So we have installed the first workflow, Mediar, in your organization. How are you liking the new system?

Well, first thing is, it does fix one of our old bugs that has been in our production environment, the adjustment of the text. That part we make it correct. And the rest, I mean, it runs quite smoothly.

I would say it's a lot faster than previously, because previously I think even at this time it's not yet completed, but the few days I come in to check, it will all complete at around 8:00 AM. And our staff actually starts work, the earliest one that comes in is around 8:00 AM. So it fits their schedule quite well.

And in terms of in the past, what solutions have you used? Was it originally like a human person doing that, and then you automated it?

Yeah, at first, all these are done by finance team. They look at the reports, and then they transfer the data manually into the SAP system. The point of sale system produces an end of the day revenue sales report, and you have to put it into SAP.

For every outlet, every day, finance team will pluck out the figures that we are keeping track of and then put it into the SAP system. That was like quite long ago until 2022 when we started doing the RPA process and using UiPath.

And it wasn't very smooth. I mean, we need support quite frequently, as in sometimes the POS system doesn't email out the reports correctly, and then there'll be missing emails, and then there's no way to ask the process to start.

It's usually we just have to send the email to our vendor and wait for them to put it in for us and run the process. I mean, manually start the RPA process.

Just to clarify, so you had to buy the license and then you had to hire a third-party vendor who is going to implement and then maintain it, right? And whenever something is not working on the server, there is no proper dashboard to do that? You have to send them an email and wait?

Yes. We can only send them the email to ask them, "Hey, this data not transferred into SAP that day. It's missing from SAP." Which time period, all those things. Finance will send them an email.

How quickly do they reply? Usually, hopefully it was like now. Every first of the month we have the complete data set for previous month. That is easier for account to close on time. But sometimes we will drag on for this part. I keep seeing finance side chasing, we call it chasing, chasing the vendor to quickly expedite the process.

But to talk to this vendor, it takes like one day to get back and forth? Yeah. We'll email them, and then finance team will check the next day, or the subsequent days, and then if we still missing, they'll ask them how is the... whether it's already processed or not. Usually the vendor will reply us that, "Oh, all this have been posted." So, if they do not reply, most probably is they have not got the state of updating the system yet.

So it's not clear. You only rely on this email communication, and sometimes you don't hear anything? Yes. How would you compare it to what you have now?

This is, I mean, very straightforward that we can see it and all those things. Basically, yeah, it's very straightforward whether it's successful or not, and the dashboard really helps a lot, and we can submit our own work to start it, to stop it, any time we want. Very flexible.

To trigger process both in a test environment and in the production? Yes. It's very configurable. I think it's quite good.

Have you tried the Q&A, the AI system that helps you review the execution? Yes. I tried a few times, you know, to check like what's the reason that it fail or things like that. Yeah. It's quite helpful. It's very helpful, in fact.

Can you explain when would you use it? I always use it when it fail, when I see I fail, and then I will go in to look at it, and if I can't really make out the reason, then I will ask this Q&A part. With the problem that you have already prepared.

Right. So the Q&A AI bot, it has access to all the execution logs, and so it knows both the workflow and the execution and the environment, so it can give you the root cause analysis. Yes. It's very helpful.

How did you find the usage of the schedule and the triggering part? How is it... Is it flexible? Yeah. It helps me especially when you can just run it without providing the files what to run, and then you run those outstanding states still not processed yet.

Actually this one we need to check how it goes about the folder, but anyway, it's really a lot better than the previous one that we use. Very flexible, and I can test it out if I want, like, whether it opposed to the... I can test it out in UAT, just changing the config there, like for this outlet, I want to test it out in UAT, I can do it. Just do the settings, all those things.

To me is a big improvement to what we have previously. And a quick question. Did you get email notifications with the other tools? And do you get them with our tool?

Other tools, we... I requested it, but it wasn't put in place, so we don't get any notification at all. But with Mediar, yes, we do receive the email notifications. And even for those asking us to check because it's not very confirmed of the outcome. And yeah, it definitely reminds us what to do, what to check, all those things.

Will also explain to you how to use the notifications depending on the role of the person, so you can trigger different types of notifications to different people. For example, when you need a finance review, you know this status applicable to finance, and those notifications are gonna be directed to that person.

I remember we had a few conversations about the quality compared to the previous solution, the quality of the entries that we do. Can you briefly describe the quality of the postings once they're inside? You mentioned that there was still some issues before.

