Elevating Digital Process Orchestration with Massoud Dehkordi's Expertise

Mark Smith: 0:31
Welcome to the Power Platform Show. Thanks for joining me today. I hope today's guest inspires and educates you on the possibilities of the Microsoft Power Platform. Now let's get on with the show. In this episode we'll be focusing on scale on the Power Platform with Agile XRM. Today's guest is from Madrid, spain. He works for Agile XRM as the product owner, focusing on dialogues and BPM for the Power Platform. Now BPM Business Process Management is what it covers. You can find links to his bio and socials in the show notes for this episode. Welcome to the show, massoud.

Massoud Dehkordi: 1:11
Thank you Mark.

Mark Smith: 1:14
It's good to have you on. I think last time you were on the show was episode 367. We're currently at episode 505. So it was a long time ago.

Massoud Dehkordi: 1:25
Yes, absolutely.

Mark Smith: 1:28
I think a lot has changed in that time. What have you been up to in the last couple of months?

Massoud Dehkordi: 1:33
A couple of months, or the past 12 months, because it's just like a talk show.

Mark Smith: 1:37
Yeah, exactly.

Massoud Dehkordi: 1:40
Well, we've been extremely busy because we were competing with various opportunities around the world. With the success, obviously, work becomes quite a lot. So we've actually grown, we have more people, and it's just been crazy busy, which is good. The worst thing is the opposite, which is you don't have work, so work is good.

Mark Smith: 2:13
So true. So before we kick off, for people that haven't heard about what AgileXRM, what it is, what it does, can you tell us what your organization does and how it applies to the Power Platform?

Massoud Dehkordi: 2:28
Yeah Well, we're like an add-on to the Power Platform slash Dynamics, customer engagement, which is a change name. So the idea is out of the box. Dynamics and Power Platform give you a certain amount of management of processes automation rather than management of processes with Power Automate, with the different technologies inside the platform. But when things become a little more complicated and involved, people quickly hit some walls which they try to overcome, hence making the solutions that they create too complicated. And that's where we're coming. We don't have to come in at that point. We can come in before. But people tend to try it out first, hit those walls and then look for alternative solutions to manage those business processes. If somebody's already hit that wall, they're aware of it and when they're looking for a solution, when we go to these opportunities or RFPs and that kind of thing, they already know what they want because they know what the limitations are out of the box. So, when we're coming, we can easily show where we add value.

Mark Smith: 3:53
Yeah, yeah, so obviously your product works with Power Automate and BPM is actually. Can you just explain the concept of BPM so that listeners can understand the scenarios that they might be coming across, where they've reached the limits of what they can do with Power Automate and where BPM solution is needed to work alongside their Power Automate implementation?

Massoud Dehkordi: 4:20
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. We work very closely with Power Automate, so there's a bi-directional integration with Power Automate. So, you know, the processes can talk to Power Automate flows and vice versa, so they're going to change data. But the basic differentiation is BPM business process management means managing the process, which sounds like the name itself. But what does that mean? Power Automate is automation. That means you create something, you kick it off and it goes away and does it right. You can't, in the middle, change it. You can either cancel it and then do a new version, and that new version you can, you know, do it from zero again, but you can't manipulate that running process. That running automation and business processes. By nature they need management, meaning that you know you can in the mix tasks which are humans have to do, tasks that systems have to do, and then maybe even your rules change in the middle because it's a long running process. That's another thing. Long running processes in Power Automate are difficult to set up because I think 30 days or 60 days is the limit, but you know some processes go for years in certain types of businesses. So it's the idea of I want full control over my process, business process. I want to be able to change it. I want to be able to maybe jump from step to another step because I know what I'm doing. Maybe I want to migrate the process to a new version because the rules have changed and I have to adapt, or maybe I find a bug and I need to migrate because of that or whatever. Yeah, so that what management actually means and also it's end to end Automation is you kick off something, it goes and does something and then it's not part of end to end. It is part of an end to end, but you can't see it, you can't visualize where am I in the process. I want to see it from the beginning to the end and I want to know where I am. It's very difficult with that other box. People just use statuses and fields and other fields just to give where they are in a particular process.

