PegaWorld iNspire 2023: LeasePlan's Transition to a Fully Digital Business Model

LeasePlan’s vision is to become a Car-as-a-Service organization with a strong focus on service efficiency and digital channels to optimize costs and capture market growth. Watch this replay to learn more about Pega’s role as one of the key partners in LeasePlan’s Car-as-a-Service model. This vision is enabled through the COE, established by Lex Ruijter (Global Pega Application Manager) with sponsorship from IT senior leadership, including senior managers, Niall Harrison and Marco van Velthoven.

Transcript:

- Very good afternoon ladies and gentlemen. Welcome to PegaWorld, welcome to the breakout session for the LeasePlan. And my name is Faisel. I'm your host today for next 45 minutes. And we have a special phenomenal speaker from LeasePlan and they're gonna walk us through their next generation digital architecture journey with us, right? So without any further ado, let me welcome our speaker, Lex Ruijter.

- [Lex] Click, click.

- [Faisal] Working?

- [Lex] Yeah, yeah. Normally somebody else does that, so I need to practice. Thank you, Faisal, you've done this before, haven't you?

- [Faisal] Yeah.

- [Lex] Yeah, when was it?

- [Faisal] 2019 PegaWorld.

- [Lex] Ah, okay. For me, a really inspiring place to be here. I've spoke with so many clients and it's really amazing to see everything that everybody's experiencing and actually also compliments that once upon a time we made a right decision to straightaway go into the new.

- [Faisal] Yeah, absolutely. And this is exactly the journey that it's a phenomenal journey. Like I said, experience, inspiration that you guys will get from this session.

- [Lex] Thank you, Faisal.

- [Faisal] Thanks.

- [Lex] Before you go, what was your first car?

- [Faisal] Ah, my first car was Fiat Punto.

- [Lex] Fiat Punto.

- [Faisal] Ah, I'm an European, yeah, sorry. I was in India at that point of time.

- Wasn't that the car that drank just as much oil as fuel?

- That is true, that is true.

- Yeah. Yeah.

- The Italian are famous for it, right?

- Exactly, good cars. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Thank you.

- Thank you

- Cars, Lee, let me start with you. I want to take you all back to a moment in time where you first had a car, your first time, but not just had a car, but you also had the first time you had your driving license in your pocket and there's nobody next to you. And now you're sitting behind the wheel and it's the first time you have to go where you want to go, what was that for you, Lee?

- [Lee] Well, my first. Yeah, so it wasn't the most, you know, it certainly wasn't gonna attract any female interest in me.

- [Lex] But what was the experience like?

- [Lee] My first drive was, I drove down to my sister's hairdressing salon and that was when I realized that I have to park this thing and I had no idea how to do that. But yeah, it wasn't the greatest car in the world.

- [Lex] Interesting, and the funny part is, you can remember it as if it was yesterday.

- [Lee] Oh yeah,.

- [Lex] Anybody else, mam? Your first experience with your first car?

- Me.

- [Lex] Yeah?

- Suzuki, and do you remember sitting behind the wheel?

- No.

- No.

- No.

- So you didn't hit anything apparently?

- No.

