Leaner Ops, Faster Scale: Uncommon Strategies for Enterprise Automation with Celigo Founder & CEO

Great, thank you. Hello everyone. My name is Yana Renz, founder and CEO of Soligo, and I'm here to talk about scaling the enterprise using various different strategies for automation. So let's get started. All right, we've got some minor technical problems there. Let me make sure I clean this out. Okay, so 89% of companies today are in the midst of a digital transformation to become a digital enterprise. And so if you take a step back and just think about that statement, you might initially say, well, that's a bunch of buzzwords, corporate speak, so on and so forth. But digital transformation really came to the forefront during the pandemic. Right around this time last year, companies were just scrambling to make things happen during the pandemic and be able to function as a business. They may have optimized certain business processes, found different channels to serve their customers, so on and so forth. So what used to be somewhat of a and abstract and nebulous concept really came alive during the pandemic. In today's session, what we want to talk about is how does automation really help companies achieve some of these goals? So we'll start with a quick preview of what does digital enterprise mean? What's that mindset? Certainly I'm not going to go through all the boxes here on the screen, but if I were to focus on a couple of things. Let's start with something that we all know. How do we communicate with our customers? What are some of the channels that we want to communicate with? For example, do we want to spin up new channels to be able to reach our customers, such as being able to transact online, have an E commerce offering? Or it might be customer service, can we do just in time customer service? Or it might be around some of our internal processes, business processes that are not fully optimized and we feel can, with some work can really contribute to scaling the company. The bottom line is there's all of this and there's a lot more that goes towards being a digital enterprise. And, and for companies to really get there, they need to accelerate that and continue that acceleration from the digital transformation through the pandemic. Today we live in a best of breed SaaS world. There's a SaaS application for pretty much anything and everything that you can imagine. A typical mid market company, let's say defined as up to 1,000 employees, have about 200 of these business apps. And an enterprise company, let's say above, 1,000 employees, have about 300 applications in the enterprise. If you were to look at this picture right here, you'll see that it's just a small sampling, maybe 5% of these business apps that an enterprise has. Even that looking at this diagram is pretty complicated. What does that mean? With the investments that companies have made in SaaS, we end up, before you know it, in time with this sprawl of SaaS applications. And when you have a sprawl of applications, there tends to be a certain clustering of apps together, which is what you see in those light blue boxes. So let's take a deeper dive into some of these. So first off, not all SaaS apps are the same. There are certainly, there's a pecking order, so to speak. And There are certain SaaS applications that we call foundational SaaS applications. Think of a CRM and ERP and HCM. These applications are the system of record for key business objects in the enterprise, such as an account or contact, or an employee sales order, purchase order, so on and so forth. Then there are numerous specialized SaaS applications that take a certain function and go much deeper. And those SaaS applications inevitably need to connect with some of these foundational SaaS apps because they need access to those system of record business objects such as the account or the sales order. So when you think about that in that level of detail, it's fairly natural to see this clustering occur. For example, in sales and marketing, as we know, the CRM is, is ultimately the mothership. And there are a number of other applications that somehow ultimately need to connect to the CRM. In the midst of all of this, there are business processes. And these business processes have existed for a while and predates the whole SaaS evolution. And of course, these business processes are getting more and more refined and complex. And the interesting thing is you get business processes that can work within these clusters that are fairly localized and domain specific. And then you get other business processes that are literally the backbone of the enterprise, such as Quote to Cash. So let's take a moment to talk about Quote to Cash. If you're a company, a B2B company, selling to other companies, you have a salesforce, you have leads, the leads get converted to opportunities, and you go through a sales cycle and then you close the deal. You might have discount approvals in that midst. Once the deal is closed, you got to get it to the back office, to your ERP and your billing system so that you can bill those customers, and then you got to collect payments, so on and so forth, right? As