The Automation Journey of Wien Energie

Louise
Hello and a warm welcome to the Automation Talk, your biweekly podcast where you get to listen to real automation and digital transformation specialists straight from the field. My name is Louise and I'm delighted to be your host.

Louise
In today's episode, I have the pleasure to host two guests at once. Markus Ivan. RPA Lead at Wien Energie and Ingomar Fellner Head of the RPA competence center at the Wien Energie group. After the successful establishment of their automation initiative and citizen developer community at Wien Energie, Ingomar and Markus are now working towards scaling their blueprint to the whole Wien Energie Group and its over 20 sub entities. In our conversation, they outlined the best practices they have identified and also shared some of the difficulties they had to overcome along the road. Additionally, they impart their expertise on how to develop appropriate governance structures, upskill their teams, and also how to keep them engaged in citizen development activities in the long term. All of this and more on how to sustainably, build, and scale an automation initiative can be found in this episode. Enjoy.

Louise
So hello and a warm welcome to both of you, Ingomar and Markus, I'm really happy to have both of you on today, and I would love to start with a brief introduction around by both of you, please. Maybe you want to start, Markus?

Markus
Thank you, Louise. Thank you very much that we can join this podcast today. Yeah, my name is Marcus Ivan and I'm working for the Wien Energie placed in Vienna, of course, and it's a part of the big group, the Wiener Stadtwerke, where Ingomar can tell you more about them.

Ingomar
Thank you. Yeah, hello, and it's also a pleasure for me to be part of the podcast here today. My name is Ingomar and I'm also working at Wien Energie. I'm the RPA competence center lead of Wiener Stadtwerke group. My team is located as well in the Digital Competence Center as an independent team and because Markus said it already. So just to give a brief introduction, what is Wiener Stadtwerke and what is the group? The group is a part of the city of Vienna and it's divided currently, I think, in 26 or 27 companies. And these companies take tasks such as public transport, electricity and district heating, production like Lean and Nikitas, the construction and operation of grids, electricity grids, gas grids, and also public garages, cemeteries, and as well such services as Fernando's It services and facility management as well. So you can see it's a very diverse structure on tasks we are doing here at the daily business.

Louise
Yeah, absolutely. As you said, it's a very big business, but maybe let's see a little bit about your roles and kind of where you are anchored inside this huge organization. Maybe you can describe a little bit what activities you are mainly focused on.

Markus
As Ingomar said. Well, we both are. From Wien Energie at the department. The Digital Competence Center. And my role is to be the business process. Automation center of Excellence lead of the Vineyaneagi So I'm really focused on getting the citizen developers, giving them the knowledge to be able to automate as many processes as possible, get a community up and running, help themselves to continue and make sure that the system is up and running and Ready, and that everyone is happy and ingamewa. You taking this idea and scale it to the others.

Ingomar
Exactly. This was the Plan and this is still the plan. So my part of where I'm anchored in the cooperation with Marcus, for example, I'm the competence and the leader. My job is to help in any case for the coe Ease that means center of Excellence and Market is the same sense of Excellence lead to help and to bring service to them and also competence and help them to raise up the tool stack. If it is completely a new initiative to migrate from the old two to the new one, as we had in this year, and as well set up the complete governance is my part or to raise the community, because we have a strong structure in case of using citizen developership. And Marcus is the CEO elite in the vinegar. So we have also a co elite in the other legal entities with RPA initiatives, and I'm supporting them as much as I can. To give a short idea. How is it working? I'm not the boss of Marcus. No, at all not. I'm working together closely with him and also with the other cu elites. We have the capability to make decisions all over the legal entities, but we don't do it like that.

Ingomar
We decided to make it more cooperative way that we like more in a community way that we say, okay, we have a steering board and every cui lead is part of the steering board, so that we can do decisions, make them together and enclose cooperation. Right, that's the way we are doing that.

Louise
Yeah, that sounds great. Thank you for that introduction. It would really help to see where you Stand. But before we dive deeper into what you're doing now, maybe we can take a little look back at your careers and see how you got where you are now and also how maybe your interest developed for the topic of Business Process Automation and yeah, digital transformation in general.