- [Lex] Okay, thank you very much. My first car brings me back to my youth. I was brought up in Africa, Tanzania, and my dad was working for Phillips in those days and he used to drive from Tanzania, Dar es Salaam to Uganda. And I was a young kid like six years and when he go away, come back after a week or one and a half and he had this white Peugeot and he would come up the driveway and it was completely trashed. The rims were bent, the bumpers were off and he had spare tires new when he went and they were all trashed when he came back and it was completely brown 'cause there was no tarmac there. It's all dirt road from Tanzania to Uganda, sometimes even bullet holes. And he wasn't a drug dealer, he was really working for Phillips, but sometimes Uganda, there's guys running around with guns and shooting at you if you move. For me, it was the Peugeot 504. So when I grew up and got my driving license, I wanted this car, so we found one on a scrap yard with a broken transmission, fixed it up and I got it on the road. I think I drove like three months with it and then I needed to get rid of it 'cause it was sucking fuel like crazy. So that was my story. And the first time I drove it, it was a automatic transmission. I learned to drive in a, what do you call that? A manual, so a shift six. So it was quite an experience and you step on it and like, well, I didn't hit anything, but it was pretty scary, I must admit, especially the part that you now make your own decision. Go left, go right. If you look at cars and cars on the road as a lease company, it's an amazing world. And in the old days, back in the day and before me, my dad and that generation, a lot has changed. And I think there's still cars and the cars have become better. And I think also we don't have the high usage of oil anymore and they're not squeaking and they don't rust as fast as they used to. But there is something changing in that world of cars 'cause the ownership model, what we used to have is everybody had their own car. Nobody really borrowed one or something like that. If you look at nowadays, there's a couple down in the street with me, young couple, early 30s, young for me and they don't have a car and they actually don't want a car because they have apps on their phone and they will go to their parents, they just choose an app and they select a car and they drive for the day and they come back home and they leave the car somewhere. They want to go for a holiday, just have a different app and they go to bigger car and bigger trips and they bring the car back. And it makes sense somehow because if you look at the ownership model of a car, in the first year, you see that yeah, the car value drops unless you have this beautiful Maserati which will increase in value or other special cars, but in the basis, the car will lose its value. And then in the current world, the cost of ownership is also increasing. Labor costs are going up, parts prices are going up. So somewhere this whole transition is pretty logical which is happening. And so fascinating market, even if you add where we're going to the EV market. Anyway, my name is Lex Ruijter. I don't know if you were in the last session. Well, you can read what I did professionally. I have two wonderful children, teenagers, real teenagers to the bone. I love sailing and I think the sailing part will also come back in my story a lot of times 'cause I see a lot of similarities between racing boats and being in businesses like we all are. If you go out for a trip and you don't adapt to what is thrown at you by nature, the wind shifts, you terror sail, you get a wave that hits you, you lose somebody off the board, you get friction on the board and the team, there's a lot of things that happen in the same way. So when I go through my motion and I see stress happening in the team and my team is here somewhere and you see that same dynamics happening, I'm a guy who really believes in, if you want it, you can do it. Dreams are tomorrow's reality. And that's also how I do my business. LeasePlan company, I work for global Pega application manager basically in short, I am responsible for Pega and LeasePlan. Pega or LeasePlan is a bank. I think a lot of people don't know that. And we offer car-as-a-service and we have basically, yeah, we take care of the customer, the whole full journey. Little statistics, early 60s, we were founded. And I think it's also really important to keep couple of these things like corporate SME private. There's a dynamic behavior there, we have back in the 60s, so a lot of you will recognize. You also have legacy in your company, which you can't avoid. And you bought a company here back in '80, we did this. And then you see that landscape in your application is gonna be scattered everywhere. Get some water, Vegas is bad for your health. They should put the party actually on the last night 'cause then you don't lose your voice. And a note, I think also this story just to be really crisp, this is the LeasePlan story, you've probably read in the papers where we've been taken over by LD. So that's nothing to do with LD. This is everything post and LeasePlan story. Our NextGen strategy is, to become the first company in the world to have a a lease company, to have a full digital end-to-end journey. And that sounds really logical in these days. And I've heard a couple of sessions in PegaWorld also about this. But it's a quite a challenge because a lot of the companies, and I say, the entities in the world still, they use different processes, they have different applications. And to maintain that, your cost of ownership is amazing. If you wanna change something globally, you're looking at a massive, massive journey. So in the old days when you need to have a lease car, you wanted to go to a front desk and like the banks, you have a teller and you got the desk, you fill in a form and then the teller goes or the sales agent goes to the back office and the floor manager says, "Oh yeah, yeah, I'm missing something." Goes back and sold paper and so we're moving from desk to desk, then the credit agent needs to do something and then you say, "Well could you please come back in a week?" And then the interesting part comes, is that you need to store all this paper and you need to do something with it. And so you have all these nice walls of archives and you need to organize it in such a way that you can find it back and the claims or you need a contract change and name them all up and you all have cupboards for them. And then time moved on and we all went into the mainframe revolution and probably anybody recognize one of these screens? Anybody have one of those? Yeah, see it's really interesting to see it. What was your inner skull?

- Green screen.

- [Lex] Sorry?

- Green screen, right?

- [Lex] Yeah, but what's it called, the application?

- We have multiple applications.

