Dries De Coster’s Post

Transcript

So Brendan, thank you very much for joining us. Brendan Simmons, everyone from the Winter Group. And Brendan, you guys have just recently gone live with Dwight. So we'd love to find out a little bit more about what the problem statement was before you implemented Dwight, what Dwight is doing for the winter. And then ultimately also understand why did you choose that automation and what problem is it solving, right? What business benefit is it bringing to you? So without much further ado, over to you now. I'm happy to share Andriza. First of all, just want to thank you guys for your partnership here. Really impressed with with the platform and what it's been able to do. We'll talk about that obviously a little bit. For us, what what draws us, what, what drew us here initially was a problem where and actually this goes back about two years for us. So as we went live on Bullhorn one we have, we use Paylocity as a, as an HRIS and and pay and payroll platform and there was no integration. With Bullhorn and so that obviously caused a lot of manual work for our team. Transferring data as a place that's created in Bullhorn, they were literally copying, pasting and transferring data, creating it, creating onboarding packets, things like that. Things that that really the, the team sat down and, and estimated that without interruptions, which never happened right from from a support standpoint, but without interruptions was taking them approximately 45 minutes per placement to complete, right. So you can imagine the amount of time with as many places as we make, right? The amount of time that that was taking and we had. Research for. And and actually gone through a process for about two years to build an API integration a couple of different ways and actually went down two different paths. One path just ended up not working. The other path was pretty exponentially expensive for a staffing firm. So we decided not to continue down that road. And that is actually what led to the conversation here. So somebody that I really respect and and work with in the industry said, hey you. I haven't, I've heard about this. I haven't had time to check this out. You should check it out. Yeah. And, and the joke that we have, right, you know, it's like, don't pay attention to the website at that point. It was like, it's not what they do. They're they're doing a lot more. And I said, OK, great. And so I trusted him and and, you know, reached out to you had that conversation And and what really appealed to us in this process is Dwight is a front end solution, right? So it literally is a digital worker. And what it did, is it allowed? Was to replace all of that manual work, right. So our team worked with your team to, to really detail out that process and build the bots to, to service that workload. So what we were doing, which was taking us 45 minutes to completion with still some, some manual and missing steps in the process that we're now averaging right at 5 1/2 minutes per completion. And that is even outside of our regular business hours, right. So typically that the team was only doing those. During regular business hours during the US and now it's we're, we're kind of able to do that 24 hours a day and about a 5 1/2 minute completion time. And obviously for us, I mean you can imagine what that means. It means that we can take those existing team members and kind of repurpose them into more value added roles where you know they can really help us drive revenue into the business. They can create relationships with our clients and our candidates rather than just being very reactive and in what they're doing. So and it also allows us to. As we continue to grow to streamline our operational support, you know, in a financially responsible way while also providing, you know, I would say even an enhanced level of service not only to our internal team, but to our clients and candidates as well. Brilliant. Yeah. And I think in terms of time equation, it was something like 3 full time equivalent in terms of people's time, right, that was doing the process manually. That's correct. Yeah, that's correct. That's correct. And so with. Our with our Dwight dashboard now we have people that are just manually nothing manual anymore, right? So they, they are literally just reviewing that dashboard. Anything that comes across that they need to take a look at maybe that doesn't match from a data perspective, they're going into that one singular point and then and then running from there. So again, I mean, we're doing that with with the equivalent of probably, yeah, half of an FDE. We we still have a team, right, but. But from an overall time dedication to just that component, we've, we've really, really been able to streamline that very effectively. And it's fascinating for for almost all of our clients. That's the situation we come across is the GHT standing for generic human tasks, automating that kind of element of the process so that your sellers can be focused on the selling and actually your middle and back office staff can focus on the more value added, more challenging kind of tasks, right, which gives. Great job satisfaction as well. Ultimately we think, but I'm sure you'll correct me if not no, I, I think that's 100% right, right. I think that those critical thinking components right that that humans. There will never be replaceable from a human aspect, right? And, and those critical touch points from a, from a human relationship standpoint are what we really want our people to focus on. And the manual tasks of the data entry and, and things like that that are critical to business success, right? But, but can be easily, you know, put off into an automated process. That's really where we wanted our focus, right? And, and as we came into this conversation and, and this relationship, that was probably the most important thing to us. Right is that's what we wanted to to really solve was not only our business problem, but to give us even a forward-looking approach. I mean this was as we started these conversations right even very initially. This was the first problem to solve and then that opened up the door to, hey, we have a lot of other things that we would love the weights to do for our team. We've we've jointly fathered one Dwight into doing the group so far, But there's there's hopefully a family coming and we'll have to exactly right, Yeah, that's exactly right. So as we were going through it, I mean, my team, we would have internal calls, right? And they were like, and this is can we do this? And I said yes, like like phase one. And then let's, let's continue the conversations and, and continue the expansion here because it, like I said it, it, it helps to streamline our business operationally, which allows us to help our business function effectively, right and and really helps us grow without a lot of unneeded overhead from an operational perspective. Yeah, and and by the way, you guys were a dream to work with. We've already given us a shout out to Josie before, but your team are phenomenal. And also, I think it's fair to say the turn around from my first conversation to actually let's get this done. And then the build time was, was a matter of a couple of months, I think from start to finish all the way from the start of the process. Yeah, I, I think we were, I think we were right at about 8 weeks, maybe 9 weeks to a test process. And, and the beauty of this is I think a lot of, when you look at a lot of, a lot of technical builds, right, or integrations, there's a, hey, let's build this, let's test it. And then if everything's good, we're going to move it into production and the way that we were able to do. Yes, I I think was really cool because it allowed us to kind of build in production ready to go. And then we were able to limit it kind of the the data that was being consumed and and the the placements that were coming from test companies and things like that before we kind of opened it up to the world. And we have the ability to control that moving forward. And yeah, I don't know, I would be remiss if I if I didn't call out Josie again. I know we've done that, but she's amazing. She she manages all of our middle and back office from a technology and. And operations perspective and, and she's great and, and couldn't have done this without her for sure. And, and I also liked how I don't know if it was her idea or yours, but as we were testing twice, you were throwing in some red herrings here and there to kind of see, hey, what would it do? And then our team was coming back going, OK, this has happened. And I was like, yeah, that's what we were expecting for it to do, so that's great. Yeah, Yeah, No, that's good. I mean, I think that was kind of a joint effort, right? We've gone through a number of these in the past and you try to build. As good of a test plan as you can, knowing that it's not going to be perfect. And, and as you work through it, you know you're going to have issues, you're going to have things that come up that, that you need to solve for and anomalies that come up that aren't usually your normal business process, right. So we try to think of as many of those as we could and kind of throw those into the mix and go, OK, like let's see if we can break it, right? Like that's, that's kind of our initial plan going forward. And, and it, it worked as designed every time, which was great. We were getting, we were getting some of these results. Back and I'm like. Damn. Like if you got a problem with the bot here, like what's going on like this? This doesn't sound normal, but let's just present the results back. Yeah, we're like, yeah, perfect. Yeah, that's exactly what it's supposed to do. Melissa, Brandon, thank you very much. And and I've got to give a shout out to the winter group as as a whole, because one, even phenomenal to work with. Two, clearly you're, you're a forward thinking firm, right, that's ready to kind of adopt these kind of newer technologies. And we look forward to many more Dwights and, and bringing up a family together. We do too. That makes you even more attractive to your clients as well. So thank you very much. Thanks, Chris. Appreciate it.