Markus
Okay, then I might start. I started at 96, so I'm already very long in this company. I started with the Female Vine, which was the District Teaching Company, which was integrated into the Vinay some years ago. And I started as a Unix administrator. So I've been really deep in the technology, down in the cellar, as we used to. But it was a great opportunity for me then, because I built a big Unix environment. But anyway, I changed six years later to get a project Manager and Process Manager in the billing department to take care of the big introduction of a big SAP solution for industrial, solution for utilities, for the fan member, for the distributing part. And I was actually in this area for almost 19 years and I had the possibility to do very diverse projects, big projects for integrating big websites, our part and a lot of different stuff. So I knew the process is very good, I knew the people, I was a technician, I was the only technician in a financial department for making this. And when RPA came up, I found this opportunity to really get good processes out of and help our colleagues to really spare big time.

Markus
And also my manager, my boss recognized the potential in here and he really made sure that I could spend as much time as possible building, making the first big RPA processes when it came up. And so I really could do some big, great process because I knew the people, I knew the processes, I had the technical background, but still was working as a citizen developer. And with this knowledge there was a big transition in the company and there was this job for RPA Lead was to be taken. And with my backgrounds and my knowledge, I could take this opportunity. And since 2020 I'm the RPA Lead for the Vineyki and have lots of fun with RPA and the community and the whole stuff.

Louise
Cool. Thank you so much. And how about you, Angama?

Ingomar
Yeah, in case of that it is completely different because my way to automation arose a little by chance. After starting late, there was all the time a purchase, a procurement manager, a senior procurement manager and things like that. And it was starting late in case of supply chain management. And suddenly I slipped into automation nearly accidentally by doing that for processes of procurement and logistics, mostly as a project manager or product owner or something like that. And after our baking to Vina Statteca in 2018, I saw the chance and I did everything to become an RPA citizen developer. This was the model which was VINNER start picker working on. And this was a big chance for me because normally if something is new, you don't have the chance to directly write to start with working on that, get a developer of anything, it's not that easy. But an RP and start pick it was easy doing and for me it was a very interesting possibility. It was a good chance to automate more in the large field of supply chain management. And you can imagine it is a field with a huge potential. Anyway, already I had automation in mind.

Markus
I started early to be a citizen developer is told and the opportunity arose as well to do this later as a full time job as RPA developer at Weinergi. So I moved from another legal entity to Win Energy and started as an RPA developer. And this was a good was my chance to do it full time and so with the knowledge of management and development of use cases and experience on RPA, it opened up the opportunity to become later on a leader. And since May 22, I'm the competent center lead for the whole group. And yeah, shortly, but this is the simple way it went there.

Louise
Okay, thank you so much. I love how it's like two different approaches, but you both ended up in this topic and you really embraced this new era, let's say, and also the goal behind Marcus. You mentioned that you were really happy that you could really create great processes with it. And I think that's a great way to look at it and not just say, let's automate everything and not do it anymore, but let's think about what are we actually aiming for? And RPA is a way to rethink your processes, to create them in a better way. And you're both kind of working towards that and also multiplying that in your organization now with your community. So I'm really curious to hear about how you're doing that specifically. But before we do that, maybe let's look a little bit more on a global scale or more holistically at how the automation journey at Vinegar or at the Van Stadec in general went about. So maybe where you started in 2018 and where you are right now, who wants to start?

Ingomar
I think at this point, Marcus should start because he was right at the beginning there already in being in the geek.

Louise
Good point.

Markus
Yes. I heard very soon in 2019 about this opportunity because there was this pilot project starting in the financial and controlling area of our company where they really made a pilot with two, three processes and it worked out very fine. Vinynecki started with great software called Process Robot by the firm Softomotive. And this company actually was this good, and this product was so good that Microsoft took them over last year and integrated them into their power platform as let's say Missing linked the Missing RPA tool because they were of course doing a lot with cloud flows and what was missing was the onprem sector. And so they integrated softer motive. And what we did, we took a look at the possibilities. We also made another second project where we looked at some vendors to get the best solution out for Beniniki and the start Becker. And finally we said, okay, it will be the power platform for Microsoft. And so we decided to do this and made the big migration. At the time, we had about more than 80 productive processes already and we had the luck going to Microsoft. We had a migration tool that made things a lot easier than going to the citizen developers and saying, okay, you have to start from scratch again, of course, but this was not the only reason why we said it's going to be our platform.

