From Malaga to Lisbon: Ruben Ruiz's Journey in Power Platform Mastery and Business Transformation

Mark Smith: 0:01
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're going to be focusing on Microsoft technologies being used in very large global implementations, specifically Dynamics 365 and the Power Platform. My guest is from Lisbon, in Portugal. Today he works at International Workplace Group as a Power Platform practice lead. He has strong teamwork, engagement, customer focus, presentation and management skills, mentoring and coaching abilities. Some of his skills include project management using the SureStep methodology, expertise in Dynamics CRM version 3, 4, 2011, 2013, 2015, as well as hands-on experience with SQL Server. You can find links to his bio, social media, et cetera, in the show notes for this episode.

Mark Smith: 1:08
Welcome to the show, Ruben. Thank you, Mark. Good to be here, so good to have you on the show and for you to tell the story, because when you first told it to me, I'm like wow, this is an epic story. I'd love to get it on a podcast, love to get it out there. But before we start with that, tell me a bit about food, family and fun.

Ruben Ruiz: 1:26
Okay, let's do it then. So family, I'll start by there. So, small family of three. I have a spoiled little girl with the age of four. She likes to keep our life fun and challenging. That's what she does every day. Food it's really simple. I like everything in general, but whatever you can give me with some proper sugar on it, I'll take it. You name it pastry cookies. I just love it. Not the best for your health, but it does make you happy, for a little bit at least. Yes, fun, nothing really out of the ordinary, hanging out with family and friends. As for hobbies, I like home automation, mountain biking, for example, whenever time allows it. So, yeah, that's me in a nutshell. More on the personal side. Nice have you always lived in Lisbon.

Ruben Ruiz: 2:14
Well, actually I'm Spanish in origin. I've lived in Malaga until I was five and then I came here on 1993. So I'm mostly Portuguese lived in Lisbon the entire time. I still like the Spanish culture. However, I see myself living in Portugal rather than living in Spain.

Mark Smith: 2:31
Yeah, Interesting, Interesting. How do you, you know? When you think about Portugal, for me the word port comes to mind. Do you enjoy port drinking?

Ruben Ruiz: 2:44
Yes, of course. Which type of port do you enjoy port drinking? Yes, of course. Which type of port do you enjoy mark?

Mark Smith: 2:48
I prefer a red over a white port and, um, and I tried, I think it was called a portofino when I was there, but any anything from the wine caves in portugal, um, graham springs to mind. Yeah, I've always been a fan of Port, love it. I've got multiple bottles.

Ruben Ruiz: 3:09
Yes, it's quite good. You should try a white Port wine with some tonic water slice of lemon. Yes, really tasty, fresh, good for the summer.

Mark Smith: 3:18
Yes For the summer, right yeah, I've been to the Festival of St Charles in Porto and that was an experience that just blew me away, and it was luck that we happened to be there at that time, but I feel the Portuguese know how to party With the little noisy hammers.

Ruben Ruiz: 3:37
Right, you probably saw that.

Mark Smith: 3:40
The hammers and the big garlic flowers that they would jam in your face. Yeah, just the joy on the street of all ages to the very early hours of the morning was just absolutely epic.

Ruben Ruiz: 3:53
Saint-Jean is mostly on port. It was actually a few weeks ago, during June and here in Lisbon we have what we call Saint-Antonio, which is the corresponding saint, but patron saint of Lisbon. So we also have the same kind of event and festivities here in Lisbon for a whole week. Wow, the city literally stops for that. Concerts everywhere around small squares, streets, sardines, meat being grilled, beer, a lot of beer. So it's quite good, actually quite a good season here during June.

Mark Smith: 4:26
Yeah, absolutely fantastic. Tell me a bit about how did you get into Microsoft technologies. How did you get in with all that experience from particularly Dynamics right back in the early days, MSCRM 3 onwards? How did it find you?

