Citrix Workspace Summit 2020 Featuring Ray Wolf CEO A2K Partners

Full video playback of Ray Wolf, CEO, A2K Partners  presenting among other industry leaders at the Citrix Workspace Summit, a free, online event October 22, 2020.

Mr Wolf discusses and demonstrates the value of building on the Citrix Workspace platform to help customers improve productivity and optimize employee experience through the automation of routine tasks and streamlining processes, making it easier to get work done.

Ray offers on-the-street insights to help companies evolve through challenges, emerge in a better place, and transcend business models with practical and actionable future of work strategies.

In his presentation, Mr. Wolf discusses strategies designed to free up or recoup more than 20% of workforce time and energy along with opportunities to achieve 100x ROI through work and process redesign through new automation technologies.

Other key topics to be addressed include how to:

  • Multiply workforce capability and profitability with workspace intelligence
  • Free up maximum people time and energy for impactful strategic work
  • Channel productivity and automation into measurable value, revenue, and growth
  • Drive continuous work orchestration and employee experience improvement
  • Deliver secure remote work from any location on any device

“Companies have been awakened to the demand for more empowering employee experiences. We help them focus on the places that matter most to moving past survival and immediately realizing ROI.” Wolf continued. “Where this traditionally starts as an IT or HR conversation, we help accelerate the conversations with other revenue critical business departments like sales, finance, revenue and procurement along with their supporting functions.”

Steve Wilson, Citrix VP of Product Management, and executive sponsor of Converge, welcomed A2K’s contributions to the microapps ecosystem, “A2K Partners is a pioneer in building the future of work. The microapps the company has created enable employees to cut out distractions and regain control and focus. Alex’ Converge session is essential viewing for our developer community”.

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Hi, I’m Ray Wolf CEO of a 2K Partners. We are next-gen Citrix partner focusing on delivering massive business value by translating technology into outcomes that our clients care about most today. I’d like to share with you what our clients are doing right now to ensure they emerge from the crisis of the last six months better than when it started keep in mind. Most of them are doing this in stealth mode making essential shifts in where their focus their time and energy to develop new products services and even business models specifically, I’m going to wrote an app how a 2K Partners is leveraging the latest Citrix workspace with intelligence platform and analytics to free up more than one hour a day per employee in less than six weeks and one day per week in 11 weeks all why eliminating variation from important business processes all with a direct and positive Financial impact what our own experience has shown is that people and companies ofter often put off what they know is right for them their employees and customers and avoid meaningful change until something forces that change to happen. The current crisis has been just such a catalyst for change forcing more than 45 percent of the workforce that change the way they work and get stuff done where they do their work and the role that technology plays in all of that back in March. There was a rush to enable remote work. We were asked to be able to provide access to Applications data and files so that they could keep their businesses going many asked us for short-term contracts thinking that this would be temporary.

Fortunately. We had already proven solution to deploy Citrix workspace in June the focus shifted to ensuring that the new remote Workforce was working securely from their own devices off the corporate Network and often without a VPN access. Again. We answer the need with a ready proven solution for secure remote work Citrix workspace.

In the August timeframe things shifted. Once again, our clients realizing that this was the beginning of a permanent shift and how work gets done started talking to us about having to get more done with less due to adjustments in head count in both directions as they forecasted future demand. The bar was moved up once again to productive secure remote work.

Putting one of our clients. We are focusing on ways to create friction list experience for our Workforce today and in the future specifically onboarding Employee Service portal collaboration tools knowledge and document management tools and always on listening strategies before I share with you. The solution experience has shown that it is worth looking to the past to help understand the future and what others did during a similar time.

During the last three economic downturns while 17 percent of the companies have significant negative issues such as bankruptcy or mergers and Acquisitions 9% figured out how to beat out their competition. All of them were facing the same economic challenges and twenty percent of the companies that started in the bottom quartile moved up to the top quartile. You must ask what they saw or knew that others did not what do they do differently?

Well, the two common denominators for the winners in this scenario where upscaling and automated net-net The time-proven Playbook and shortest path to merge from uncertain times ahead of everyone else is upscaling in automating.

So let’s go back to what clients were asking in August. So how are companies doing more with less improving productivity and improving their business. The answer is they are using automation the freed up time and energy from survival and functional low-value administrative tasks and shifting it to operational which yields linear growth and transformational which yields exponential growth. This is exactly where Citrix workspace excels.

The best kept secret of workspace is the intelligence functionality that can easily be turned on this is made possible by the Innovative micro app technology Citrix is pioneering that enables resilient automation the intelligent function enables automation of tasks within and across the applications that you’ve already provided to your workers taking routine things that you Workforce does and streamline them some common examples of this is reduce the number of steps to get things done with a number of clicks. It also eliminates the need to search for information in your Workforce needs to make decisions to get their job done often from multiple data sources and seamlessly collaborate across organizational boundaries and eliminate the constant context switching that your employees have to do. Think about this. Your average worker has eight applications open in 10 Windows and is switching all the time. And the best of this is that all of this is enabled on the mobile device.

Let me provide a couple of examples so you can get the picture. The one that we could all relate to is when you sit down in front of a television that you’re not familiar with and you find yourself with three remotes remotes have 75 buttons in all you want to do is turn on the television change the volume and change the channel and when you look at these remotes you find 753 button combinations. Juice. Why would we do this to ourselves? Well the better answer?

Is to have one remote with six buttons of the things that you want to do most often that make the other three devices do what they need to do.

Now let’s shift to a business example a long time Citrix customer also our customer a global semiconductor manufacturer. We work with them over the last couple of years connecting 13 applications to workspace and automating 96 workflows related to streamlining the approval process.