Markus
And so by February of this year, we could finally finish this project. And we are now up and running with, let's say about almost 100 processes productive and 30 already done, which is actually good.

Ingomar
Yeah, because is this what Marcus told you now? Is this just what what Winnecky did? Not just, but it was the story of Winnecki. There are other entities which also had RPA initiatives within the Vina statue group. They already started as well in 2019, because Vinygi was already telling everybody how good is RP, what everything is done, and some others started also with small projects. And the reason was that nobody didn't know this technology well, but everybody wants to have it. In the beginning, the ways the different companies went was a little different. So we had structural thinking, different forms of the structure, how is RP used in this company? And this, and this. And after the assimilation of Process Robot to Power Automate, everybody was in the situation that we have to change anything, we have to stop working with Process robot, we have to migrate to another tool. And so we had to decide how to do this. As Marcus told already, there are the list of reasons why we decided Power Automate was big, but this was a huge list. But other hand, we had to think of how we can train all the citizen developer to use, for example, your iPad, as never did before and so on.

Ingomar
So in the other companies, it was also different. And so we decided afterwards to do this migration on Vineyki side, to say in case of the maturity, the biggest maturity in RPA, it was sure that Viney should do the first steps, should plan that, should do the migration, create a blueprint. And afterwards, based on this blueprint, we go out to the other companies within the group and bring them to the same level. And the others were very open for that. And that's the reason why we created this competence.

Louise
Cool. Okay, thank you very much for that sort of overview of your journey so far. What I would like to know now is also what role business process automation plays kind of strategically for the whole organization. As you said, you have vinegar that is kind of trailblazing it for everyone else, but it must also have sort of a place in the company's strategy overall. So maybe you can talk a little.

Markus
Bit about that, especially in Wien Energie. Digitalization is one of the three current strategy aims of Wien Energie. So it's a big topic here and there are many people thinking about how we can perform better. And we as part with business process automation and RPA, we are very much, of course, in the game and working for getting to a better future with automated processes.

Ingomar
I think that the thought or the mindset in case of RPA or automation is very good settle that's been in a key also in other companies as well. But how to say we have why is it very why we do have this focus in the vinegar at Wicker Group on doing automation? Because the demographic development in and around Vienna in the upcoming retirement and it will be a lot of them in the group mean a lower number of employees for the start picking group in the future. But this under increasing workload and to this requires a reduction in staff workload on the one hand and a focus on the valueadded activities on the other hand. So the way to use IPR, for example, is this just one tool and one solution. But the way to do this with RPA was the way we decided to do within the next years. And I'm sure of that this is a good decision because we have to deal with the upcoming situation, right?

Louise
Definitely. I mean, you mentioned that it's a problem that is happening in the Vienna region but it's probably something that we can all kind of relate to also in Germany, this development and also this increase of workload and the shortage of skilled employees that can fulfill this workload.

Ingomar
We have this all over Europe, this problem, right?

Louise
Yeah, exactly. It's a problem that we're all facing and it requires still though a mindset of this open also for this change and how we work and how we deal with that workload. So I'm really curious to hear a little bit more about how you then tackled the topic. So you've placed it in your strategy, you have identified it as part of the solution to tackling this issue and also to driving towards a more digital organization. But now I really want to know sort of how that looks like before we do that and before we dive deeper into your story of process automation at the Vine Nagi organization. And we're going to take a short break and we'll be back quickly. Why buy process automation at a high.

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Louise
So we're back and ready to talk about how the vine energy subsidy or the entity has been kind of pioneering best practices for the whole organization. And one big part of setting up or starting with business process automation is also setting up a governance structure. So that is something that I would be really interested in. Marcos, if you could describe a little bit more in detail how exactly you are going about this.

