How process automation cured process pains for AC Immune with speed and flexibility

Paul Stone00:02

Hi, and welcome to the FlowForma and AC Immune session. We're going to talk about how process automation cured process pains for AC Immune with speed and flexibility, and today we're joined by Ilker, who looks after SAP at AC Immune.

Ilker Esener00:26

Thank you for having me, Paul, to explain our experience at AC Immune of using FlowForma process automation.

Paul Stone00:39

You're very welcome. I'm Paul Stone, and I work for FlowForma, a vendor in the digital process automation space. AC Immune has implemented FlowForma, a no-code process automation tool, to deliver results into the business. We'll talk about those results, how they were achieved, what AC Immune set out to do at the outset, and the journey they went through, through a series of questions for Ilker.

Paul Stone01:37

The very first question: Ilker, could you tell us a little about AC Immune and your role in the organization?

Ilker Esener01:45

AC Immune is a small biotech located at the EPFL Innovation Park in Lausanne. We're a research and development company focused on finding the cure for Alzheimer's disease. Everyone in the company, day and night, IT together with the business and our scientists, has one passion: to run the research program for finding a cure for Alzheimer's and neurodegenerative diseases more generally.

Ilker Esener02:28

I'm moving into my third year here, but I have 25 years of IT experience. Most recently I was the global design lead for the SAP and ERP landscapes at Nestlé. Here I've implemented the ERP and I'm responsible for SAP. On top of that, we have a business service management platform that helps the business optimize, digitize and automate internal and external processes, and I work as a partner to the functions that need help in this area.

Paul Stone03:27

That's a very wide-ranging role. So what pain points did you identify, and what motivated AC Immune to look for a process automation tool?

Ilker Esener03:43

Once we implemented the ERP, the journey doesn't stop, for any size of company. The first challenge we identified was HR, who wanted to implement onboarding and recruitment processes, and a couple of other internal departments wanted to improve their processes for their user communities. So HR was first in line for some form of automation.

Ilker Esener04:24

At the same time, in IT we were saying: from now on, we don't want to write requirements, wait for development, test it, send it back and get it in place in one, two or three months. We're a small, fast company, so we needed smarter approaches that not only digitize the process but also empower our users to build those solutions themselves. We looked for simplicity and speed, and mainly no-code automation solutions. That's how we were introduced to FlowForma.

Paul Stone05:15

It's interesting you went to HR first, because we see that a lot in our customer base. Many HR systems have some functionality, but they're often not aligned with the needs of the business, especially in agile companies like yours that need to change and adapt and make sure onboarding is compliant.

Ilker Esener05:46

Unfortunately, one size does not fit all. That's why we need agility and adaptability, quickly.

Paul Stone05:54

And I take your point about time frames. With a traditional system, development takes months: you write a specification, the vendor delivers, and maybe it's right or maybe it's wrong, and there are so many iterations. An agile system lets you build something that matches your business needs and changes quickly over time.

Ilker Esener06:20

It also helped our people be very close to the process, because they were developing it themselves. Day by day, while they were hands-on building it with the tool, I'm sure they improved the process further. That's my observation.

Paul Stone06:44

One of our lines is that one of the big things you get from digital transformation is education: you understand how you operate better, and you can refine it as you go. It's a big side benefit.

Paul Stone07:09

The next question: what were your requirements for a process automation tool when you chose to go forward?

Ilker Esener07:18

We're a small company building our digitization foundation, and we're a Microsoft Office 365 customer, so whatever we do, we check we're leveraging that investment. The first requirement was: can we enable something on top of Microsoft 365? FlowForma is native to that platform and runs on Office 365 and SharePoint.

Ilker Esener08:01

The second requirement was to clarify that we needed process automation, not necessarily robotic automation. After our investigations, requirements started coming to us naturally: procurement, human resources, IT and quality assurance all wanted to improve the experience for their internal communities by automating their internal processes.

Paul Stone08:42

A lot of people jump straight to RPA and think it's the panacea that solves everything. It works very well in certain scenarios, but in many others you still have people collaborating on business processes, and you need something to help manage that.

Ilker Esener09:06

We went through a step of internal education on the difference between digital process automation and RPA. When you see the scenarios each one suits, they're quite different, but very complementary. You can use the two together very well in certain scenarios.

Paul Stone09:40

As Ilker said, AC Immune uses Office 365, and FlowForma sits inside that environment. It saves all the information you capture in the workflow in SharePoint Online, and it handles documents and tasks as well as workflow and data. It's a no-code tool focused on business developers, so ideally you can work without any input from your IT department.

Paul Stone10:24

Can you tell us about some of the processes AC Immune automated in the first instance with FlowForma?

Ilker Esener10:32

The HR onboarding process is already live. It's been live for a month, we're happily onboarding new members as they join, and we're getting good feedback from our HR partners. Two or three weeks after go-live, we started pipelining other processes, including other departments.

Ilker Esener11:04

We've started offboarding and HR recruitment, and the HR group is developing them as we speak. When I say they're developing them, there's minimal IT involvement. That's the digitization part: empowering them to do most of their own process automation. We help with the technicalities in some areas, but most of the work is done by the power users.

Ilker Esener11:52

In IT, we'll implement change management and a ticketing tool on FlowForma, replacing another tool, because we believe we'll have a better experience. And procurement is starting on supplier onboarding as we speak. The list isn't limited to this; I'm sure that in the coming months, in 2022, we'll have more processes.

Paul Stone12:23

Your business people are configuring processes and getting results pretty quickly. How did you get them up to speed? Did you train them yourselves, or use FlowForma's training resources?

Ilker Esener12:40

We used the SureStart starter pack. It helped the power users quickly understand how easy the platform is to use, and I leveraged it with them as they developed. Separately, I used SureStart to quickly build up our own technical knowledge, so that we could help the power users day to day. That gave us quick development and implementation cycles.

Paul Stone13:28

A number of our clients follow the same approach: business users trained and supported by FlowForma, and IT users trained separately, who then support the business users as they build. It's what we'd call a center of excellence approach, with one, two or three people in IT acting as experts that business developers can call on.

Ilker Esener14:08

Exactly. On the technical parts, we need to be more experienced so we can help them; we can't leave them alone. The SureStart program helped us a lot to achieve our initial results.

Paul Stone14:24

I know from speaking to you that some of those end users were very enthusiastic: they got hold of the system and went to town building things. That's a good sign. What I always say is: let business users be creative, build what they like, and keep an eye on it. You might find a few gems, where a process suddenly delivers a massive improvement.

Ilker Esener15:03

I think it's related to how responsive the platform is. At our size, people get a quick response to what they're ideating, and they quickly turn it into action, which drives more innovative thinking. The difficulty for us is deciding when to stop. That's sometimes the hardest decision.

Paul Stone15:51

That's something you'll have to decide yourselves! In the time it would take someone to communicate requirements to an IT person, they can build the system themselves. Some innovations will work and some won't, but most will, and you always get the education spin-off: people think about how they work.

Ilker Esener16:39

Exactly. To be honest, the initial business process requirements and what we're running now are definitely different, but in a good way, because we agreed on a better experience, and the platform helped the HR community implement it safely. I'm quite excited to move forward with more processes.

Paul Stone17:12

Question five: what results has AC Immune realized from process automation?

Ilker Esener17:27

Starting with IT: we now have a self-service automation platform. We can onboard a function, teach them how to use it, and they can automate 80 to 90 percent of their processes themselves, sometimes 100 percent, which is perfectly fine for us. It comes with speed and flexibility: it's very easy to develop, very easy to govern with the governance functions in the platform, and very easy to deploy. We don't need to invest in that area ourselves.

Ilker Esener18:23

On the functional side, the support functions are more empowered. They can do what they wish to do without IT in between. We'll meet on technicalities, especially integration, but they're creating, maintaining and improving their own processes, and they can discuss among themselves what the next version of a capability should be.

Paul Stone19:21

That aligns with feedback from other clients. Once business users understand the system and start innovating, they love the feeling of ownership: it's their baby, their solution, and that drives them to make it better. And they don't need IT except for the occasional technical query.

Paul Stone20:01

We have a very large company in the UK that has built around 400 processes with a business developer team, and even with that many processes they use less than one full-time IT person to support the whole crowd. The hardest thing is getting started. Once you build momentum, the return on investment just grows and grows over time.

Paul Stone21:14

Last question of the day: there are always new processes to automate. What's next for AC Immune?

Ilker Esener21:30

We'll automate the processes that bring value, speed and effectiveness to the company, and scale to the functions as needed. Our internal campaign is running as we speak. We started a month ago with onboarding, other processes are being implemented, and more will come as people see the results and the experience of using the platform.

Ilker Esener22:12

The next important part for me and the company is integrating FlowForma with other sources of data, meaning master data in our ERP and other solutions: the data in SAP and in Veeva. That lets us enrich processes with that data and avoid duplicates and data integrity issues. We're working with FlowForma on the SAP integration. It's not to replace SAP, but to enhance our processes with enriched data.

Paul Stone23:20

You made an important point about digitizing at scale: every process you automate should have an expected return. It's good to have governance in place that asks whether a new idea will actually bring value, so you can prioritize.

Paul Stone24:02

That's what we do with our own product ideas. We release monthly, and ideas such as your SAP integration go to a product board that decides whether they have enough value. For SAP Business ByDesign, we've built business rules that interact with SAP through web services.

Paul Stone25:04

Integration is a priority in our product. We integrate through Logic Apps with over 300 applications, we have bespoke integrations, and integrations like the SAP Business ByDesign one will work with many other systems too. And your point about master data is a strong one: lots of clients want to standardize their data.

Paul Stone26:00

We haven't talked about this, but at the end of the day you'd expect quality reporting and analytics out of all this. Digitizing your processes captures lots of data, on process performance and on the details of, say, employee onboarding, and you want dashboards and reporting on the back end.

Ilker Esener26:31

We have explored and are using the Power BI integration. We haven't rolled it out yet, but our HR business partner has seen it running and it's in her pipeline. It's the next thing to roll out for HR; we just need some data first.

Paul Stone26:57

Once you have the data and the process right, good reports are the next step. From a management perspective, that's where the real value is: accurate data, where in the past you might have been working off a spreadsheet.

Paul Stone27:22

Let's move on to questions from the audience. The first one is for you, Ilker: how long does it take to digitize a process with FlowForma?

Ilker Esener27:44

I can't give an exact answer, but I measured the HR onboarding process from day one, when we introduced the team to the SureStart program. There was a change of roles in between, which happens, but after 22 or 23 hours of meetings, with FlowForma and internally, we were able to deploy to production. Remember, we had no knowledge of the platform before, so I think the next round of processes will be much faster.

Ilker Esener28:55

The duration is different, of course: we started in mid-August and went live at the end of September. But the true effort, which I measured, was about 23 hours. Most of that effort was spent changing and delivering the next version, which I found a great experience.

Paul Stone29:33

Duration varies a lot between clients, because a process may not be well defined at the start, and there may be lots of stakeholders who need to agree. The agility of the platform helps with getting agreement, because you can change things so quickly.

Paul Stone30:37

The next question: what are the technical requirements for using FlowForma? The only prerequisite is SharePoint Online, or Microsoft 365, because FlowForma saves your data, workflows and documents in SharePoint by default. You can use integrations to store data elsewhere, and it can automatically push data out to SQL. Then you use a browser or the mobile apps to access your workflows.

Paul Stone31:32

The next one is for you, Ilker: what are your three tips for user adoption?

Ilker Esener31:48

First, for the functional members, use the SureStart program. That's your real accelerator, and it really helps with quick adoption because everybody understands the capability of the platform very quickly.

Ilker Esener32:04

Second, run your process development cycle hackathon-style: bring the process people, the platform people and IT together, see what you can do in an hour or two, and agree on the progress you've made. That really helps you improve with each cycle.

Ilker Esener32:44

Third, nothing stops you testing. Testing is still important: make sure you do user acceptance testing, and have governance in place for a final check of the testing. Those are my three most important tips.

Paul Stone33:10

Another one: could I enable my suppliers to take part in processes digitized with FlowForma? Yes. FlowForma lets you involve external parties, so your suppliers could, for example, apply to become a supplier in a supplier onboarding process and complete their step. You can also do it anonymously, so there are various options.

Paul Stone34:04

Processes often need changes. Could I make these changes in-house with FlowForma?

Ilker Esener34:27

Yes. Processes change; it's a matter of agreeing when and how to deploy the change. The tool has the capabilities we need for making the change, auditing who made it, and safely deploying it to the production site we've defined in our governance. As you can imagine, auditability is of utmost importance in our industry, and it was one of our top requirements when we onboarded FlowForma.

Paul Stone35:25

One very last quick one: do you have any tips on how to prioritize processes?

Ilker Esener35:42

I would go for quick-to-implement, high-impact processes first. That helps us progress to the more challenging ones, while delivering value along the way.

Paul Stone36:06

We're almost out of time. If you want to try FlowForma, you can trial it before you buy, because some people don't believe it's no code or that it's so easy. And for independent views, you can read feedback from our clients on G2. Thank you very much, Ilker.

Ilker Esener36:59

Thank you very much, Paul, and thank you for having me.