Yeah. Because the way the POS complete the tax and the SAP auto-calculating the tax, there will be sometimes some differences, and then we have to post adjustment to the general entries. The previous one, the previous system it posts, like, sometimes it's very weird. The numbers doesn't really matches what we wanted, and after the general entries, finance have to go in to do further adjustment.

Because even when the system adjust the entries, the tax is still wrong from the previous system. So, this is the part that mentioned just now, that we fixed this bug with this... all the posting, the tax amount actually matches to our post-tax amount. So, that part, the finance definitely will have less adjustments to do.

So, just to clarify, are you saying basically with UiPath, there was an issue how they calculate adjustment to tax when they do their posting in SAP, and despite having these conversations and trying to make it work in UiPath, it still wouldn't give you the right result.

And it was simply not possible with UiPath, and you had a finance person manually had to go into SAP end of each month to make some data entries manually because there was an error, right? Yes. Definitely, yes.

Because at the end of the month when you have to report to the tax department, the tax bureau, what we collected from the POS system is the true figure, so we have to adjust to that. And based on UiPath, definitely every month, finance still need to do adjustment.

Even though every day when it's posting, supposed to do the adjustment, but the adjustment is wrong. We can see it in certain days, it's different from what the POS text is. But so far, from Mediar, all of it matches, so this is one less task for finance department to do adjustment.

When we were helping you create this workflow, it was a tricky part, so we used AI background that builds the workflow. And it looked up the complication about the tax calculation, and we found out that different system use different rounding approach, and in this case, it wasn't a math rounding approach. We needed to use the banking rounding approach, which is slightly different rule.

So that was causing... I suppose UiPath doesn't support that, and so that was causing the trouble, because sometimes it would work just randomly, and sometimes they wouldn't feed into the same rounding rule, and that would create one-time differences that were annoying.

It's like they try to force-feed it. Even the adjustment they post, the debit and credit side, the amount, sometimes we see it's different as well. When you do the adjustment, you are supposed to post the debit and the credit should be equal amounts. Yeah, it doesn't work that way. I don't know what kind of formula they use.

So it seems like they don't have validation in place. They just do their hard code automation, like "Yeah, we post something," but they don't run a validation check on top of it. Yes. And you cannot run this validation check yourself. You have to do it manually at the end.

At the end of the month, yeah, we have to do another adjustment to the tax. And just like a last question. In terms of onboarding and creating and the experience of getting started with Mediar, if you were to compare with... You're a software engineer yourself, imagine that you would create your own script to automate things end to end.

How would this process be different from using Mediar directly? That's the thing because our company has this policy of moving away having a dedicated person to always do the coding part.

If I do this, I mean, I've tried, I do not use any AI tools so it's very traditional style where I will write a Python script to do the processing the CSV files to what I want, to form the data that I want, and then calling the SAP API to do the posting, all those things.

So if there's any changes to all the mappings and all those things, I will have to always be updating the Python script. And then, let's say I go away, someone take over, they may need to spend time. So that is the traditional method of doing all this integration.

So that's why we are looking at now whether we can go into, like, your style, I would say is, like, no code programming. So you just do this, do this, do this—even the AI can tell me—rather than someone has to go and always maintain the Python script or Node.js or using .NET, all these things. So that will be a big difference.

Makes sense. To be able to maintain and also the knowledge, like if you leave the company, you might forget to show to the new person how to run this particular workflow and they will run into issue if there's a problem with the process in the future.

But also, what about the environment because as part of the project we give you a virtual machine. Yes. That's the thing. So you don't have to worry about that, right?

Yeah. That is also the true gist of how it starts, the infrastructure out of the coding part, all those things. So we only face Mediar site. I guess that's in terms of you just manage your partners on doing all these things.

In fact, and that is the gist of the so-called cloud computing. It helps you simplify a lot of workflows on your end as well. Right. And you can run these workflows here, you don't have to worry about the server? You just design your... and it runs in the protected environment automatically. You don't have to worry about this infrastructure part.

Yes. Even now, even if we host our own VMs, it still instead of the physical maintainers, you still have to maintain the infrastructure, ensure that the VM is running properly. When it's time to upgrade, you still need to do a lot of work to do the upgrading, all those things. So yeah.

Good. Good. Yeah, thanks a lot, Chai, for this feedback and comments. Really, is what I feel is not like... I'm stating other things there. It does, it really is, at least on my end, a big improvement compared to UiPath. That's good. That's good to hear.