- [Lex] Yeah, yeah, so it's interesting to see they're still alive and still going strong actually, they're really stable. I think they do the job really well and over time, they've copied like 23 of ours and they've come pretty sophisticated even. The problem what we are seeing is, ours is called, NOLS. It's a New Operating Lease System, new was '83, imagine. I think we changed that terminology smartly in the new ones. But the problem was, it is digitalization, but it's not automation. And if you look at it, it sounds real simple, but it really is a massive change. If you look at scalability, it's intuitive for users. It's not adaptable to anything what moves around you 'cause the new technology is difficult to connect to the old technology. We're talking about a AS400, talk to a cloud-based high-tech environment. Resources nowadays, I think the people that working on NOLS should go with a pension and enjoy their time with their grandchildren because that's the age group we're talking about. So it's time to get to the new world. If you add to that in time with our strategy, we wanna grow like most companies wanna grow. If you add growth to a legacy environment, you're gonna see a massive challenge. Then we came up with NGDA, we did a little sidestep to another platform, wall-to-wall, didn't really work out. So then we stepped into the world of next generation digital architecture. Basically, we harmonize processes and services and make that from a global point of view. And then the idea is to bring that to all the countries. It must be modular instead of the monoliths, which we used to have and it should be scalable. API-driven, and I think most important also, cloud-based, but resilient by design. Instead of trying to customize things to make it resilient, what we see a lot. The NGDA landscape, we have customer facing, core business, supporting and data, say, let's section. And in that we have domains, so it's a domain architecture and over the domains we said, what we need to look at in the marketplace, what's the best of breed application or tech platform which could support those functions in each domain. And that's where the Pega story started. Back in 2019, I was still working for Accenture in those days and I stepped over after this project. So during this project was a risk. So it's purely the Decision Hub. We build a decision scorecard. It's basically a risk assessment of the client. Can he pay for the car? You put data into it, it's a magic box and it gives you an outcome and it's a value. And the value is rated happy flow or denial or decline or maybe flow. Maybe flow is that you need to maybe get a down payment and then you can still become a customer. And this process around it was not part of Pega. So we were only doing the scorecard and then we would talk to Salesforce and Salesforce would do all the processing around it with also, other legacy systems around it. And that was a struggle. So there we had a long chat with Pega also and tried to do POCs to show, because the Pega team on the floor, they're saying like, "Guys, we can do this in weeks. It's so simple to get data into an application decision hub and then process it around it and bring it to the next step." So what we did, in I think not even a week, we put that POC together, it wasn't complete, but it was showing what we wanted to show. And that was very successful and that success spread out and then we started looking at the sales process 'cause the risk process is a part of a bigger process, which is basically when the client says, yes to a quote, you take 'em on the journey of identifying the client, getting financial information and then doing a KYC and evidence checking. I think that's about it. And so that was a beautiful orchestration, which you could also take into Pega. We had quite a interesting battle with Salesforce colleagues, if I can call it that. And I won't get too much detail there, but I think the end result was that we were on a lot of time pressure. I think, I'll show you the next slide is that we needed to show off Pega in really short time and show that we could do that orchestration. And I think in a way we did. But the funny part is that, and that's my thing, my biggest learning and also the energy and my passion to do it in a different way in lisson is 'cause we need to transform not only using Pega, but also, the way of working. The way of working is completely different if you use a low-code platform. And you probably recognize these, you give the business an opportunity to come in a room and you talk about requirements and then they have a whiteboard and they start drawing something and they go on and on. And suddenly, you have this whole wall full of pictures and drawings and if you really look at it, it's really difficult to see what's happy flow and what's the alternate stage, what is an exception. And probably, you know, if you talk to business, they're talking exceptions 'cause they're a pain in the every day. They wanna get rid of those exceptions. But for Pega point of view, if you're developing a case or a journey, you basically want to have the happy flow first. 'Cause if you have the happy flow, then you have your structure and then you can start looking at all the stuff around it. Anyway, so you have these beautiful pictures on walls, they come to a nice requirement list and then the PO needs to be really, really regularly good and has to prioritize, "Okay, what's actually my happy flow?" And then you see that it's your MVP suddenly grows and grows and grows and you don't have the MVP anymore 'cause it's basically just copying what you used to do and bring it into a new world. And is that really what we wanted? I don't think so. So this was about a time where... Okay, I missed this one, sorry. What we're doing is also it's technology driven. So we saw that a lot of the LSAs also, technicians from other technologies were in a room listening to these requirements and they straightaway started talking about interfaces and where we need this element and we need to connect that data and where are we gonna get the source data. And that's not what it's about. It's not about features and functions. So the business is also misguided in this way because they're used to having that conversation and straightaway say, "Yeah, but you need to get the data from that system 'cause that's where the data is." I don't care where the data is. What's your process? What do you want to accomplish? And that's a little bit when the time came that I went back and said, "You know, I pulled the handbrake," and I was like, "I'm stressing myself out, I'm not seeing what the delivery of Pega," what we were promised or I was together with. We're selling this when I was Accenture to LeasePlan and we were saying these beautiful things, we're gonna do this, we're gonna do that and it's really fast. But it wasn't that fast. And maybe, the business was thinking, well, that is massive what you did in a couple of months, but the reality was, is that we were supposed to build a global process. We didn't. We were building a proprietary solution for one country and then we basically needed to adapt it again to the next country, which was not the whole thing we should do. So then we thought about okay, let's change this and what would be the other way to do it right? So it's about outcome. You've heard the story many times probably also, in this PegaWorld and you've heard it back in the day too. But I think Pega's also now it's maturing and the constellation and all these things are coming. You're actually enabled also to much easier do this. And it's really easy now to show it in the screen 'cause it's more prescriptive so you can show it and you can box the requirements easier and translate 'em in an easier way to do it. Anyway, so you have a persona, you have an outcome and then you need to create a journey. So you go into a DCO session and you do this on the screen together with the client, our businesses and show it, and see this what you mean. But you're only focusing on the happy flow and try to advise your business, yeah, I don't want to know the exception, if it only happens once a year, I don't care. Let's first talk about what's the main process you wanna automate. And then of course, you have one and then you need to fit that journey somewhere in your architecture. And 'cause we're not just Pega and LeasePlan, there's also Salesforce, there's SAP, there's loads of other applications to get quotes, to configure cars, storage, stock management, all these stuff you'd still need to manage together. So what we thought and that goes also back to 2019 where we said, Okay, we want to have a micro-journey, but we don't have the data in Pega. We want to use other systems of records. Our clients are in Salesforce, we don't want them in Pega. Our financials are in SAP. If we have orders, we don't want them to be stored in Pega. We wanna have a separate database to do that, manage that. On the front side, we have Salesforce, we chose that strategically. So we want to have the user community who's now in Salesforce to stay there. So how are we gonna use a Pega process and push that into a Salesforce? And that's where you really slowly see also the story coming is that constellation where we should once upon a time started with Dex API version one, we showed it, it was possible we were still using UI kit and then gradually, we were moving towards the new world where we start with Cosmos, Cosmos React. And then somewhere in our journey it suddenly had a new name, it was called, Constellation. Anyway. One journey went into multiple journeys and now you suddenly see that Pega is spreading out in LeasePlan. And we're basically going from quote to all the way to remarketing of the car and in-between, I'll tell a little bit more about the other stories. So back to the timeline. After I stepped out of the sales process where yeah, I was not seeing what I was expecting from the journeys in Pega, I started with the COE. COEs, like I said in the beginning, I'm a delivery guy so I was a project manager, change manager and when my client told me, like can you go to the COE 'cause they probably have some guidelines you need to follow or same like security or compliance department. And they would give you this whole list and you have to comply to this and they're basically pain in the ass 'cause they never help you. They just tell you do this and then send you away and you have to come back and, "Oh what did they mean? What are they really gonna do with this?" And so when I started COE, I was really like, I want to create something that enables, I want to help teams to bring them faster. I want to make them scalable, fast, secure and keep this platform clean that we don't end up with a mess. I spoke with a couple of vendors and I can name them here 'cause I'm really proud of them. Azure Process, BPM, Azure. They're really valuable together with Pega to think about the concept, what is the seaway, what's it gonna bring? And they all have their own visions. And I somewhere decided my strategy and we came up with five pillars. The first pillar, architecture is... sorry, water. Architecture is a lot about we're not alone. So we live in NGDA landscape and NGDA has their own guidelines and principles we need to also align with. Then we have the way you use Pega and the way we set up the layered cake. And we wanted to have reuse really locked into the organization that we do it the right way straight away, day one. And it says in the top, "Let's do things right the first time." I actually did it the second time, but what I'm trying to do is make people first think and then before and then do it. And it's really now after one year further, it's starting to pay off. If you look at architecture further, we made a big transition and said, "Okay, we're gonna stop with UI kit, we're gonna really move into the constellation world." And this means a lot, it sounds really simple, but it means, you need people focus on app studio, start doing it, it's not trying it, it's not hoping it works, do it. You need to be religious here. If you look at Constellation, Mark Odizer is somewhere, if I see him here, he can tell you a lot about the details here. I love this picture he created 'cause it tells a lot about the application, the views on it and all the options you have to which channel and how you want to bring this to your business and how they want to channel it throughout the world. And we're using everything from employee facing Constellation, out the box, our web portals, Salesforce with the lightning component and we're pretty mature now with the SDK, mapping it to the LeasePlan SDK. And this LeasePlan SDK to the Constellation Pega app SDK and you probably have loads of questions about this. And it's amazing, there he is. It takes a while to really make that mind shift, but it's not difficult. It's more that you need to change from section-based thinking to a view-based and you need to think in patterns. Once you get that patterns, you understand why Pega came up with them and what the thinking behind it, the outcome is there and then it becomes really natural. And if you make the translation from SDK, you need to look at that pixel perfect UX community, which is really important by the way. It's not that you shouldn't look at Pixel perfect, but you need to somewhere make that balance choice. How much am I gonna invest in? How is it really gonna help me get more clients? So it's that balanced discussion. I think we have a pretty mature SDK now on the floor. Moving on, so we have services. Services, I think that's also hooks into the first remark I made about COEs. I wanted to have guys on the floor that could help the teams when they had a problem. If we set up guidelines on how you should develop and how you should put up your pipelines, how you should do testing, we need to help them. So not just send them a message, "Do this," but we also need to bring their training, explain how to do it and coach them. Go back, check if they're doing it still, if they have questions, do they have a desk that they can come to. We also have, for example, a lot of the ceremonies and events we organize from the COE is that we have like a Monday call where Jash tells everything about UX. So we change something and he tells a story, they have a chance to talk. App Studio is a really, sadly enough a new thing 'cause a lot of people in the community of Pega don't use App Studio. They're still old App Studio-driven. And if you look at App Studio, you need to also, from a COE point of view, you need to facilitate these people. So if they have a question, basically where do I go? So we have this session every Monday and then we also have a chat group where people could just ask the dumb question and say, "Well, I wanna do this, how do I do this in App Studio?" And then you can see this really interesting discussion and the energy starts to flow is that people are wanting to discover it better and better, which is really cool to see. And it also goes wider 'cause it's also things about which are not just App Studio driven, but you're getting also community to start talking to each other and not being afraid to seem dumb, I don't know something. Other things, staffing is a key thing I think in this whole conversation. I think a lot of people, if you have your certificate, well, it's probably a good guy. I really move back on that and I am in every single interview. I'm personally in there and it's a lot of work, but it's paying off at the end 'cause then I really filter, people, you need to be into the new, you don't read the book about App Studio, you have to do it, do a POC, touch it, smell it, play with it, fill with it learn and learn and learn. And I think I heard Don this morning also say, "If you didn't do it today, do it tomorrow morning. Don't wait for another week or a month. Start doing it straight away 'cause it's gonna be a journey." That's part also what we are seeing. It's not something we did overnight. This is months of people moving, motivating to start using it. Quality, I think also an interesting topic, I'll just pick one of them. I think we do designs and built reviews. We first do purely technical. So we looked at how the applications were built and now we're moving a little bit more into the business design. So we try to be from a COE, we involve our BBAs into the sessions and help design the sessions in the beginning of PI plannings to really get more involved and less a police officer that at the end of the PI, we do have this validation and say, "Well, it's not really right." So I wanna be in the beginning of the journey where I can together with the teams, develop this stuff and then design and think about it. And Mark and I have realized, we've seen a lot of scenarios where we see like a timeline of three, four sprints for a certain use case. And then we go in and it's like two days work because it's just we design it in a different way and use the patterns in the right way, which is fascinating and really great news upstairs. Bigger platform is, yeah, it's I think the easiest one. It's a halftime rockstar who I think he's picking his nose most of the time. It's all Pega cloud native and it's wonderful. It never downtime, the upgrades go smooth. It's all controlled and least of my headaches. I hardly have any issues here so