Ruben Ruiz: 4:42
It's an interesting story. So I graduated in computer science and telecommunications. I had the possibility to either go one way or another. Ended up going more into IT. There was actually more offers, more work and I managed to land an interview. Well, actually, two interviews in the same company one for OutSystems, one for Dynamics just at the very start of my career Ended up liking more the Dynamics product, the team, and that's actually how it happened. So it was just a decision that I took at that moment that actually would shape my professional career from there to the future. So essentially I started working with Dynamics as a technical consultant in that company and I've worked ever since that stage, done multiple things in multiple consulting firms with various roles, from solution architecture to delivery management, functional consulting, setting up Dynamics 365 or Power Platform practices as well.

Ruben Ruiz: 5:57
We did some nice nearshoring projects here in Portugal, where we had an exchange with the university and we started training people right outside of college in the technology as well to get more people to work with us, because it's actually a very competitive market here in Portugal. It's a small country. It's hard to get by talent right and you could, you know, outsource from other countries as well, but wages in Portugal and prices in Portugal are normally lower than in other countries. So it's not the same as having someone from Netherlands hiring a person from Portugal, because you have the bandwidth to do it. Here. It's not that easy unless you go to other countries, such as India or countries in Africa, for example.

Ruben Ruiz: 6:37
Across that experience, you know, also did a few projects in some fun industries, from football clubs, for example, or soccer clubs, to NGOs, to utilities, to banking, so quite a lot of, quite a lot of projects going on during that period, both small and large, which which is good, you know. It kind of gives you a well-rounded profile around the technology, not focusing on the technical part or on the functional part, but rather a little bit of experience all around, which is good to have different levels of conversation, whether you're talking to a more technical person or to a C-level stakeholder, for example. So I really value that experience and the possibility to go through multiple industries, rather small or larger. I think it's very valuable and I would recommend whoever has the opportunity to do so to spend as many industries as possible, as many companies as possible, within reason as well, because you see different worlds, different ways of working, different people as well. You know, it just adds on to your experience and I think it's really good to be able to do that.

Mark Smith: 7:51
Tell me about International Workplace Group. What do they do?

Ruben Ruiz: 7:56
So International Workplace Group, or IWG, which is the name it's most common known, is essentially a multinational company. We provide flexible workspace solutions across the globe. We have around 6,000 centers, more or less 12,000 staff members and the IWG brand in itself it's not very well known. What people normally know are different brands that we operate in multiple countries. So IWG owns Regus, for example, spaces, signature and other brands which are the actual names that you see on the streets when you see one of our offices where you can rent a space.

Ruben Ruiz: 8:36
In terms of services, we offer multiple services, but the most common ones are office spaces. So if you need to rent a private office for you, for a team customized to your specific needs, you can do that with us either short-term or long-term Coworking spaces as well. So if you like to have a day in the office without actually renting an office, we have coworking spaces where you can sit on a hot desk with internet, coffee and all of those amenities and services. Meeting rooms as well. You could rent a meeting room for a couple of hours in a nice place in the city because you have an important meeting with a customer and you would like to be in a central place, and then we have other services, for example virtual office services.

Ruben Ruiz: 9:21
So let's say that you open a company right, it's just you and the company, and you need an address in the city center in Lisbon, for example, so we can get the correspondence handled for you, you can send all mail there, we have telephone answering services and you don't really need a physical office space in that place. Then if you want to have that important meeting with your customer, then you have you'll have special prices with us in that particular office so you can actually physically take a customer there. So in general we offer flexible workspace adapting to whatever needs you have, and those are always changing in today's world. And those are always changing in today's world People going remote, companies going hybrid. So it really adapts to the needs that you have as an individual or a company.

Mark Smith: 10:12
Wow. And so you're saying, is it 6,000 locations around the world?