Mark Smith: 6:39
In 2013 is when I was first introduced to the concept of BPM. I hadn't come across it before. Back then we were using Windows Workflow Foundation as the main tool in dynamics to do our automations and I came across the concept of BPM. It was in the context of banking and you know where. Let's say you've got a loan amortization over 25 years let's say a mortgage, for example and that typically has fluctuations and things like interest rates. Is it fixed for a period of time? What happens at the end of it? And this is when I saw BPM really come into its own, because you could change things like interest rates etc over that period of time, but the actual overall 25 year loan still existed with those changes. And it was then that the light bulb came on for me around BPM, and I know that in my part of the world across Australia, new Zealand one of the major banks is using your product to do that type of functionality. What are the other big type processes that you see it being used in? And probably, what industries do you come across where BPM needs to be part of it? Is it common, like in logistics? Is it warehousing? Where else?

Massoud Dehkordi: 7:58
No, most. I think for those logistics, warehousing there are kind of things, more automation would be probably enough. But anything where you know regulations are in place, Regulations are set in, you know, in big documents and they have to be followed, Okay, and regulations then change. So you have this issue of you know. Sometimes regulations have to change for existing you know circumstances of a particular process. Sometimes, no, it's a part. Anything was done before has to continue with the old regulation. Anything new from a certain date, from 1st of January, has to be done in the new regulation. So, you get these. You need to have a solution that can cater for either of these circumstances. Everything should be changed or only new stuff should. So versioning becomes important. Migrating to the new version, something that was in the old version becomes important, Depending on your circumstances. Then our BPM at least allows these kind of circumstances. So obviously anything. Government I think government regulation is very important. They have a legal obligation to do things right. Banks as well, insurance companies that's where we find most of our clients, but we also have a customer like a major Spanish football club. Everybody, knows. A very famous Argentinian used to play. We can't name them because we're not allowed to use their name.

Mark Smith: 9:52
You have to pay like 10 million to use their name.

Massoud Dehkordi: 9:57
They use this, for instance, for Anybody who wants to become a member of the club. They go on their online site and they're using our technology to gather all information for one member, or a whole family, to become a member. They put their photos in, they do their digital signatures, they do their payments. Everything is guided by these dialogues, which are actually anonymous dialogues. So, we can open our dialogues to anonymous users as well. So industries, anybody who has anything complex, and, as I said, they've already hit those walls and they want a fast time to market. Sometimes you can maybe do it with out of the box. You put in your efforts to implement it. You have enough people, experts because they have to know lots of different parts of the power platform. They have to do plugins and JavaScript and power pages or whatever. You can maybe put that all together. But the question is how long is it going to take you and how much will it cost you? And then afterwards, when those people leave, how easy is it to maintain? Now, if you need that same company to continue giving you the services for every small change, then maybe you're not using the right technology, or at least you're missing some important technology. What we allow is those processes and those dialogues to be easily understandable by a business user. So you look at the model in Visio, which is where we model those processes and those dialogues. You can see the flow is exactly where what it does, all the paths, each one what it does, and then it's easy to understand. So your business logic is not spread across all sorts of components underneath. So if your logic is in a plugin, a business user will never see that it just happens. You do something and something happens, but here every step is in the model. So you see exactly why it's doing things. Hence it makes it much easier to understand, to maintain it, to change it, and that's what tends to happen Many of the customers. They find that they can actually maintain it themselves after it's been implemented.

Mark Smith: 12:31
So that's interesting, because one thing that you said quite often is this visualization layer. So, using Visio, you can see exactly where things are right in their process. It's not hidden in the depths of some code in a plugin. You can actually visualize it so a business consultant or a business analyst can understand what's actually going on in the process and tweak it.

Massoud Dehkordi: 12:59
That's right. The idea is what you see, what you get. So if you sit with the business analyst, sit with the business person who understands obviously the process, who knows the business part of it, you can model something that they see. This is you know. Yeah, that's what I want to happen in this order, in this logic. Understand it and then that same diagram is going to be configured to work. So there's no code generation here, there's no, it's just configuration. So each shape then is configured to execute, become executable, and then the engine is executing the logic underneath to say who has to do what when, what they should see, what they should input, etc. So for business people, it's you know, as amazing says. Still, because you show them their process actually running and they understand it.

Mark Smith: 13:52
Okay.

Massoud Dehkordi: 13:53
When you just have CRM meaning data versus, or just Dynamics 365 and a user goes in in a particular table, where is my business logic Maximum? They have that business process flow for that particular entity, okay, at that particular table, but they don't see the overall end to end, because maybe a business process touches many, many different tables, yeah, and they won't see that. They just see their own BPF for that particular entity. So you know, the idea is simplify it for the end user, simplify it for the BAs, simplify it for the configurators or the makers. Beginning to end is the same diagram. It just obviously becomes improved and you add more shapes and, you know, becomes more complex as you, as you implement it, but visually you see it and you don't lose sight of your business process.

