Video Transcript
Jeff Hughes (Broadcom): I'm joined with Bruce Frank, director of technology operations with MUFG, one of the world's largest banks. Bruce, welcome.
Bruce Frank (MUFG): Thanks, Jeff. Thanks for having me.
JH: We appreciate it. I want to start off just by talking a little bit about automation in general. Well, we know automation powers the world, in retail activities, in supply chain, in checks clearing, and obviously, in your business in banking, automation is an integral part of business processes. So, I thought we'd start out, maybe you could just share with the audience your anecdote about the Chicago bus drivers and how automation had an impact on those people when it came time for their payroll to come to them.
BF: Okay, great. So, about six months ago, we run a lot of transaction banking for our systems, which is primarily file transfers from one system to another. And the Chicago school bus union is one of our clients where we processed their payroll.
So, I guess, in this instance, it was lack of automation that really caused a major problem for us, which almost shut down the school busing system in Chicago back in, I think it was in January or February of this year. What had happened is, part of their process is we process their payroll files. They send it to us. We do the transaction for them, and then we pass it out, and we, we supplement them to their bank accounts, and they wake up in the morning looking for their payroll into their account. Unfortunately, that day, they woke up: no checks in their accounts, no deposits. People were starting to panic in Chicago. And, at that point, we got notifications back to our, our business office, our different transaction offices, that there was talks of possible school bus drivers going on strike due to no payments in their accounts.
And, we had to look up the systems, look where files were broken, and it was one simple file that got stuck in the system. And, we were able to process it and get it all going. We averted danger, so to say. Everybody got paid, but we actually had to send a representative out to Chicago with a, I'm not sure if it's a certified check or whatever it was. We didn't get all the details on it, but we made them whole, the kids got home, the buses were rolling, but it was pretty significant when you're talking, probably, millions and millions of dollars of people not receiving payroll, and it caused a major issue.
So, from that perspective, we learned a major lesson, and we sort of built a pretty standard, basic process to make sure that we are looking at these files, leveraging some of the tools from Automic and AI, putting SLAs or SLOs against these files, making sure when the transactions come in, we see the workload processing. We get alerts, being proactive, knowing when they should have come in initially versus when they get stuck in the system, which is reactionary. Whereas, we may have lost a half hour in the process, but now we put some processes in place to alert us and get through the get through the system a lot quicker.
JH: This is a great example of a real-world experience where you have people that are dependent on getting their paychecks, and so automation really is key behind that. But, if you don't have the technology to see what's happening behind the scenes when something goes wrong, then it becomes a very difficult situation for companies and customers to remedy those particular problems. And, some of them could be life-threatening in various situations. So, automation really is significant in transportation, banking, all kinds of industries across the world.
One of the things that we've noticed, too, is that it plays a significant role in running and managing automation. Could you share with us some other examples of how your team involvement has been able to drive significant business impact for the banks? So, I'm thinking of your ability to manage transactions and get them posted before the market opens each day. So, maybe you could elaborate a little bit on that.
BF: So, we look at it a couple different ways, right? So, automation plays a part in it, right, and using the automation tools we have in place. But, we go back to the rudimentary, it's moving data from one system to another, making sure jobs process, and being able to look inside those processes that we usually call it "eyes on glass". So, we have operations teams that I have in my command centers where we have eyes on glass. People are watching jobs day in and day out. They see a little red blip, and they they try to, they try to act on it. At that point, that's more mostly reactionary. We try to go into the proactive measure, and we've done it in a couple different instances.
One, one was which is significant, and talking about large sums of money, is our ability, we borrow money and we lend money on a daily basis, right, in our business. So, one of our larger businesses, based on the time of day that they borrowed money, would determine what they pay for that money. Right? It's basically borrowing from the Fed or borrowing from another institution. And, if you start borrowing at 5:00 in the morning, they may charge you a quarter point for your money. If you borrow at 7:00 in the morning, you're paying two points for your money. There's a premium for that money.
So, looking at how jobs are running through the process, we've worked with these lines of business. And, these are actually, when I say business people, these are all the way, I call it on the right side. I consider myself on the left side where the process starts, and the business is on the right side where, where the transactions are taking place, when we're dealing with the Fed Reserve, we're dealing with different institutions. And, so we try to fix it upfront, and so that the transactions flow, and they're pretty transparent at that point.
So, what we've done is, using AI, Automic, and just other tools that we have, internal tools, just trending tools, analytics tools, and things along those lines, really taking a look at the upstream processes via automation and building different programs around that. One program we built was that the first one that I mentioned is that we were actually looking at how these jobs performing and looking at the upstreams.
But, more than that, using AI to track these SLAs. And then as the SLAs, if they breach or, as we look at trending, we've built incident reduction programs with this to take a look to say, "Okay, why are these things breaking?" "How do we go out to an AppDev team and how do we help that business get their processing quicker?" And, implementing an incident reduction program, it's one of the things we're pretty proud of here. We've actually reduced incidents by 60% in a lot of our automation and workflow work area. Whereas, we're looking at jobs, and we get five, six, 800 failures per month on a particular job or a particular set of jobs within a line of business. And, taking the critical ones out of that to see which is really the most critical and has the business impact.
So, what we've done within our SLA process, we've gone a step further, right? Being a techie, I look, "Okay, is my systems up and running?" "The job process, did they finish?" That's great. But, at the end of the day, what's the true business impact for that job not finishing? And, we've translated a lot of this stuff where, job ABC, Jill, whatever you want to call it, right, an order job means absolutely nothing to a business user. The file means absolutely nothing to a business user. When that file goes down, when we generate an alert out of AI, we we actually have integrations with ServiceNow with that. It generates that alert, and it actually tells you what the true business impact with that is. "Business cannot start for the day," "transactions are not processing," "ledgers are not updated," all these things where a business person is really looking at, and that's where we've transformed a lot of this, going from technology to business-related items.
JH: I think you bring up a very good point. Bruce is referring to our analytics, our automation analytics and intelligence product, AI, and of course, Automic, which is our workload automation tool. You bring up some good points around being able to interact with the business. So, you've got this capability over here in IT, the tools that allow you to look into the future, so to speak, and be able to identify where problems are occurring and really translate that to business, a business language, if you will. And, I think that's really key to for businesses to bridge the gap between IT and the business side of the house. Do you have anything else you want to share there, in terms of how you've been able to interact with IT and the business side of the house?
BF: You stole my line: "bridge the gap". Right? So, "bridge the gap" is it's actually my motto in the company. Right? So, we look to bridge the gap. Right? So, if you look at it, you look at it, I call it in three different circles. The first circle is really technology, right, where we all sit, the majority of us sit in my company, like on my team. Then you have the middle area, which is that, that AppDev, some of the business liaison, and then on the right side, which is the true business area. Right? So, you have the three circles, so to say, and the interactions, and where they intersect with each other.
So, we do a pretty good job of circle one talking to circle two. Circle one talking to circle three generally never happens. People put up their hands, they're afraid of talking to the business, and that's where we actually show the benefit to the business. I meet business users all the time, and they come to us now to help them with a solution. They don't, they don't understand the technology side of it. They just need to know that I need my processes done sooner, that I need my reports done earlier.
One of the big issues we had a couple years ago with, especially in the COVID era, with liquidity, liquidity and risk in the market. Us being able to say we have to open the doors to start the bank up in the morning. We were delayed hours at times with our liquidity reporting. That's a true business area, where they're reporting right to our Treasury Department is reporting right to the Federal Reserve saying, "Hey, we can start our day, we're liquid." The problem was, we were running four to six hours late every day on these reports through the upstreams.
And so, looking at, like I said, the integration with these tools, with the workload automation, with the AI, with some of this incident reduction stuff that we have in place, we're able to bridge that gap. And, basically, a user coming to us, an end user, business user, saying, "Hey, you got to give me my reports by 12:00, otherwise the bank can't open its doors." And so, looking at this, we were able to reduce it by almost four hours, which was significant.
Now, we had a great partnership with the Broadcom team. We built solutions in the cloud, which were never there before. A lot of AWS type work with the S3 file watches and file buckets. We co-partnered with the Broadcom, some of the organization there, and we built this functionality in the cloud, on premise, it was a hybrid solution. And, that that was a true business impact, start of day that we're able to solve.
So, that's one area. And then, again, we have, we meet with the business on a monthly basis: transaction banking, corporate banking, depending on the lines of business. And what we do is, we share with them what we're doing, what we have from a technology perspective, and we ask them, "What do you need?"
So, us helping the people in that middle bucket, so to say, if we can make problems go away from incidents, the AppDev guys aren't having to work as much to fix the incidents, right? We're identifying where we have challenges within like a workload automation process. We run this incident reduction program. We identify them, we run it quarterly. We fix the problems, and then that gives them the ability to work even closer with the business, to give them what they need on the business side, to roll out more applications and do things on their side. So, us helping the middle really helps the end user.