Markus
Okay, talking about governance I'd like to mention perhaps the roles that we implemented in our structure. And there I start with myself as the RPA lead and I'm responsible that every, as I already said, that everything is running and everyone's happy and see that everything develops the right direction, of course, a lot together with Ingumar, because we developed the thing for the whole place. Then I'm also doing a lot of jobs like my fellow colleagues being RP operators or BPA operators, who take care of the citizen developers, of their needs, of the monitoring of the productive processes, getting processes with our we made a test process or a blueprint process, which has the most important rules already in the process that the citizen developer starts developing. And before we get a process productive, we take care that every need is done in the process and that everything runs as stable as possible, that everyone is as happy as possible. Because as you know, RPA is not the most stable invention or tool or solution in the world, but with our experience, we are getting there to really make sure that it gets as stable as possible.

Markus
So these are the operators that we have in our department. We have two business analysts who take care of the ideas of our citizen developers and the colleagues of the whole firm. Then, of course, the citizen developers themselves. And we implemented one special role of a citizen developer that's the key user. It's the one with the most knowledge in the department of RPA and he's helping, of course, his colleagues, the citizen developers in his department and of course, he's the first connection to us in the Digital Competence Center to help him solve his problems and continue as best as we can together.

Louise
Right, okay. And if I understand it correctly, those are the roles that are part of the center of Excellence of Vinegar. And then you have a similar kind of center of Excellence approach in each of the entities that are already starting with business process automation. Do you have kind of smaller teams in each of the entities? And do you also have then the kind of head organization? Would that be then you Ingama?

Ingomar
Yes, correct. This is the competence center. This is a little above, but as said it before, in the beginning of each center of Excellence, each RPA lead is part of the steering board for the decisions we make within the Competence Center as that we want to do the decision together and to bring RP together forward to the future within the group.

Louise
How is your feeling with that approach? I would like to know what you say because there are different ways to go about a center of Excellence. Would you say that this kind of federated approach has been serving you well? What would you say are the main benefits of this?

Markus
To frankly spoke on that point. This is something it came up out of our group culture. We have not the same chance as we have in private business that we say okay, the CEO gives an order and everybody below has to do that what he's saying. So we have a different culture because we are a public company. Let's say the minimum, what we want to have this week we give out and everybody decides and confirms that he will work with that. And for example, Marcus always do a little more because there are a few steps forwarded in case of the others, for example. So that's the reason. And on the other hand, we are not how to say I'm not angry or unhappy. If one department in a small league entity in any other district of banner develops something, an RPA, which we have never seen before, they are really good technicians, then it's my job to grab this, know how to grab this competence, put it together and open up it to make it available for everybody in the group. That's the point, right?

Louise
Thank you. You've touched upon many interesting points. There a lot of it is music to my ears, not focusing solely on RPA, sharing the knowledge, bringing everyone to a common understanding, having the goal in mind that you want to improve it for everyone and not leave anyone behind. And not automate for the sake of automation, but automate smart and in the best lean way, being agile, being flexible. I think those things are great keywords that a lot of people preach. Not everyone walks the talk. So I'm really curious to hear how you're also doing that. We're going to talk a little bit about the community and how you share knowledge, et cetera, later. But while all these are very interesting points, I also want to know a little bit about the dark sites. What are maybe challenges you have faced? I heard before the word migration tool changes. So there I detect maybe a risk. Can you maybe talk about some of the challenges you have faced and maybe also let us know how you overcame them?

Markus
Well, of course, as I mentioned, we had to do this migration from software motive processor into the power platform. And as you can imagine, this was a big project for us because Microsoft did very well in integrating process robot, but we actually wanted to be finished with this project by the end of last year. And in December the first white paper came out. We had a hard time migrating the stuff because it was a lot to do. There were so many productive processes and although there was a migration tool, we had to change a lot of stuff. We had to understand the architecture, we had to get there, to get in the beginning to have the least the monitoring that we can really operate and administrate the whole system. And this was a big journey and we learned a lot in the short time period. And this was very challenging but it was a great project. We had another issue, another project that we didn't plan beforehand. Microsoft, as most of you might know, turned off the basic identification by October this year and we had a great solution in our era and success handling of the processes, working with exchange actions that were supposed not to work anymore in October.