Mark Smith: 14:47
So we've discussed BPM and that's a key component of what you have, but the other part of it which is very interesting is this area of dialogues, and you touched on it in regards to your Spanish football team. Just explain to me what dialogues are and where are you typically seeing them used?

Massoud Dehkordi: 15:06
Okay, dialogues, we didn't invent them, okay, we just implemented them what we think the right way. Dialogues originally existed in CRM.

Mark Smith: 15:15
There was a concept called dialogues back in the day, back in the day and it got deprecated.

Massoud Dehkordi: 15:20
So, the idea of the dialogue was a series of screens where you have fields and you ask questions, and so you're guiding the user through a, let's say, multi-step form let's call it that way and in between you can have logic and that kind of thing. Now that became deprecated and it was very limited what it could do at that time it was quite simple dialogues. Now dialogues have become fully blown applications. Now you can create an interaction with the user that guides them to whatever complexity of interaction you want to create, because you break down that complexity into different pages. So in a page you ask maybe I don't know the user's details the customer's details. Depending on the type. Maybe you ask different questions. Each of these set of fields are in different pages and we root the correct page based on your answers. So this whole complex interaction becomes very simple to design and present, and that was one of the main reasons we actually, at the beginning of this year, we won the, an RFP with an Irish government agency, regulatory agency, which the tender actually started back in 2019, believe me Wow, that's a long person. Yeah, so it took three years. It's true that in the middle there was one year of COVID, so we have to discard that. There's nothing happening, there was no movement from anyone. But outside that was like two years of evaluation. That's a public tender, meaning at European level, any European company in Europe, they have an office, they can actually go to that tender. So it was open and it was a big contract. So it came under radar of a lot of major companies the Salesforce, SAP, lots of others and the evaluation said two years because they're not looking just for solving their own problem, which was to implement all the regulatory requirements that they had, but also look for a platform for the Irish government to. This is about their test testing with this agency to see what combination of products or solutions can come together and give us a digital transformation platform and, as they called it, for the next 20 years. Wow, wow. So it was a very important deal for us to win and we had to jump through a lot of hoops. We had to do lots of POCs and proof of concept a type of things. For instance, one of the proof of concept was we get the requirements for a subset of their requirements. We had to build it, but then, when we're showing it, they would ask for change to those rules Live. We had to show them how we make the changes and they can see the changes. We explain them how we make the changes and then we show them that we put it, publish it again and now you have the new rules. The process changes, the form changes, the field changes, all sorts of things. Why they asked for that? Because they said that sometimes big companies to win a big deal, they put tens of experts behind the scenes and in fact a huge number of people are working on it to make it look good and they look good, they look really good. But when you want to do it the project then that's a very costly setup. We wanted to prove that it's simple. They wanted to know how simple or hard it is and we managed to prove that it's simple. Hence we won and obviously we celebrated greatly. And since then, since the beginning of the year, the project actually started in May. There's a lot of paperwork in government, so in May they started and set up the environments, etc. And now we are in Sprint, I think, 12. It's an agile project, so we're Sprint 12, and it is delivering in each Sprint set of functionalities and there's a few more months to go because it's quite a huge, as I said, totally transformed their environment. They opened this up through the portal to the older people they regulate, which are like old-age pension houses or children's units or wherever there's a radiation machine like dentists, so they have to regulate those and they're going to get more and more actually responsibilities, so they will be regulating other things in the next year. So when we started with them, I think there were 350 people and there are like 600-something people now. So they're getting more and more responsibility and hence they need tools to simplify interaction, because there's a huge amount of work, and BPM allows them, and these dialogues allow them, to control all the data what should happen when, who should do what, what happens if they don't do it? All that stuff.

Mark Smith: 21:05
So it was a drawn-out process and obviously a lot of big players SAP you mentioned Salesforce which are considered the big end of town. How did you hold your own against those? Obviously, the demonstration was part of it, and being able to on-the-fly show that a business analyst could make changes and apply those changes what was the other compelling things that stood out about why Agile XRM won? This Irish government bid over others?

