work fun again. There were humble beginnings and this culture of staying humble, accepting feedback and seeking to improve, remaining obsessed with our customers’ success still permeates our present ethos. This vision of shaking up the workplace in order to free up employees from the mundane part of office work with the help of software robots and letting

The Story of Work CLICK TO WATCH

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07 them focus on value-added work like

a 500,000-member strong global

analysis, creative activities, and stra-

community of RPA developers. We

tegic tasks producing revenue impact

were the first company to offer free

made UiPath the globally successful

download of our community edition

company it is today. Dedicated to what

product – software developers, schools

we like to call accelerating human

and universities, NGOs, small compa-

achievement, we focus on the whole

nies have free access to work with

narrative not just on the commercial

our software robots. On one hand,

gains. UiPath knew it was going to be

we were able to garner valuable feed-

disruptive from the get-go, and we

back and improve on our product so

maintained a steadfast commitment

that it responds to the most diverse

to democratising access to RPA and

range of business cases, but we have

digital skills – through the free online

also been creating the essential work-

training platform UiPath Academy,

force to enable our customers to

and the continuous investment into

achieve a greater outcome with their w w w.ui pat h . com

U i PAT H

08 automation journeys. And we paired

our robots to respond to increasingly

this with a focus on creating a strong

complex processes and demands,

ecosystem of partners – an essential

embedding into our platform artificial

way of taking our end-to-end automa-

intelligence and machine learning

tion platform to customers and having

algorithms, task and process mining,

it service their goal.”

advanced analytics that allow the robots to learn and execute more.

CURRENT TRENDS WITHIN ROBOTIC PROCESS AUTOMATION

Little did we know we were actually priming our product for the number

“In market terms, RPA is the orches-

one trend Gartner predicted for 2020

tration capabilities of digital assistants

– hyper automation. This is now top of

– software robots that help people

mind for the entire industry, and it’s

perform their daily job on a case by

end-to-end approach. Rather than

case basis. Our focus during the

a one and done approach, organisations

last two-three years was to enable

are looking for a true transformation

for business strategies, which can

global pandemic. With more people

be captured in four key pillars: digital

working from home than ever and

transformation, enhancing employee

unprecedented challenges in terms

experience, improving the customer

of supply and demand or customer

service, and reducing risk and increas-

grievances (think aviation or call cen-

ing compliance” says Duddridge.

tres here), relying on technology for

“All these are even more fundamental

remote on-boarding, or sorting huge

for CEOs in the current climate while

backlogs of requests, or staying compli-

business models are reshaped by the

ant takes centre stage.”

E X E C U T I V E P R OF IL E :

Chris Duddridge Title: Area Vice President and Managing Director (UK and Ireland) Industry: Computer Software

Location: London, United Kingdom

Chris Duddridge is UiPath’s Area Vice President and Managing Director of UK and Ireland. He leads the UK and Irish teams in their mission to drive automation adoption in the region, helping customers achieve their automation goals using UiPath’s best-in-its-class hyperautomation platform. Chris previously held the position of RVP of Sales for UK and Ireland at UiPath, supporting UiPath during a period of hypergrowth. With more than 20 years in sales and technology, he is an experienced sales leader with a track record of helping small teams rise to market leader status. Passionate about technology, Chris is inspired by the potential of automation to transform the future of work.

Highly motivated by teamwork, his key areas of interest are incentivising collaboration, creativity, and customer focus. w w w.ui pat h . com

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POWER UP YOUR DIGITAL OPERATIONS WITH INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION At Symphony, we’re the proven leaders in transforming front, middle and back office operations to boost overall efficiency, increase employee productivity and improve customer satisfaction.

“As organisations grappled with their

volumes of data. Think of the many hours

own specific challenges and disruptions

an employee spends copying and past-

whilst the pandemic unfolded, it quickly

ing data from one application to another

became clear that intelligent automation

or extracting information from one docu-

programmes facilitated faster decision-

ment and inputting it on an excel sheet

making, much needed agility and

for example. Think of the huge volumes

operational resilience to adjust to rapidly

of invoices a financial shared service

changing demands and pressures. Now,

centre needs to operate and how only a

as businesses begin to stabilise rela-

robot will pay the same attention to the

tive to the earliest days, smart business

5000th invoice as to the first. Usually the

leaders are reimagining operations with

challenges with implementing RPA are

radical agility baked in, and automation

that someone has to deliver it, a subject

at the forefront. They’ve also begun to

matter expert has got to share their intel-

realise that the decisions they take will

ligence around how that process works

shape many aspects of business and the

dealing with every nuance that comes

future workplace, not just for the remain-

with it. Which leaves you with the reality

der of the pandemic – but for years to

that robots are very clever, but they do

come.” added Jason Martindale, Vice

not replace cognitive skills. Humans still

President Sales at Symphony, a SYKES

retain the ascendancy in every automa-

company – a long-time UiPath partner

tion because they’re either the subject

specialising in IA implementation and

matter experts that need to program

managed services.

the automation, or they are the part of the loop which needs to train the robots

THE BENEFITS AND CHALLENGES OF AUTOMATION

to learn and continue to deliver value

“The benefits of automation are easy

challenges with delivering automation

to sell,” contemplates Duddridge, “eve-

revolve around firstly having enough

rything that can be automated, will be

people to dedicate to delivering that

automated as long as it’s process led,

journey, scaling up the RPA centre

rules driven and you deal with large

of excellence, the subject matter

in that process. And so the real world

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U i PAT H

experts and the people that will lead

real problems, not “selling potential”.

the automation journeys forward within

“Recent events have kickstarted digital

each organisation, and ensuring what

transformation journeys for many

you’re developing is actually delivering

organisations, with remote working,

a return on investment and making

increased demand, or asudden burst

sure that people invest heavily in

in volumes pushing a lot of organisa-

the delivery.”

tions to think about automation. This

Following the COVID-19 outbreak,

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is something that UiPath is looking

Duddridge reiterates that the organi-

to help where it can, to drive innovation

sation is truly focused on helping solve

for business continuity.”

