A business is, at its core, an amalgam of processes working in tandem to achieve a set of results — including profitability. These processes are created, implemented and refined over time as the corporate entity scales, pivots or reaches new heights of revenue and/or profitability.

Recently, technology-focused companies have also begun to invest in process automation, and solutions providers such as UiPath Inc. are at the forefront of the field.

“What we’re trying to do with continuous process discovery is enable you to identify the processes, figure out how to optimize them, and then automate them once they’re automated,” said Palak Kadakia (pictured right), vice president of product management at UiPath. “We want to monitor them and then keep doing that cycle over and over again, using technology rather than having people fill in paperwork,” 

Kadakia and Leyla Delic (pictured left), group chief information and digital officer at Coca-Cola İçecek, spoke with Dave Vellante and Lisa Martin, host of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s livestreaming studio, during UiPath’s Forward IV conference. They discussed the evolving work UiPath is doing in the RPA and continuous process discovery spaces, as well as how Coca-Cola İçecek is benefiting from UiPath’s RPA solutions. (* Disclosure below.)

Coca-Cola use case

The partnership between both companies started around three years ago; it was the second major decision Delic made as CIO at Coca-Cola İçecek. The company discovered several gaps in its processes and workflows and identified UiPath as the best partner to fix those gaps.

“So we said, we want to improve cash flow management, [and] we discovered that the improved invoice due date changes impacted the payment terms by 20%. We also improved credit limits approvals by 5% by removing unnecessary approval steps,” she explained. “We realized there were unnecessary approvals. These two are directly impacting our customers as well, because it’s waiting in somebody’s queue to handle those approvals. And the customer is not getting the delivery because payment and delivery go hand in hand.”

There have also been cycle-time improvements across the board, according to Delic. The company has also been able to report about 30,000 hours in regained productivity in one of its operating markets in just one year. Continuous process discovery and process mining allow companies like Coca-Cola İçecek to repeatedly improve on existing processes while cutting redundancies.

Listen and learn

Shifting paradigms in legacy tech processes requires close collaboration with partners, as evidenced by Coca-Cola İçecek’s use case. To this end, UiPath prioritizes customer feedback.

“These partnerships actually make us build better products,” Kadakia said. “This is how we stay ahead of the curve, by listening to our customers. They’re the ones doing the implementations — they understand how our product works. We can design it, we can test it, but that’s the extent to which we can go. Once they implement it is when we know what’s working and what’s not, and how do we take that feedback and make better products? It’s a two-way street and we love hearing from them.”

As indicated by Delic, an important objective for CIOs is to continuously improve process mining — not just once, but as an ongoing measure. With UiPath, this effort can be done with the added benefit of automation powered by artificial intelligence. Two 2019 acquisitions to support growth in process mining are ProccessGold, an enterprise-grade process mining platform, and StepShot, a software documentation tool automating the creation of tutorials, workflow walk-throughs and step-by-step guides.

“ProcessGold was a great technology to begin with. So it wasn’t a huge stretch for us to take it and integrate it and make it part of the platform. Typically when we acquire companies, we look for product-market fit, we look for a technology fit, we look for people fit, and we had that with ProcessGold,” Kadakia explained.

Kadakia furthered: “What we think about when we’re designing our products is how can process mining help you optimize your workflows, such that you can spend more time with the customer … and get back to them faster.”

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of UiPath’s Forward IV conference. (* Disclosure: TheCUBE is a paid media partner for the UiPath’s Forward IV conference. Neither UiPath Inc., the sponsor for theCUBE’s event coverage, nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE