Host (19s): Hey everyone. Welcome back to The Orange Chair podcast. Today’s episode is all about Hyland RPA. This episode will conclude our Hyland offering series that we’ve been doing over the last year. We’ve had a lot of fun and learned a lot of things about Hyland and its suite of offerings and technology.
This episode is all about Hyland RPA, and I’ve got two special guests with me today, Tim Tallaksen and Brien Lay, but I will let them introduce themselves to you.
Tim Tallaksen (46s): Thanks for having me on here. I’m Tim Tallaksen and I’ve been with Hyland for 20 years. I’m a long-time employee with this company and have seen an awful lot of changes over time and have had the opportunity to work alongside KeyMark for all of that time as well.
Brien Lay (1m 7s): I’m Brien Lay, Director of RPA sales at KeyMark and I’ve been with KeyMark for about two and a half years. I initially got hired as a solution architect on the RPA side, and just recently picked up a bag and started selling so nice to be here.
Host (1m 25s): I always love to do this on my episodes to kick off what we’re talking about and I would love to learn a fun fact about you guys.
Tim Tallaksen (1m 35s): I know that all of you folks down there in South Carolina are big Clemson football fans, and I’ve had the opportunity to attend a few Clemson football games. I have actually become a huge European soccer fan, which is not all that common here in the states.
A lot of it has to do with RPA. The company that we work with, Hyland RPA, is actually located in Cologne, Germany, and I have become a rabid fan of Bundesliga German soccer league. As an American, one of the things that always held me back from being a soccer fan was that I always thought the game had some elements in it of players flopping and the game just wasn’t like American football.
I will tell you that the Germans do it quite differently. It’s very organized and very structured. There’s nobody flopping on the field as you see in the premier league and things like that.
Host (2m 45s): Have you ever been to a soccer game or is that on the bucket list to do?
Tim Tallaksen (2m 49s): I’ve had the opportunity to travel to Germany and see a game there. Again, it’s a tremendously different atmosphere than American soccer, but it’s much more like a college football kind of environment, for sure.
Brien Lay (3m 11s): I went to the Citadel, which is a small military school in Charleston, South Carolina. We had about 2000 students there and I played rugby. I got recruited to play football. Didn’t end up playing football and played rugby instead and I loved it. We were in the top five in the country out of all the collegiate rugby teams.
That’s my fun little fact and I had a great time getting off a restriction because at a military school you get punished for just little things and even you’re not allowed to leave campus the entire time. So rugby got me off campus and got me traveling around the country. It was a lot of fun.
Host (3m 56s): Now I imagine rugby and football are very similar. AmI wrong or am I right in that assumption?
Brien Lay (4m 3s): I think they’re very similar. I think the mentality that you have to have to play either one is very similar. The games are a little bit different, but you have to be mentally and physically prepared.
Tim Tallaksen (4m 14s): I think over the last two years, I’ve become a fan of odd sports that are televised on TV. Not only have I watched a lot of European soccer, a lot of rugby or cricket, things like that. It’s a good time to get involved in some of those more obscure sports.
Host (4m 32s): One of my favorite Olympic sports to watch is ice curling. It’s so intense and you wouldn’t think it would be, but it is.
Thank you both for joining me on the podcast today. I want to go ahead and jump right into this and understand the history of Hyland RPA. Tim, can you tell me about the inception and what pushed Hyland to get into the RPA space?
History of RPA
Tim Tallaksen (4m 59s): It’s a great question. Well, our customers are ultimately why we moved into the RPA space. We purchased an organization, a company called Another Monday, which was a well-established German-based RPA company. If you look back in some of the Forrester and Gartner reports, you’ll see their name there.
They had some strengths and weaknesses and differences according to those analysts, just like any other vendor and our customers were rapidly making purchases of RPA products and our partners were signing up with some RPA vendors to support those customers.
It made a lot of sense for Hyland to make a move in that direction because RPA just couples so naturally with our product set. It made a lot of sense and that’s what our customers are doing.
What we really wanted to do was give our customers an option of continuing to work with Hyland to purchase from Hyland and to use a Hyland-supported product for their RPA needs going forward. That was really the main trigger for us. Moving into that space because our customers were asking us and pushing us to support them among the many choices that are out there in the marketplace. A lot of good choices out there too.
Benefits of Hyland RPA
Host (6m 29s): We talk a lot about RPA here at KeyMark and we’ve got a lot of content surrounding RPA and why we believe that it’s such a great product and such a great solution for an organization to have. Tim, from Hyland’s perspective, why is an RPA solution so important? What are the benefits, if you could give me a few use cases?
Tim Tallaksen (6m 59s): I’ve been configuring OnBase workflows for a pretty long time. One example of how RPA could be beneficial to our customers is automating different queues. I look at every queue and think to myself, “that could be further automated, right?” Now, the question you have to ask yourself is, “do the benefits outweigh the costs of bringing RPA in there?”
Ultimately, ROI is a big factor in the equations. If somebody is using Hyland workflow and they’re routing documents to a queue and they’re serving those documents up for a person to work on and that person has related documents, they might have ad hoc tasks and they have external systems that they’re working with, they’re using OnBase exactly how it was designed and exactly how it’s been deployed for decades.
By bringing RPA into that mix, we could take a lot of the work that a person is doing physically like going into other systems, updating keywords, checking to see the status of something on an external website.
All of those things are candidates for automation by a bot. Now those high volume queues that have many documents and lots of people load-balanced type queues, are prime candidates because we’re not looking to replace all of the people in that process, but we can automate a tremendous amount of that work and then reduce the number of people that are working in that area of an organization to allow them to really focus on the work that takes a human mind to make decisions and to deal with ambiguous situations, like customer support situations.
With those things that can be automated, RPA is a great tool for helping our customers do that.
Host (9m 1s): You mentioned a few examples of how Hyland RPA integrates with the WorkView and Workflow pieces that OnBase inherently does. So when an organization is already utilizing OnBase, how can Hyland RPA further support their technology efforts such as integration with other products they may have? What sets Hyland RPA apart from others in this space?
Hyland RPA Differentiators
Tim Tallaksen (9m 25s): There are many similarities among the RPA products in the space. It is a quick-moving industry. There are some well-known players in that space that have very large marketing budgets that bombard our customers with webinars and email campaigns and things like that. There’s no doubt our customers know some of the big players in that space. You can look at any Gartner or Forrester report.
We don’t really try and position ourselves and we have this grand set of capabilities that those products don’t have. There is a lot of similarity between the products, right? That may be an interesting way for me to approach that, meaning there’s not too much unique and different about our product, but we can bring a lot of the same capabilities that those other vendors do.
We can bring it to our existing customers and allow them to continue to work with Hyland. They can make incremental purchases on an existing licensing agreement that they may already have in place or some other purchasing vehicle that they have in place. They can work right through our same partner network, or if they’re working directly with us with the same support team that they know.
So we’re giving our customers a choice. But what we really feel is we’re giving them a great technical product that stands up well to scaling. We’re also giving them something that the other vendors cannot, which is a sense of security of dealing with the same technology and people that they have been all along.
That’s really why I go back to my sort of answer of why we moved into this space. We did it for our customers to reduce the amount of risk that those customers may have by incorporating other technology and other vendors to work in their existing solutions and allowing them to make a less risky solution or less risky decision about continuing to work with us as a company in our partner network.
Brien Lay (11m 34s): Tim, if I could follow up on that. Since y’all purchased Another Monday in the past year, I know that you’ve made some great strides to create some of those integrations for your existing customers. Can you dive in a little bit deeper on what integrations you have in OnBase?
Enhancements of Hyland RPA
Tim Tallaksen (12m 2s): Think of it this way, when you are working in an OnBase environment, whether it be Workflow or WorkView or any of our automation pieces, OnBase is well-known for capturing and storing documents. That’s great.
But when you’re looking to automate business processes and use some of those automation tools like Workflow and WorkView, we built into those products integrations where it can speak directly to Hyland RPA to initiate or kick off a bot request. So a document shows up in a queue and we need to go check an external website for the status of something.
Maybe it’s a State-run government site or something like that. When that document shows up, the document communicates to the bot and says, “Hey, can you go do this piece of work for me? And when you’re done, let me know.”
Well, we made those configurable options so that our customers and our partners can deploy them quickly without any sort of custom programming, making it really easy to make the time of deployment easier and remove the risk of an error in any of those configurations. I think most importantly, we also made them supportable going forward because they’re configurable options.
On the flip side, we’ve made the RPA product OnBase aware. Meaning that as you go down through the configuration inside of RPA, there are going to be activities in there that say things like “update keywords, create a new document, update WorkView object.” We made the familiar language of an OnBase environment that a system administrator may have when they go over to Hyland RPA and work in this new configuration, they’re going to see things that make a lot of sense to them, and really ease the ability to create those integration points for themselves.
No code or low code?
Host (13m 57s): Tim, you’ve been talking about how Hyland RPA can integrate with current OnBase tools and assets like WorkView and things like that. I just want to ask about the ease of use for Hyland RPA. I’ve had some discussions with some other vendors out there and they talk a lot about how their product is “no-code” or their product is “low code” or things like that. Can you speak to that in regards to Hyland RPA?
Tim Tallaksen (14m 25s): Those are always good terms, right? No code? I’ve never met a product that’s truly no code. I write code in Microsoft Excel, right? There’s code everywhere, but it is a menu-driven exercise to configure RPA processes.
We’ve always prided ourselves on the OnBase side when you’re configuring document types or setting up workflow queues or configuring WorkView objects to be menu-driven. There are points in there where you can write code and call external programs and hook into a web service or an API when necessary.
The experience of configuring and deploying a bot in our environment is very much a menu-driven exercise that can easily be handled by a prototypical OnBase system administrator.
We make all of the training classes and documentation available through our premium subscription service so that people can quickly become comfortable with configuring these bots and putting them into a production environment.
I wouldn’t call it no code because there is an opportunity to write code should you need it, but it can be done in a very low code way.
Future of Hyland RPA
Host (15m 44s): Brien asked a great question about the enhancements that you guys have made to Another Monday since acquiring it. Where do you see the Hyland RPA product going in the future?
Tim Tallaksen (15m 58s): Continual upgrades on those integration points. We’ve got some of the fundamentals in there, but if anybody’s worked with an OnBase Workflow over the years, they know that we had a certain set of rules and actions at one point, and now there are literally hundreds of them in there.
We’re going to continue to build out small pieces that allow the products to tie together to greatly minimize the need to write any code or do any scripting between the two of them. That’s really the goal there. It is going to be a continued amount of activities, rules, actions, that sort of stuff coming out.
We are also going to be moving in the direction of stitching RPA into some of our capture products. We’ve got integration points. There is the Brainware Hyland Experience Capture, which is a completely web-based capture product. There’ll be work done there to tie those products together in a more configurable manner, and then really build out the rest API and set up the RPA products so that we can have this product much more cloud-aware.
Most folks that deploy an RPA product do so locally on-premise. That’s what we’ve seen. That’s not necessarily a rule. You can deploy it either way really, but we’re hoping to continue to develop a product to make it more available in our Hyland cloud. Customers can quickly deploy a Hyland solution up in the cloud and we want them to know that they’ve got options for deploying their RPA products the same way.
Wrap – Up
Host (17m 34s): Thank you both so much for being on the podcast. As our time comes to a close today, do you guys have any final thoughts? Maybe I asked something that you would like to elaborate on, or maybe there was something that you want to touch on that I didn’t ask.
Tim Tallaksen (17m 52s): Talking to the customers out there, I’m thinking about, how there are certain people that are well-versed in the RPA products and can jump right in and maybe even have a lot of experience. But if you’re one of those people that are sitting there saying, “I’m not really sure where to start.” Great. We have some material for you.
If you visit the Hyland RPA page on our Community website, not only do we have a lot of helpful information about RPA, we have use case examples and product information, and marketing type information about the product.
You can also download the software itself and put it into a test environment. We allow our customers to download licensable software and use it in a full-blown test environment.
We also have a space for customers to take some training classes online. We’ve got some e-courses from 10 minutes long to four hours long, depending upon what sort of depth you’re looking for.
Then we’ve also got some pre-configured bots that we have made available for our customers on an area that we call trythatHyland.com that lets you try out some of our software in real-time.
Those pre-configured bots will allow system administrators to do some of the more tedious OnBase tasks in an automated way. If you’ve ever found yourself having to create a whole bunch of keywords or document types in an OnBase system, you know that there are a lot of screens to repetitively go through to do that.
We’ve done things like, make some bots that read all that information from the spreadsheet and then go through the act of entering all those keystrokes into the OnBase system for you. We’ve hoped to put together for our customers a way for them to get their hands on the software. They can get their hands on the training and they can even get their hands on an RPA bot that they could use to help them do their jobs a lot easier so they can get better acclimated with understanding how RPA works and how they can see it in their environment going forward.
Brien Lay (20m 10s): I would just add that there’s a lot to the software. As Tim said, all the major vendors have a very similar offering. One thing we don’t talk about enough I think with RPA is the process mining and process analytics that goes into the tools. Hyland has a very capable area in this regard for process mining and task mining.
They are tools and products that tell you what you think you know but you really don’t know what’s going on in workflow. They use artificial intelligence to look at things like log files or little programs that are installed on everybody’s machine for task mining that goes into extreme detail on every single step that users are doing.
Then it uses artificial intelligence to pull all this information together and give you insights into the bottlenecks and different processes. I would say, as you get into your RPA journey, look at the process analytics features within Hyland RPA, because they’re definitely a differentiator and can add a huge amount of value from what I’ve seen, especially in the healthcare space. We know that almost every Epic account has OnBase on the backside and there’s a tremendous opportunity to become more efficient by using the process monitoring task component.
Host (21m 42s): Thank you both so much for being on the podcast today. I appreciate you bringing all of your knowledge about Hyland RPA and sharing with our listeners about it.
Thank you for joining us on The Orange Chair Podcast. This podcast is brought to you by KeyMark and it’s produced by Clay Tuten and me, your host, Alex Frazier.
For more information on OnBase by Hyland, please visit our website at www.KeyMarkinc.com/OnBase-software. Never miss an episode by subscribing to our podcast channels wherever you listen to podcasts. Also, like and follow us on Instagram and Facebook at The Orange Chair Podcast. Want to get in touch? Send us an email at TOC@KeyMark.com.