you can see, Quote to Cash is a complex business process that spans not only many different applications, such as A CRM, a cpq, a contract management solution, a billing solution, a professional services automation system, and finally your accounting system. Not only does it span those business applications, but it also spans some of those clusters or silos. One takeaway from this landscape is to know that there is process automation occurring at a localized level within these various ad hoc clusters. And certainly process automation that needs to occur throughout the enterprise. In order to do this, companies ultimately need to think about automating their business processes. And to automate business processes, you need to think about a centralized automation platform. So what are some ways to approach automation? So on the left we have what we call the connected enterprise. That's typically the world we live in today. And on the right side we have the tomorrow's enterprise or today and tomorrow's enterprise, the digital enterprise. So of course companies have business apps connected today, whether you know it or not, out of the box. There are vendor built integrations that exist to automate certain things, but that's more or less moving data around. And what we want to think about is how can we think about it in terms of business processes and best practices? What's the system of record? What are the key workflows? Can it be configured? Who can use it? It's best practices in a box, which is different from just connecting various apps and moving data. Next you got to think about how you're going to do this. Typically we see various different tool sets, ad hoc Solutions where an IT team may have used APIs to go build integrations, or various teams are using these out of the box SaaS, provider built integrations. Compare and contrast that to more of an enterprise wide automation platform that can really be that operating system of the enterprise when it comes to business processes and gives you a single pane of glass to be able to think about your enterprise in terms of automation. Assuming that you've picked an automation platform, then you have to think about what the delivery model is going to be. Is it going to be centralized? Is everything going to go through it? Or are you going to turn things over to various teams to to make ends meet on those teams? Or is a federated model better where you get the best of both worlds? Let IT build mission critical business processes and manage those, because those sometimes need to be under lock and key, but then delegate and empower teams and departments to go build their own processes and in certain cases have them start a particular automation and then have that be turned over to it. So the model that we think is the best model for this landscape is that federated model. Let's go through a quick example. CDC foundation, which of course is the nonprofit arm to raise capital for cdc. As you can imagine during the pandemic about a year back, they went through a massive influx of transactions and increase in transactions and while they had an automation platform, they were only using it in a fairly nascent way. And a forcing function like that enabled or forced the CDC foundation to think about automation in a different way that getting into all the details. They automated the quote to cash process so it's more like pledges to donations, the automated business processes around employees which we call hire to retire, so on and so forth. I won't go through all of these bullet points, but one telling factor is the mindset and it's captured there on the bottom right of having done this a few times, how the IT team and the biz ops team at CDC foundation is now thinking about these business processes because they've seen what a difference it can make and the return on the investment. So it's no surprise that the most successful companies are the companies that are making a major transition to transform themselves into a digital enterprise. This allows them to scale and then of course that leads to larger market share, higher profitability and arguably the single most important thing is greater customer satisfaction, which is an absolute must in this day and age. So to summarize, it takes a lot to be a digital enterprise. There there are many factors to consider when it comes to automation. Arguably the single most important decision that you can make is to understand the impact of not automating some of your key business processes and selecting a platform for that automation so that you can automate key business processes. You can delegate to the various functional or departmental teams to build certain domain specific local automations that are within their purview and then also find a balanced model where it can can direct and control some of the key business processes such as quote to cash that tend to span the entire enterprise across some of these clusters and silos. Thank you. We would love to hear from you as to what your automation strategy is. Please Visit us at www.all my emails there. I would love to hear from you if you can shoot me an email directly.