Markus
So we had to find a new solution and we did well preparing this and now we have a lot of benefits of our new solution. But we had to do a transition of almost 100 processes and of course we didn't want to go to the Citizen Developers and say please, you have to change this, because it was a big impact. We want to go of course, to keep them happy. So this was a good thing. The whole department, the whole digital competence center helped. We went together and divided the processes in small groups so we could all handle this in this time period. But of course this was some months of a topic that we could have used better into going out to the community and helping them and going on with our journey. But yeah, we made the best out of it and we got a very good solution now for this. And perhaps there's a third thing I'd like to mention is with our structure, and I think this is the best solution in the viney. Nicki and it proves that it's really working because also during the time where we were working with ourselves, with the migration in both projects, the thing was running, but we were able to keep the company happy so that we're still people coming to us and say, okay, I got a process here.

Markus
Can you help me with that? So this proves that it was running on its own already. We made this peak. But there's a big thing I'd like to mention. It's very important that also the management understands that it's important if you have a citizen developer in your department then make sure that there's a second one, if this one is in holidays and holidays for example, and make sure that the process is still under control when this employee leaves the department. And that's one of the big issues we have to work with constantly. But I think we're doing fine with this.

Louise
Okay, yeah, well thank you for sharing that as well. I think one key takeaway from that is that I also like is that, I mean, you had this something that was holding you back, but it was an important step to take in order to make the journey more sustainable, in order to move on with the work that you'd already done. As he said, not start everything again from scratch, but also build on what had already been done and also preparing for changes and adapting to the environment that is out there in order to ensure that the project has a certain longevity and that people have trust in it. So I think that is one important action that you've taken. And the other one, as you said, is the mindset. Something that we are also very keen on developing is the automation. Mindset is seeing processes in the right light, seeing the opportunity for automation and the benefits that it can generate. And that can be really hard work. And I was wondering, I guess it's also kind of a stereotype that I might have of like a public organization, but I can imagine that not everyone is like a tech affinity, tech savvy person there that wants to get started with development.

Louise
I can imagine that there's also a certain amount of fear and resistance to that kind of change and to the skills that are required. So I would really like to know how you went about training those citizen developers, how you identified them in the teams, how do you motivate them to get started? What were your best practices there to set up this community?

Markus
Perhaps I start because I was in this position, I was starting as a citizen developer. The project manager from that time came to all the departments, to all the managers and told them about RPA and the possibilities. And of course they could prove with their pilot projects what is possible. And they asked us to make some list of potential processes that were able and we went through them and found out, okay, this is good for RPA, this is not good for RPA. I've seen the potential and they made a brief introduction. What's low code, no code programming. And as far as you know what the conditional is, you are way ahead. It's very easy then to build it and especially starting with the softer motive process robot. It was so easy for myself to just really start programming. I only had this one little step back when they told me, okay, yeah, you know that you do the trick, but here's the governance and there's error exception handling. We do like this and stuff like that. But yeah, by the time I was completely in there and I see this with many people, of course there are some employees who say, no, this is too sophisticated for me and I will never understand it because they have just fearful something new.

Markus
But I think it's the same thing like exel many years ago. It's the same thing. It's a tool for the people in the departments to help doing the job better. And that's the main thing about RPA. And we got 50, about 50 RPA developers who are able to we trained more than 50, but I counted 50 with them who are active and who got active processes, where the process runs and runs and there's nothing to do. Actually with some RPA processes this really happens that there's nothing to do for ages. And they're still, of course our RPA developers because they are. Responsible for the process, but 50 people in a big company that's I think a lot, and we are counting and counting, and that's the good thing. In the last month we had three new people who are really keen to go on to start with RPA and get some processes running. So there's big interest, and I'm happy now that the projects are over, that we can support them as fast as we can.