Ruben Ruiz: 10:16
Yes, ever growing. Yes, when I joined, it was way less, and I joined a little over a year ago, so it's rapidly expanding. Yeah, incredible, yeah, incredible, incredible. I was actually amazed by the number of offices that we have across the globe. Me, as a worker in IWG, I'm able to work in any of the offices that we have in Lisbon, or any other place as well, and I gradually discovered more and more offices around the city that I wasn't really aware about, which is truly interesting.

Mark Smith: 11:16
So tell me about how are you using the Power Platform and Dynamics within the organization.

Ruben Ruiz: 11:25
It's fun that you placed that question. That's the same question that actually started it all. So back in March last year I had that exact same question asked by senior leadership in IT. So you know, we have this thing called Power Platform. We believe someone is using it. How do we use it? What are we doing with it? Apparently, there were a couple of pockets of usage within the business and they wanted to know you know, what kind of usage and how are we driving the platform.

Ruben Ruiz: 11:58
Given that I had a background in the technology, I took up this challenge and went digging. You know, let's see what's the adoption here. What are we doing? What's going on in the platform? It's not being managed at this stage. We'll surely find something or find some usage.

Ruben Ruiz: 12:15
So we started with the Power Platform COE starter kit. We took some metrics and when the numbers finally surfaced, I was quite amazed with the numbers that we have. So after doing all of that work, we found out that we had over 40 power platform environments, around 2,000 flows going on in the company, 750 plus power apps, around 100 RPA flows and 80 people actively leveraging the platform. Okay, wow, I mean again, the perception was that there was a few pockets of usage in the company, and this is a little bit more than a few pockets, right? So, yeah, we were actually amazed by these numbers, which are good. It means that people are actively leveraging the platform, even though it was not being disclaimed in the company or publicized. However, these same numbers actually give you the firepower that you need to say look, as you can see, we have a lot of people using the platform here and there are risks associated to having a platform like this ungoverned, right? So? So this gave us the ignition that we needed to actually start setting up power platform practice with proper controls in the company. So we pitched this idea to senior IT leadership, based on the numbers and the facts behind it. Of course, we really needed to take over the platform and make sure it went in favor of the business, and it was explored to improve the business, and within six months, we grew from a team of half a person, which was me working part-time, to six full dedicated resources, building key applications in the company, promoting adoption and reaching out to multiple business areas, to say look, we have this platform. These are the capabilities that we have. Let's start doing something. Let's start finding some cases where we can actually leverage the platform.

Ruben Ruiz: 14:17
Parallel to this, there were a few business areas that discovered a platform earlier than the team was actually formed and, either in a self-taught approach or using external contractors, they started building their own applications, which is good. That's exactly what we want teams and business units to do. However, it is common that these applications outgrow themselves and you know they reach a stage in which they have such a level of importance that they need some proper maintenance, thinking, structuring behind it. So that was actually our entry point to prove the business that there's value in having this team. We started onboarding those applications into the practice and, using the problems that they were facing, we saw opportunities to more and more improve those applications and show what they're worth. So we ended up onboarding these apps, making them scalable, maintainable and, above all, making them stable for production usage. You know we're talking about 12,000 staff that's a lot of people across the globe, all the time zones, so they really need to be working properly, because the problem can come up at midnight or at midday or any time of the day.

Ruben Ruiz: 15:37
So some examples I can give you of these pockets of usage that we actually onboarded are some procurement applications, for example, which started as Canvas apps based on SharePoint. That's normally what we see as the most common approach. You use SharePoint as a backend Canvas app to give it a nice interface. So these procurement applications were essentially used to again procure services or goods with vendors which need across the globe for for the center. So you could either procure a laptop for a new hire in it or you can ask for seven sandwiches because there's a business launch going on in the center in lisbon, right, and you need to get a po to do that and to pay the vendor.