UI PAT H ’S G U I D I N G PRINCIPLES

THE BEST STRATEGY With the benefits and challenges of adopting an ‘automation first’ mindset,

• A robot for every person

Duddridge reflects on the industry and

• Pioneering an ‘automation first’ mindset liberating office employees from boring mundane tasks to focus on added-value work;

explains that the strategic approach

• The UiPath mission is to provide the best RPA technology platform to enable the ‘automation first’ enterprise; • Free access to training for all RPA roles (also the first RPA company to provide a free download version of its product).

for an effective adoption of automation has changed in recent times.

“It used to be very varied in terms of how automation initiatives were created,” he comments. “An example of this is someone within the finance team deciding that vendor invoice management could be automated.

That finance organisation could use Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to retrieve the pertinent data from a document to break the back of 80% of its document ingestion and make its operations more agile. These kinds

“ Everything that can be automated, will be automated as long as it’s process led, rules driven and you deal with large volumes of data” — Chris Duddridge, Area Vice President and Managing Director, UiPath (UK and Ireland)

of organisations were our entry point into the market, but what we are now seeing are top down or bottom up strategies – sometimes both. For example, you will see CEOs of large banks talking about automation being a key pillar of their commitments, but you’ll also see citizen developers – regular employees – that are finding opportunities to make their work and the customer experience better. If people adopt that top down and bottom up approach it means that organisations will meet in the middle and always think about automation first.”

UiPath partners - stronger together CLICK TO WATCH

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U i PAT H

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A robot for every person: Benefit from automation at enterprise-wide Scale - UiPath CLICK TO WATCH

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INNOVATIONS AND TECHNOLOGY IMPLEMENTATIONS When it comes to innovation and technology implementations within automation, Duddridge sees the biggest benefit that has evolved being “collaboration of intra technology companies. Think about anyone in the market that is perceived as market leaders, these leaders have acquired RPA skills within their business because automation is a key component of their platform. But what we’ve seen is that with our open and free community of technology partners we haven’t had to roll out 50 different proprietary bits of technology because we can leverage our relationship with partners such as Microsoft, Service Now, SAP and Salesforce, which are open to work within a collaborative ecosystem to deliver really transformational customer outcomes.”

Duddridge adds that “while perhaps with technological advancements within the automation industry cloud technology has been a key player for us, allowing us to stand up our infrastructure within AWS or Microsoft Azure in seconds, and while the advent w w w.ui pat h . com

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“ Recent events have kickstarted digital transformation journeys for many organisations, with remote working, increased demand, or a sudden burst in volumes pushing a lot of organisations to think about automation” — Chris Duddridge, Area Vice President and Managing Director, UiPath (UK and Ireland)

“across public and private sector clients in the UK and Ireland, innovation not only being an aspiration, but a necessity to find work arounds by

of cloud is not new, how we leverage

enabling technology at speed, and we

our relationships with cloud vendors is

felt compelled to help them, playing

truly transformational for businesses.

our part in mitigating the devastating

Most organisations are now looking

effects of the pandemic .” However, he

for cloud-ready technology that they

believes that while it has accelerated

can adopt quickly, knowing that you

the agenda it hasn’t changed anything,

tick every security box, compliance

and the technology remains the

box and regulatory box necessary.”

same. “The spirit of what we are trying

Other strategic additions to automa-

to achieve in getting software robots

tion Duddridge has seen in the last six

to take on the mundane rules-based

months include intelligent document

repetitive processes at speed and

understanding, some of which are AI and machine learning enabled, as well as OCR, process discovery, process mining, business process management and RPA.

POST-COVID-19 AND FIRST STEPS FOR THE INDUSTRY Reflecting on the industry since COVID-19, Duddridge has witnessed w w w.ui pat h . com

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“ W e can leverage our relationship with partners such as Microsoft, Service Now, SAP and Salesforce, which are open to work within a collaborative ecosystem to deliver really transformational customer outcomes” — Chris Duddridge, Area Vice President and Managing Director, UiPath (UK and Ireland)

2005

Year founded

$360mn Annual recurring revenue (2019)

3,000 Number of employees

scale, and allowing the employees to

that act as a contingency, or ensure

deliver value-added impactful work

that parts of the business that are

which will ultimately be transformative

a challenge to manage with a remote

for organisations remains the same.

workforce are address in the long term.�

At the moment everyone’s still dealing with contingency planning and keeping the lights on, but post COVID-19, I think automation will remain the biggest topic for making sure that, should something like this ever to happen again, there are provisions w w w.ui pat h . com

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