Ingomar
Maybe just a little. It is Marker said we have to find the potential developers everywhere. It's not that easy. So we have two things we have to find. One is the developers, the citizen developers who are interested in to learn coding on RPA. And the other thing is to find that potential. We want to code, we want to automate. These are two things we have to think of. If you think of citizen developers, we have different ways to reach them. The one is some of them come to markers, come to down the RPA lead to say hey, I have here something and I want to try to learn that and want to develop it. Many others have the fear that they have no idea, they are not It specialists, they have never developed anything they don't know. Coding. We show with trainings, open trainings. We offer within the group the basics of RPA, what is RPA and how you can code and show that with this track and drop a user interface that is very easy to do this stuff. No, we are not that developing specialists, because we know to code, we have just experience to deal with some issues and to deal with the technology.

Ingomar
But to coe is very easily done. And this we want to bring out as an information to everybody who is open to it. Some of them still will. No, it's not my job, it's not my thing, out of my business. I don't want to do that. This will always happen, as Market brought this example with Axel. Axel does has a lot of things you can do with it, and most of the people don't use it as it is able to. And this would also be the same with RPA. Later on we will have a few of them. You bring out new developments, you bring something out with the RPA and the others don't. This will always happen on the one hand. The other thing is, as Marcus said in the beginning, going out to the department and find the potentials, and bring the potentials also to us, that we can automate them.

Markus
Perhaps may I add something to this? Sometimes we find people who really are interested in RPA and these other, let's say the good employees, who really do all the jobs that can be done, who are really top motivated. And these people the most times don't have the resources to start RPA like that. There's a big outcome that's of Louise, an issue and there are some happenings, of course, also here in some departments where they say we have a lot of potential to be automated, but we don't have the time to do so. They have to find a way that we help them, we motivate them, we show them with processes, what time they can save, what quality they can enhance, where they can get, if they spend some time doing the right alternation.

Ingomar
Yeah, that's the reason why Marco said before that it needs to also be backboned by the management, that the decision is made as well, not only by the citizen developer. So you can see we have that there are three parts to think of it potential for the one hand, citizen development trust on the other hand, and the management backbone and so on. The decision has to be done and you see to have this all together that sounds like music, that sounds like Arthur and this is not that easy. And this is the stuff we are working on also very intensive.

Louise
Okay, yeah. So thank you for that. I think a really big takeaway from that is focus on those champions, those people that are coming up with ideas, proactively and that are happy to learn new skills and that will join you, and that will then maybe also multiply that kind of enthusiasm within their own teams and bring the topic along to the other employees that might maybe before have had fears of resistance. So I think that is something that is a great sort of best practice approach, finding those champions. And you will, as you said, always have people that are fearful or that don't want to change, don't start and try to motivate them from the start. Start with the champions. So I think that is an important learning that you've said but also getting the buy in from management to ensure that the time is there to properly become a citizen developer and to be able to focus on that. As well in your daily job, because you have to integrate it with your current workload and to really see those benefits and to make them clear to everyone, not just the management, but also the citizen, developers and the employees that are concerned.

Louise
So I think you have there shared again some really great best practices. You've also talked about sort of governance error, handling documentation, making sure that the process is not just running and then if the person leaves, it drops out, but making sure that you have a consistent maintenance of the product of the project or of the process there. I would like to know how do you do that? How do you keep people motivated to look at the process once it's already running and to look into how to maintain it properly. Is there a best practice there for you?

Markus
Well, we got a big document with all the rules we have that the process has to catch to make. We get a lot of suggestions. We try to help the people to get the most stable process possible because there are many ways to solve an issue, how to implement a process. The one thing then we built this, as I said, success and error handling inside the process, which is fixed in every process how this has to look like. We built three categories, of course, the success process, the failure process and then we built a third thing when there's an error from an employee not using the process correctly, for example, and the stakeholder they are in a list then and the process looks okay. With this process, these stakeholders get the email information about how if it was okay, if it has a failure or if there was another issue and we try to get as much information out to the developers and to the stakeholders so that they can react pretty quick. And see, that's the problem. I have to do an enhancement in my process. I do this, of course, with our help if needed and then they tell us to deploy it to the production and hopefully this issue will never ever happen again and the process is a bit more stable than before.