Ruben Ruiz: 16:24
This essentially evolved. We're a Microsoft house here. We have a Dynamics F&O system going on, we have Dynamics customer engagement going on as well, and there's added benefit into actually integrating these apps with those systems. So, considering the strategic will of the business to build a more robust procure to pay business process, we integrated these applications with with finance and operations. So that means that at this stage, an app that was actually a canvas app based on sharepoint is now integrated with fno. We get all the vendors from finance and operations. We get approvals going on. Once a PO is fully approved, it's sent to the vendor automatically and this will then allow us, through the F&O integration to have automatic procure to pay processes. So you get the PO raised, you get a PO number, the vendor can send the invoice, it's matched automatically all that kind of stuff that before needed an actual person to do that. And with 6,000 offices and thousands of customers it's just not scalable to do it manually. So we use the existing issues to gradually build up functionality.

Ruben Ruiz: 17:41
It started with a single item purchase order. We evolved to allow for multiple items in the same purchase order. There were issues with approvals in the application that we inherited. You know. Approvals were getting stuck. They weren't working.

Ruben Ruiz: 17:55
The business needed to change a certain criteria and we couldn't do it because it was hard coded in the legacy version of the app. So we rebuilt all that and it's now fully configurable. The business can go there. They can say okay, for this category I want five approvers If it's more than $10,000, I want it to go to a sixth level or I want it to go to a bunch of people instead of a single person. So that's mostly what we aimed to do make it as stable as possible and as configurable as possible so the business can actually use their own configuration, not rely on us or IT to do that kind of work. So each of these applications, just to give you an idea, they average 1,000 users per day, give or take 40,000 app launches per month and they drive tens of millions of spend per month. So it's very very big numbers.

Mark Smith: 18:51
Are you still using SharePoint as your backend?

Ruben Ruiz: 18:54
We are still using SharePoint as the backend, but we are actively working on switching to Dataverse right now. That's actually a project that is going on at this stage For scalability reasons. Dataverse also offers a set of functionality that SharePoint doesn't like email templates. You know stuff that we can just leverage and that won't make us build new functionality because it's already there in the platform. Things like proper security, exporting to Excel, editing in Excel in bulk. You know it's just basic stuff that's sitting there and it really adds value to the people using the apps.

Mark Smith: 19:32
Nice. And so what's been the impact, then, on the organization?

Ruben Ruiz: 19:39
Well, first, of all, stabilization that's the main impact in having onboarded these apps. Mobilization that's the main impact in having onboarded these, these apps. So we are now following standard processes whenever something comes up regarding these apps. That wasn't happening before. So if there's new demand for functionality, there's proper sizing involved. We work with architecture, we develop, we do designs with our BAs. We develop the thing, we get QA engaged, we get UAT testing, so in the end you get a more robust product than you would if you're doing this internally within your own team. Right. So that adds up to stabilization. Apart from that, we're also using the platform to work on other things, right. Apart from onboarding these legacy apps, they mostly focus in the following areas so optimizing licensing costs wherever we can, reducing operating costs in the company through, you know, efficiency, through automation or replacing end-of-life legacy technology that we have. We have some legacy technology in the company that we gradually replace either with Power Platform or other applications. But this also adds up to cost reduction, to consolidating technology, and essentially it allows you to modernize those applications as well. Some processes were a little bit stuck in time because the legacy technology wasn't just capable of dealing with um, with the requirements, with the modern things that we need to do that those old applications wouldn't do. So I can give you a few examples of those areas. If it makes sense to you, yeah, so, for example, on optimizing licensing costs, I think this is quite a good case.

Ruben Ruiz: 21:29
So we have our centers use an application to manage their day-to-day work. Okay, that application is used by center staff on a daily basis and it's built on native technology. So we have an iOS app, an Android app and a Windows platform app as well, so any of the center staff can use one of those three platforms to use this same application. It integrates with multiple systems in the company with Dynamic CRM, with ServiceNow, with Finance and Operations to essentially gather customer-related data. So you can show it in a single place to your center staff gather customer-related data so you can show it in a single place to your center staff.