JH: I mean, these are great examples of the IT side really able to provide value to the business side in these very specific areas, and actually save the company money. So, thanks for sharing these examples. I mean, this is just amazing. I think a lot of companies will benefit from having this type of information so that they can model what you've done at MUFG.
I want to just conclude with asking one other question, and that is around the heat maps and so on that you've worked with and being able to look at a heat map for a particular line of business and identify SLAs. Could you talk just a little bit about that and your partnership with Broadcom in developing that technology?
BF: So, with within, again, with around the SLA, the AI, so it's like it's a two-part process. Right? From an SLA perspective, what we've done is within our SLA process. So, we, we identify SLAs or SLOs, depending on, wherever it is, right, in objectives versus, SLAs. But, the goal is to get the file processed on time. Right? And what we've done in that SLA process is include a lot of the trending and analytics information within the SLA documentation that gives that end user the ability to really take a look and say, "Okay, can I make my time?" "Right, I need to make a 10 a.m. file."
When you start looking at all the upstreams with that, and we run all our analytics, we can actually, which was great, we just, I'm sidetracking here for a second, but we had a major divestiture last year. We sold a big portion of our bank, and we had to understand the linkages between the applications so we could actually break them apart. Breaking apart applications, and we use AI to take a look at that upstream dependency mapping, which could go 25 levels high, 25 levels deep. And, it really gives you that good understanding of how an application is integrated with other systems.
So, from an SLA perspective, very similar, we want to make sure that the upstreams that are feeding this core system are meeting their obligations as well. So, as part of our SLA process, we include these dependency mappings. And, when someone comes to and says, "Okay, we need to make a 10 a.m. SLA," like it's virtually impossible when the system above you is just giving you data at 10:00. So, we use that to drive a lot of that information. So, we've built a lot of that into our SLA documentation process.
And then, getting to your point about the heat maps. So, what we've done is, using the tools, we run analytics every month. We know what our SLAs are, how many times a job runs per month, how many SLAs are associated with that SRA. So, if a job runs one time a day, 20 days out of the month, it's 20 runs for the month. Some of them run multiple times per day. And, now we have an idea of how well they're performing against those 20 SLAs that they need to make every month.
And, what we'll do is, by line of business, we'll just do a simple, a heat map or an analytics or a trend to say month over month, "Did you hit your SLAs for last month?" "You were 18 out of 20, which is okay." Whatever the number is. I'm not sure the exact number, but if you go below a 90% or 95%, depending on the line of business, they have their specific criteria that they need to meet. Whether it's 90, 95%, 99% on some of that that they have to meet a certain SLA.
We'll actually, we show them that information within these heat maps, and they look month over month. So, one month doesn't make a trend, but the nice thing is, we show six months of trending, nine months of trending, and it'll show you your fluctuations. "How well are you doing against your SLAs?" And then, we'll show month over month trending just to show how well you're doing from a previous month.
And, we present these on these business meetings that we have on a monthly basis, and they are actually able to see, at one shot, "How well is my application and my business performing?" and, hitting their mark from from a workload automation perspective. So, pulling the data out of, running the jobs out of Automic, pulling the data out of AI, and then, trending it, and using these heat maps to generate these reports, and sharing with the business has been paramount to our success. And, the business comes, like you said, the business comes to us now to help them solve their problems, which is, it's a great accolade for us to say, "Hey, people are coming to us instead of us having to go out to them," usually, and try to fix their stuff.
JH: So, Bruce, we know everybody has automation. Practically every business in the world has some automation solution in place. But, what a lot of them lack is this visibility, the ability to look across islands of automation and really see what's going on with these different processes. So that if you want to bring down the length of a process, if you want to identify where transactions are failing, you really need some kind of tool that's going to allow you to look into these systems so that you have this intelligence so you can share this with the business teams as well. And, so, like you had mentioned, you have the ability to generate reports for different lines of business and provide those, weekly or monthly or whenever they're needed, which is a huge help for companies, and that brings a lot of value to businesses. Bruce, I want to thank you for your time today. We appreciate you coming over here to talk to us and share your insights. Again, Bruce Frank with MUFG. Thank thank you, Bruce.
BF: Thank you for having me. Looking to continue our partnership. Thanks very much.
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