Awesome. Thank you Jan. We definitely have a few questions in the chat, so I would love to spend a little bit more time with you if you don't mind. One of the first great. One of the first is what business processes should I prioritize automating first?

Yeah, and let me answer that question. I'm going to go to this big Diagram here. As I said before, certainly there are more localized business processes as well as centralized, kind of the heartbeat of the enterprise. The simple rule that I would recommend is first come up with a list of your key business processes. Understand whether your existing solutions there, whether it's, whether it needs to be automated. If it has been automated, let's say through an out of the box offering from a vendor, a SaaS vendor, is that working well enough? If it isn't broken, we're not asking you to fix that. That doesn't make sense. And once you go through that exercise fairly soon you're going to understand what some of these critical business processes are. Likely they're going to be the ones that span across the enterprise and have a larger footprint, but not necessarily limited to that because it certainly can be a more localized process as well.

All right, thank you. Scott here has curious as to what drove the increase in market share.

Increase in market share for. I'm sorry, the example that I gave in terms of CDC Foundation.

Yes.

Yeah. So for them it's fairly simple, right? During the pandemic. They had many additional requests for donations and as a result they needed to ensure that they had the infrastructure, the right processes to be able to achieve that and be able to take the donations that they get and scale that infinitely. So every company is going to be different in terms of this market share conversation. Some companies may start new channels to increase mindshare, but for a company like CDC foundation, it was more about ensuring that they could handle the inbound requests that they had.

Makes sense. Chris Fernandez here has what are the most important factors when you look at a build versus buy decision? It's a two part question, so I can hit you with that one first.

Yeah, let's do one at a time. So build versus buy. Classic question. Clearly I'm going to be a little bit biased, but I'll try to put that aside and say that if you have fairly minimal requirements, you're a smaller company and you needed to fix something immediately build an automation, that's fine to go build. And by the way, I'm making the assumption that build in this context means you don't have an automation platform. You're going to use direct APIs and go build something. The thing I will say though is it has an extremely limited shelf life. We've been doing this for many, many years. Anything that someone builds, unless they put a ton of time and try to truly productize it, it's going to be brittle and it only can take you so far. But if that's the business problem that you want to solve and you have an acute pain, point building is okay. But frankly, for anything else in this day and age, it's 2021. An IPaaS solution, an automation platform has to be the first place that you start with.

Okay. The second part to that is so we just said when you look at bill versus buy decision or when should you prioritize the Swiss army knife versus the scalpel approach.

I'm sorry, the last section. The Swiss army knife.

The scalpel approach.

Yeah, that's a good one. I don't think there's a right answer. Context is key in these situations. And of course I also have more of a follow up question there to truly understand the context of the question. But assuming that I'm understanding the question correctly, I think based on again an inventory and prioritization of what needs to happen, then that decision needs to be made.

Chris, do you want to. I know, I see Chris on here, so I don't know if you wanted to clarify himself.

Oh yeah, sure. Happy have to clarify. Thanks for taking the question Thinking more in terms of like a business solution. So I sit in our customer success ops Org and I'm currently assessing customer sentiment solutions, things that capture NPS csat. So we have a kind of point solution for NPS currently and I'm trying to weigh do we stay with that? Does it fit the bill or should I look at a broader solution that can touch on multiple business needs?

Understood. And I'm very familiar with the subject matter. So I think my understanding of the question is should you go for a very pointed solution that really solves that problem or go for a broader solution. But to me that implies that they are both business applications. And so since this conversation is more around automation, so some of the questions that I would urge you to think about would be that broader scope versus the more narrower focus. How does that tie in with the rest of the business applications that you have in that customer success domain? Does it need to connect with your CRM? Do you have another dedicated customer success management tool such as a gain site where that overlap is? But again trying to focus on automation Mission to think through. If you were to get this what are some of the workflows that you might need to deploy once you get that NPS data, Where does it need to go? Does it need to be married with some other CRM type data or customer facing data and evaluate the pros and cons? I certainly can't tell you which business app to pick because that's not my expertise, but I can certainly give you tips on how to, once you've narrowed it down to a couple of apps, as to what you should think in terms of automation.

Perfect, thank you.

All right, I've got one more to close us out. What is the culture needed for automation?

Yeah, that's a great question. So first thing is to recognize that there's a need, as that saying goes, right? You cannot solve something unless you identify and admit that there might be a problem. And look, every company does this differently. Some companies think ahead a long ways, other companies play it as it goes. And you get signals along the way as soon as you realize that certain things are not working and your data is not moving around and you don't have a well oiled machine when it comes to some of these processes. So first ensure that you understand that there's a need, whenever that is, listen to those signals. And then I think the biggest thing when it comes to culture is to get buying across the board that this is something that should be solved at this level here rather than at the siloed level. By default, companies will gravitate towards that clustered approach. Each team is going to go solve their own problems and that can get you to the next level, no doubt, but it's not going to give you that fully automated enterprise that most companies ultimately will need to scale their business.

Fantastic. Well, Jan, thank you for coming. Thank you for being a part of this. We appreciate the Lego as always. And everyone here, we know there's, wherever you're watching, there's I think, one more final session of the day. But we want to make sure that you stop by the sponsor hall, visit Lego's booth. They'll be in their lounge for a little bit. And as always, I'm sure they're here to answer any questions moving forward. Thank you guys.

Great. Thank you everyone.

Have a good one. See you all later.