Ruben Ruiz: 22:13
One of those integrations was with customer service Dynamics, customer service. At the time it was built as a very simple page in that native technology that would leverage some web services that were custom built. There you could see the cases that you have going on with the customers from your office. So if a customer complains about a printer or they want a coffee add-on or whatever, you would go into the app. You would see it in a very simple interface. You would click it and that would take you to the actual case record in Dynamics. So what this means is that we're using customer service, the full-blown customer service just to show a case to center staff right, we don't need that. That's ridiculous. To use a cannon to kill a fly, as you normally would say, and this means retail price. We need a license of $95 per month per user. So multiply this by 8,000 staff that we have in centers, times 12 months, so that's around eight or nine million dollars per year. That's a lot of money that would buy you a lot of nice things in a single year.

Ruben Ruiz: 23:16
So to get those costs down and also to provide a better user experience, we thought, well, let's collaborate with the teams that built this application in the native technology. Let's collaborate with the team that built this application in the native technology, let's collaborate with the team that is building and working with Dynamics, and let's try to do something that can lower complexity, have responsive design, better UI and, overall, reduce licensing costs and also have faster delivery times. So what we did is we came up with the idea to build a very simple canvas app that would surface exactly the same information. That app is embedded in a frame within the original application using the same color scheme, you know, same kind of design. So this would result in a seamless experience for the user, as if they were working always in the same place. So we did that. It was quite fast to build quite fast turnaround time and in the end you know those 8,000 staff members were reduced to a PowerApps premium license, which is five times less the cost. So you can see the savings, year on year, piling up right. We also had something else in mind, which is, if we can pull this off, then we mean so we have at least two-thirds of the organization licensed with a premium license. So this will open the doors to actually build better stuff with premium connectors for most of the organization and we can further dilute the cost of the licenses because we're leveraging those licenses across other applications and other functionality. So it was really a win-win scenario for everyone. We pulled that off. We pulled that off. It's now working, it's now in place, and the idea is that we can now gradually apply the same recipe to other areas of that same application. So, for example, servicenow. We could do exactly the same Build a Canvas app, connect to ServiceNow, use the same UI and try to lower the costs as well. Nice, so that's one example of optimizing licensing costs. I'm pretty sure there's a lot of them. It's a very big company, but yeah, we need to bite the apple one bite at a time and gradually work towards that goal.

Ruben Ruiz: 25:25
Other things that I can tell you is reducing operating costs, for example that's something that we also try to do costs, for example. That's something that we also try to do, and, such a large organization, it's very easy to find scenarios where you can do that. So another example is we we've got teams that do that collection right, so we have customers that will owe us money, which is normal in every business and this is a cumbersome process because we have staff members that would have to, you know, collate all the invoices and the contracts from those customers, to package them all together and actually send it off to collection agencies across multiple countries in the world. So this takes around seven minutes to do for such a person, and we have around 5,000 to 10,000 customers which we need to handle in collections per month. So that's a lot of time just to manually collate information that we already have laying around in systems and we could get.

Ruben Ruiz: 26:24
So what we did is we built a couple of Power Automate flows, nothing too complicated. So what these flows are now doing is they go to those systems, they're able to get those invoices and those documents, they package them together, they put in a sharepoint site organized by country customer collection agency date. So everything is now automatically bundled together. So we're able to reduce those seven minutes to three minutes, because we still want to have person people checking the contents of those files. So that means that out of the seven full-time persons that we had, we only need three now and we can actually have the other four, doing more relevant things to the organization. I mean, if you go digging around you, you'll just find cases like this quite easily in organization this big. So there's a lot of potential for using the platform.

Mark Smith: 27:15
Amazing. So do you have a sense for the impact this has had inside the organization? So you mentioned there's about a thousand active users a day on it. Has your number of flows increased? Are you using just Power Apps or are you using things like Power Pages? What's your thoughts on AI and how that's going to come into the mix now for you?