Massoud Dehkordi: 21:37
Okay, the credit is not ours all of it. Obviously, a big part of the credit is to the platform that Microsoft provides. So we're not competing against Salesforce, we are together with Microsoft platform. We are competing against Salesforce or the others, so that is the winner. How do we know? If only Microsoft would have tendered out of the box, maybe they would have won right. Well, they did. They were one of the competitors. You know, we know that. You know the just out of the box did not cover the requirements for a major digital transformation. With our add-on plus a portal connector the portal connector, which is a Sylogist product. The combination of these three did answer all the requirements. So sometimes you know the tools which are in fact, sylogist is just like us. Their portal functionality does not have it has its own life outside of Dynamics or Dataverse. It has to have Dataverse. And for us, the same, our BPM outside of Dynamics or Dataverse has no life there's. It has to have Because it's integrated and embedded into Dynamics and Dataverse. So you know, we think this combination is a winning combination for any kind of major project.

Mark Smith: 23:24
So where to from here? Are you looking at focus on any particular industry? Are you seeing your growth happening across North America as well as Europe? What's the scope for you?

Massoud Dehkordi: 23:37
We are concentrating on now is what we call self-training type of materials, so that you know. This is our plan for 2024 to have everything so that you know people can start off, you know using the product, seeing, you know where the advantages are, etc. And to be able to self-teach themselves, because training courses don't work, because training courses people don't have time to go to training. They want to do a series of you know lessons on their own time and they can then try it. The other part is, you know, to make this available to more people, we're concentrating also on our public cloud multi-tenant setup. Okay, so for that, we're going to be working with a company who are specializing in hosting in. Azure and everything, so that you know this becomes available to everybody. We already have one, but it's not production ready. So we don't sell it because it's not production ready, but it's good enough to show you. You know, for a POC or yes, but you know we want to harden it. It's just purely on the security side. Everything else is there but, we want with a company who know how to harden a product. Excellent To put it as a sauce. Yeah, very, very good. That's how our growth is going to be around there.

Mark Smith: 25:13
And outside the government. Obviously there's a lot of scope in government and banking, and I think you mentioned insurance as well. Any other particular industries that stand out for you that are using your tech?

Massoud Dehkordi: 25:26
Well, you know utilities. For instance, one of our major major clients is a utility in Holland and you know they're creating like 15 million process instances a month. In a very, very high volume kind of you know what we call business critical type of processes. Right, if this doesn't work, it hits their bottom line. Okay, so you can't risk it with anything you know that might have issues with. You know limits or or you know volume high volumes has to be scalable and they have, like I think, two different environments. One has three orcs or environments. The other one has three others, because they have different brands and they manage them each in a different environment. And you know we are. Our involvement with them is like I don't know, once or twice a year, a couple of hours, that kind of thing. Well, you know, very limited. There's all the old, self sufficient to do anything. You know all the things they want.

Mark Smith: 26:39
Yeah, To wrap up, if somebody wants to try your product and get their hands on it and kind of get a feel for it and and make a decision around whether it's right for a project that might be involved in, do you offer a version that people can use and get access to and start developing their skills on it?

Massoud Dehkordi: 26:59
Yeah, I mentioned the public cloud, so that's one option that obviously has zero installation. It's just configuring it to connect into one of your maybe your developer or one of our very couple of hours is set up and you can start using it. The modeler is in the cloud as well, so you, as a remote app, you connect and you can model. That's the fast track option. Also, we have a free community edition with 25 user licenses, free forever, which you can install. Your Azure VM. It's an image, so you just deploy that image into your environment. Again, you get the modeler and the server and they you can connect it to all your orcs et cetera and you can use it for free within those 25 limit user limit. That's another way of actually testing it and many people are using, you know, testing it right now in that way.

Mark Smith: 28:02
Excellent, excellent. We'll make sure that those links to those resources are available in the show notes. Masoud, this has been a great discussion with you. Congratulations on that major win with the Irish government.

Massoud Dehkordi: 28:14
Thank you very much.

Mark Smith: 28:14
I look forward to speaking to you again soon.

Massoud Dehkordi: 28:17
Thank you, thank you very much. Thank you very much, mark. Talk to you soon.

Mark Smith: 28:21
Hey, thanks for listening. I'm your host business application MVP Mark Smith, otherwise known as the NZ365 guy. If there's a guest you would like to see on the show, please message me on LinkedIn. If you want to be a supporter of the show, please check out bymeocoffeecom. Ford slash NZ365 guy. Stay safe out there and shoot for the stars.