Louise
Okay, awesome. Thank you. I think we've talked a lot about the best practices that you've started to establish and also the learnings that you've had along the journey. Now, before we conclude, I'd like to know what is now your plan for scaling this blueprint from Vina Nagi across the organization, or you've already started doing that, but what elements would you say you prioritize in that kind of scaling initiative and what are your hopes for this and what do you think it will look like? It's a big question, but maybe you can just focus on the top elements of that.

Ingomar
Yes. Okay. To scale that, I said this before based on the Vinaigi experience thinking of operating model of thinking of the keyword citizen developer and empowering the Professorization of RP and used terms of governance business analyzes. This is happening already at Vinegar and this we want to bring out to the others as well. And started with a lot of knowhow runs first and tried to find a way to have here as that before already the same knowledge also within the Coe and we also tried to find out which company is able to empower citizen developers and which one needs to have more external development capacities. This is also happening because of dollars and this is the level we want to create here. In case of how we improve that, it is very different. In case of what we can imagine what will happen in these different companies as because they're working still on their own. So we have to be focused on doing also IRP marketing to them together and still keep it in mind. Sometimes it is very easy to find new potentials because it's coming up from the department itself and sometimes we have to push it.

Ingomar
This is completely different also within the legal entities here we have here in the strategic group in Viennagi, for example, most of the potentials are found out of the department and others. We have really to deep dive and to do marketing and to show, to showcase what is happening with RPA. And this is how we want to improve that, to scale that effect we have here at Binacky, for example. And the hope is that we will have not only nearly 200 flows running nearly daily on our machine, we have something like 70 developers, most of them citizen developers. We have 70 in the whole group. In case of the numbers, it sounds a lot, but in case of the size of the Venus Shuttle, it is not that big and we want to have it in future. My hope is to have it much more, much more processes running and more interest on developing and to gain that because this is the reason why we keep on this. Citizen developership. If you think of a centralized model as we had it already in smaller components, then you have always this backlog which is increasing and it's gotten a lot bigger and bigger.

Ingomar
And the time to automate something takes. Yeah, we have the demand and when it's automated, it takes over a year because of the resources. This is something we want to also to be very fast. If there is a demand, if you want to automate it, if you want to scale it because it's an urgent case, think of ACP interface. ACP interface is ready in nine months. I need a solution for this. Nine months. Then we have to deliver something and this is what we want to be focused as well. That means we want to move fast and this we need also to get the capacity. This is the hope that we have this in future better and better and more and more.

Louise
Right. Okay. This is kind of your vision. I mean, ultimately, as you said, your goal is to take or to tackle the issue of having a huge workload and not enough people to COVID it. And also what we stand for is kind of meaningful work for everyone. So having not repetitive tasks, that's something that a bot could do, but having tasks to focus on that are interesting, that are maybe more value adding, as you said. And so I think, as you said, you are going with upskilling people, empowering people, creating the capacity to deliver those solutions as fast as possible and then also kind of opening up the skill sets for other people. So giving people a chance to move along in the organization through gaining new skills, I think that is great. And then also being open to new technologies. You said you want to move maybe beyond RPA, maybe think about intelligent automation solutions for different tasks. So you're trying to kind of COVID the whole spectrum, I think that we have covered.

Markus
Yeah, perhaps something I'd like to add. We want to get out the advantages or the possibilities of the Power platform in future. At the moment we are pretty focused because after the migration and our other project with the basic out, we still have focused that our on prem RPA processes are up and running and the community is happy and this will be our main focus for the next month and years, of course. And everything that Ingrams said, yes, that's where we have to go. But on the other hand, we plan to perhaps, of course, open to the cloud flow session more to get this possibility as well to get this mixture, cloud flow and desktop flow in the Power platform. And there's one big lighthouse project that was just starting where we make with the Power platform a process management project where we will work with Power apps, with the list, with SharePoint lists, with cloud flows, with desert flows, to put it all together and make the next step in using all the possibilities of the Power platform. And now where our projects are over and we get our community there where we want it, then we'll stop this.

Markus
As long as we have the resources for doing so.