Ruben Ruiz: 27:38
So number of flows is steadily increasing. Yes, not only from the work that we are doing, but actually from end users as well. We try to promote the platform as much as we can within the business areas. I start getting more and more contacts from people throughout the business, from finance to operations to sales to customer service, with questions, with things that they built and they need help with. So that's quite good. It means that people are engaging with the platform and they're actually extracting value out of it. In terms of what we're using, we're mostly working with Dataverse, sharepoint, canvas apps, power Automate, a little bit of RPA as well.

Ruben Ruiz: 28:22
Power Pages we haven't had such a case yet. I think it will eventually come over time. Ai we are still scratching the surface on that, but there are clear use cases for it. So in this collections example that I gave you, one of the issues or challenges that we have right now is the naming of such files right. So you can get three contracts from a customer and the place we're getting it from won't give us a proper naming in the file saying okay, this is contract one from day A to day day z and this is contract two between those dates. It's just a random name. So one of the scenarios that we're exploring is okay, let's use ai builder, let's feed it some contract templates that we have. Let's say, you know, here's the place where the data is normally sitting in. This is the other information that we need to extract, and we're training such a model so that will automatically give us the name of the files that we need. And it's a really simple fix and simple use of AI, which translates in more efficiency.

Mark Smith: 29:26
That's very cool. That's very cool as we wrap up any challenges, any recommendations you'd have to others considering using the Power Platform at this type of scale.

Ruben Ruiz: 29:37
Yeah, definitely there are some challenges that we faced. For example, if you're inheriting applications and onboarding them into your standard IT processes, whatever those might be, that will be a challenge on its own because we're talking about a team that, autonomously, is building an application without any controls, without any gates, so it will be a challenge to onboard them into such processes, which will make the building process longer overall. Right, because you need to get a design, you need to get it tested, you need to do proper design, you need to get it tested, you need to do proper software development lifecycle steps. The good thing is that once you do that once or twice with that team, then they really start seeing the value of not having to UAT test things on their own because we have a dedicated UAT team of all the scenarios that are being picked up and weren't thought about at the very start when they started building the application. That's definitely a challenge. Also, if you're working with contractors, as we come across every once in a while, then we also need to get those contractors onboarded into the same practices right, so they need to learn how to use, for example, use JIRA for work management, onboard them to JIRA, you know. So they need to learn how to use, for example, use Jira for work management. Onboard them to Jira. You know you need to show them the benefit. They need to be thorough on what they are doing, on the items that they are creating, on reporting progress.

Ruben Ruiz: 31:03
And I would say that another challenge is definitely pace. Power Platform is a fast-paced technology, meaning that you can build something rather quickly. So that means sometimes it can get frustrating if you have to follow these processes or if you're interacting with another system that's more on the traditional development side of things which you have a dependency with and you'll have to do a little, a little, waiting for them to have everything you need available for you to continue your work. So pace can be frustrating sometimes. Fortunately, there's a lot of work to do, so whenever something has to stop, we just move to the next piece of work and then go back, whenever we can, to the original work.

Ruben Ruiz: 31:47
And I would say you know communication. I wouldn't say it's a challenge, but it's definitely something that you need to keep top of mind, especially if you're building up a practice, like we did. So you need to take an active stance in the projects you're in, make sure momentum isn't lost, try to build proper connections with people from the business. So you're seen as a trusted partner in the process of building these applications and improving the business. So communication is definitely key on this partner in the process of building these applications and improving the business.

Mark Smith: 32:17
So communication is definitely key on this. Ruben, thank you so much for coming on the show.

Ruben Ruiz: 32:20
Thank you for the invite, Mark. It was lovely to chat with you.

Mark Smith: 32:23
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'd like to see on the show, please message me on LinkedIn. If you want to be a supporter of the show, please check out buymeacoffeecom. Forward slash NZ365 guy. Stay safe out there and shoot for the stars.