When we reached about the 20th workflow, we automated the approval and fulfillment of non-standard work orders. This was essentially anything that didn’t have asked you the process initially took six weeks and the employee had to go and find a document in SharePoint fill it out routed for internal approval then routed to the customer for approval then get it back and then routed internally for execution again, all of that took six weeks well with Citrix workspace.

And the intelligence feature we were able to reduce this from six weeks the six days resulting in a multi-million dollar monthly positive Financial impact.

Another customer we’re working with locally here in Austin is a fast growing division of a multibillion-dollar company. We started out by automating five workflows for their sales force and are now working on the second set of five after finishing the first five we were able to free up more than one hour a day so that the sales team could be more proactive and do some outbound sales calls their sales have grown more than 30% as a result of these efforts.

Now we’re seeing this scenario play out over and over again. So let me give you the prescriptive no-load Playbook that we’re running with our clients secure rapid time to initial value. The first thing we do is we identify a Persona or critical business process with massive upside potential.

Next we complete the a2k discovery process. This takes about 10 minutes of your employees time and about two hours of their leadership. Third. We connect workspace with the designated applications. A 2K does all the heavy lifting and all we need from the client is access to the business analyst three weeks later. We run a conference room pilot make any needed adjustments one week after that. We begin a phased rollout moving this into production.

And then the best every month after that, we released an additional two to four automations and the benefits just continue to accrue.

The number of applications and automations are endless to make it easy and jumpstart the process. We’ve created a few bundles. The most common ones are for sales, which is a call center outbound solution for customer support, which is a call center inbound solution and a collaboration bundle that allows people in different locations the work seamlessly.

I will now give you a preview of the outbound call center solution. Let me first Orient you as to what you’re looking at. This is the workspace screen is very clean you I hear a lot of white space on the left side. There’s a home button, which is what we’re looking at right now. There’s an actions and think about these as those items that people need to get done to do their job applications are exactly that these are the applications that are integrated into workspace.

Oh and then there’s an option to integrate a virtual desktop. We do not have that as part of this particular bundle directly in front of you in the center of this is the feed. This is where actions that you need to take or information that you need to know get surface to you and I’ll go into these a little bit later and then on the right hand side, there’s some Shortcut menus for the actions that you use most often as well as the applications that you access frequently.

First let’s go into the actions. This particular bundle has five applications integrated and 15 pre-built workflows.

The first one is in a telephony solution for Amazon connect second. One is an IT service management with service now.

In the area of collaboration. We have slack CRM Salesforce and share foil another example of collaboration.

These 15 can be changed modified and customized at any point in time. We usually start out with this particular bundle and then we expand as people get familiar with workspace and the productivity benefits with that.

On the application side. I’ll just click into the applications. What we’ve set up here is the ability to go directly into an application. If there’s something you need to do that has not been pre built in automated here in workspace, or you just need to spend your entire day in one of these applications. You can go directly into those applications very easily and securely directly from workspace.

These applications the ones that were showing here are SAS applications, which are also able to integrate on-prem applications as well.

Let’s go actually go back to the home.

And take a look at what’s been going on here. So the first one you’ll see is that a lead has been assigned to me. So I would just click on that feed and a card comes out.

And there’s the most relevant information that I need to understand what’s going on with that lead this likely scenario is that I’m going to follow up with this lead. So I could place a call directly from here that is integrated with the telephony solution. The phone number gets pre-populated and then I’d be able to speak directly from any of my devices.

If after my conversation, I believe it’s a qualified lead. I can convert that if I have another follow-up action. I could send a white paper or I could schedule a meeting. There’s a number of different pre-built actions that can be put here. There’s also an option to edit this so very easy to use when that action is complete and you’re done with it. You can also remove it from your feed and just simply click that away.

There’s another type of action that we have here that’s been placed in the feed. This is a regarding service. Now first one is that an incident or a ticket that I had entered the status changed? So it’s keeping me informed what’s going on.

Cork pops up. There is the detail around that and then I can click on to get directly into the record and get more information or it could add some comments in the field here. I can update the incident and then I can close that out. If I choose either one of those actions it gets executed in the App servicenow application recorded and it’s available for Access later or for others that are looking at service now as well.

as for the actions in the things that

I need to get done during the day. I’m a salesperson and I want to essentially create a lead. I can click right here. This information comes out card comes out and you’re able to just put company.

Name here XYZ for the purposes of this demo. We made these fields optional but you can make these mandatory and configure that however, you’d like and then you just submit that that lead then gets executed and you can see on the left hand side or notice came out that said it was successfully executed in Salesforce.

Any number of actions can be taken from the action screen one. I’ll just check here is on share files. So very often this follow up with clients is internal communication that goes on and we frequently use the same document. So rather than searching in a location to find those you’re able to from this screen select who you want to send it to in this case this

Categories we set client and employee so you can choose any one of those.

You can choose any number of documents that exist and you could put as many documents that you’d like.

And you could add another recipient just like an email and then you could just share that link and then you’ll see shortly on the left hand side. It will pop up and say the request has been processed and sharefile. So really very easy convenient way to automate those tasks and actions that you take on a regular basis. It eliminates the context switching between these five applications. It eliminates the need to navigate multiple menus. So, that’s our

Edge call center bundle again, very easy to set up and get going.

The three conclusions. I want to leave you with one. It is possible with the right approach to emerge from the latest crisis better than when it started statistically 20% of you going to do this to the secret to achieving. This is the free of time and energy to focus on the most important things to your business by automating out low value administrative tasks. Lastly the technology to put you in the 20% is here today Citrix workspace with intelligence.

Implemented the a 2K way will get you results fast.

Thank you.

A2K Partners