9DECEMBER 2020need to understand how to deploy that tool effectively in the organization. So that's how I keep my selection. I did my research to see which firms were supporting and then met with them and their customers. I tried to learn if they have success with this organization. If the answer was yes, then we brought them in and made a request for a proposal, and now we're utilizing their services. Latest project InitiativesFor a robotics automation project, we interviewed all of the providers who are in the marketplace. We met with all the robotics solution providers to understand how their business model works. How much do they charge, and how does the tool get deployed. And we tried to select what we felt was the best tool that was akin and would work best with financial applications. We also interviewed a lot of financial companies to learn what they were using. And combining all of this research, we choose a perfect solution for us. So we set up an Intelligent Automation Center in finance, and the millennial generation volunteered without even being asked to be a part of this project. Because they see what's the benefit of these tools are. Then we sought to determine what would be some of the projects that we would use the robots for, and specifically, in finance, we're using them in account reconciliations and in manual journal entries. And our underwriting group is using them to help to evaluate and score specific clients. We then realized that we had many other processes that needed automation, and that robots were not going to work for that. That's when we did our investigation of these different tools and selected an organization to come in and help us with automating these processes. Also, we have several processes in our health services business that we're looking to automate. We're looking at our expense area differently. We have 15 to 20 expense controllers that all seem to be doing the same activity. And then we brought in a consulting firm working with my people and are looking at the process documentation that exists to see how manual it is where the excel spreadsheets are. They're going to come back to me in the next couple of weeks to advise me as to which area can be automated using this tool. So right now, we are at the evaluation phase and haven't completed the work concerning deploying the Middleware automation tools. What's Next?The new middleware tools are powerful, and if we deploy these tools properly over time, this whole data gathering and manipulation of data will become less important. People will be able to focus on analyzing information and be able to provide more real-time data analysis to the commercial side of the business. This is a huge transformation because when you look at a bell curve of how you would look at your employee population depending on your organization by age, you probably have close to 10 to 15 percent that knows these tools who are starting to learn these tools in school. In contrast, everyone else is in an excel based type organization and so all those people need to be retooled and trained. The second thing is that the schools where these kids graduate from, I don't know how many of them have altered their programs or their curriculum to address the fact that this is going to be the wave of the future. And a lot of the universities and colleges are struggling with that fact, and there's going to be a lot of change. For example, actuaries today are graduating with the knowledge of python, but it's not pervasive. This transformation will continue and will ensue for the next ten years. But it's not like there's a silver bullet out there, and as Jean-Jacques Rousseau-a Greek philosopher once said that "Everything is in constant flux on this earth." So it's all about change, and both technology and how technology is being deployed and developed is happening at an exponential rate that we've never seen before. People are having a hard time keeping up with it, and as a result, a lot of our institutions that exist today are behind. Thus we have to spend the next ten years working through that so that we're keeping pace with the rate of technology.
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