Ingomar
Yeah, as Michael said, we don't think only on RPA, so we really think of the automation chain in best case, end to end because there's a complete stack existing. You have the SQL database, you have a shared list there, you have Outlook, you have something and you have a cloud automation and you want to have an app and you want to use Power Bi for example. You can all connect it together, not only from the house called desktop automation. This is the on prem automation. Microsoft offers really a big chance with the platform to connect it all together, not only within the Microsoft world because of more than four or 500 connectors, you can also add other applications and this is, this is the chance we want to use here. In the past, when you're thinking of softer motives, then it was a little more restricted and we have here now open up wide field and we don't want to stay on this, what we have done the years before. This is just a base, right?

Louise
Yeah. Okay, well, thank you so much for telling us about your journey up until now and I'm really curious to see how it goes on. I think you have set yourself great goals and I'm really excited to see where you're going to go, but also think you have shared for all our listeners some really great best practices, some great initiatives that you've started. And I think what my favorite thing is, is your approach to it on a community basis so collaborative working on this thing together and taking everyone on board and really spreading it across the whole organization in a community based approach. I think that is my favorite takeaway from this episode, and so I want to thank you for that. But before we end, I have my quick fire question vending machine, and I have prepared four questions to each, and you can just answer what comes top of mind. I do this with all my guests. So I would love to know, Marcos, if you could do the dream job from your childhood, what would you be now?

Markus
I didn't have a dream job in my childhood, as far as I can remember. But I'm a child now. I would say I would rather be a musician, an actor or a scuba diver. This would be my dream job now. But I'm very happy where I am because I can do all this besides my job and doing this just for fun.

Louise
Okay, that sounds great. I would have been surprised if it would have been something like RPA lead as a child, but that sounds great. Thank you for sharing.

Markus
I didn't know this existed, but probably didn't.

Louise
So, Ingama, what do you think should be digital live urgently? Where is something where you see this should be digital 100% now completely.

Ingomar
Anything what has happened? Anything in general? I think something like public election, because the digitalization steps could increase more voter to another thing if it would more legalize that. And on the other hand, if you think this occasionally problematic absentee ballot thing here, this can completely go obsolete because we have currently a few hundred thousand sometimes of discards where you can do the election and send it and it takes days and days until it can be counted to the result. And so I think this is something easy. When I think of the Austrian government, they do really a lot of automating or of digitalization, and it's good. But in this case we are still old fashioned and never stop thinking of America. I think they have a little more behind.

Markus
But I think, Louise, we have to cut this because we don't want to lose him to the government. We want to have him there in the stock.

Ingomar
I'm still working at a public company.

Louise
A controversial answer, but I agree with you. I think that has a lot of digitalization potential right there. So, Marcus, your second question. Which famous person from the past would you like to tell about automation?

Markus
That's an easy answer. There's one special person for me from the past. It's Frank Sapa. And I would tell him about everything. And I would love to talk about all the things and of course, also business process automation, of course.

Louise
So, last but not least, Ingamar, the question is what motivates you the most can be at work or in life in general?

Ingomar
Oh, I think it is my idea. What I have in mind works on both sides. I think improve that what you're doing daily and make it more efficient that you can do in business, that you can do in private life. And this is also something I had always in mind since I was a child, I think. And yeah, this is something, but mostly to me a lot.

Louise
Great, thank you. So continuous improvement as a mindset. I think that is a great note to end on. I think that has been a red thread throughout our discussion today. It has been an immense pleasure to talk to you and to receive all those insights and bits of knowledge from both of you. Thank you so much for coming on today and good luck with your automation journey.

Markus
Thank you for having us. Thank you so much.

Louise
Thank you. Take care.

Ingomar
Bye bye bye.

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Thank you very much for your time. We hope you enjoyed today's episode and that you were able to take away a lot of interesting information and insights from our guests. For even more insider knowledge freshly coming from the core of the automation industry, feel free to listen to our other podcast format called Automation Insider. This is hosted by Nico Bitzer and Andreas Zehent or if you prefer to read, subscribe to our Biweekly Automation Magazine. If this has intrigued you to learn more in the area of process automation and this is also interesting for your company, then feel free to visit our Automation Academy and get advice on Upskilling. You can find all the necessary links in the description. See you next time your Bots & People team.

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