I'll move on on it. Reuse. Reuse is yeah, a easy word and we read a lot about it and everybody's, "Yeah we should do that," but what does it really mean? And also, when I started it was more like, okay we have an interface to some certain data source and we can reuse that interface in another application. But it's much more than that. And what we did, and let me take you a little bit through our architecture, we have infinity at the bottom and on top of that, we have the enterprise layer where for example, the SSOs covered and then we came up with a new layer and it's called, accelerators Fenith Kickalo who used to work for me, he came up with the word, accelerator and we still use it. I think it's a nice way of saying it's not a component 'cause components often are mixed up with other technologies and things. Anyway, accelerators, those are basically all the reusable access in LeasePlan. Then on the top of that, if you go back to the thing about NGDA is that we wanted to have global processes which we rolled out throughout the world. And then if you look at a little bit closer and global applications, on top of that, we can put the country implementations. Zoom in a little bit into the accelerators. For example, a customer, if you take the middle one, every process needs a customer information. So instead of building that customer search, some countries use a VAT number, some use a name. Sometimes in Portugal, the names all look the same. So you can't do that, you need to have different dynamics. So instead of putting all that complexity into your global applications, you take it away and make it much simpler. You need a customer information. You basically go down to your customer component or accelerator that will do all the complex work. So which country precondition, it's a SME or it's a private individual and then it'll give the information back to the global application and then move on. And what we're seeing now, especially with the use of App Studio, all these accelerators. So basically, you clickable, you can choose when you're creating applications and select which accelerator you want to use. And if it needed to adjust it, we made a bigger applicator like a COE management app where we basically control the whole journey of adjusting and creating new accelerators. Excuse me. So parallel to my starting up the COE in the meantime, the world didn't stop. So we started with the CLM KYC from Pega and then we had the fleet ops team starting, which was a separate domain. And then we had light commercial vehicles. And then later on the end we started with basically the remarketing of the cars after the lifecycle. Now, go back to the LeasePlan landscape. So where we are now with Pega and I think good to know it's not just Pega. So in one domain, you could have still.net, Salesforce or other technologies where we need to talk together. From left to right, you have customer order. That's basically the quote needs to get the customer onboarded. So you need to go through like a sales process, identify the client, get information to do financial checks, scorecards and KYC and then they handed over to actually deliver the car, which is in fleet operations. And then you need to create purchase orders and actually get the key and the cars, send the invoice out. Then during the lifecycle of the car, you have to contract management and allow service transaction management, which is basically, I run against a tree, I need service, I need a fuel card, et cetera, et cetera, loads of them. Oops, going too fast. And we have risk decisioning for retail clients, it's different than for corporate clients. Retail is very much per country. You have your source of data. So you need to really in local level in countries need to have a different way of dealing with those scorecards. And then you have the corporate with more like rating models which go global and with a global data source. And then the remarketing. Group together. And then I think we're coming to the end of my story and I think why were we successful with Pega, I think it's an always interesting question. I think it's successful is always something in a time box because the world keeps on changing and we still need to be successful tomorrow. And what we did today might be cool, but we still need to be ready for what comes at us tomorrow. And I think built for change is very true, especially the way the team put up the architects in the layer cake using Constellation and constantly, constantly sticking with what's out of the box. We do not customize, I forbid people to customize. If you customize, we will delete it unless it's approved by the COE. After the usage is really making a difference, 'cause you're automatically getting like this transition from LSA driven projects to LBA driven projects where you get much more attention for designing in the right way. You're enabling all the accelerators and that circle is actually enforcing itself now because you're seeing all these things are coming together and you're going much faster. Scalability, low code, the DX API. And I think partnership, I think we've seen this journey would not have been possible unless people like Sam Alexander, product team, the consultants from the Pega were on the floor. We needed to have POCs, we needed to not just have a fancy Salesforce or PowerPoint story. We also needed to have somebody who could really show it and knows what you're talking about and bring it all to my stakeholders. Because I can cover a lot, but I also need sometimes to just show it and prove it 'cause proving tells mostly the big story. Then my passion, sailing. And I think it's interesting if you go to a yacht race, I didn't win a lot, but I have seen the stage and when you get called onto the stage, it's really interesting that they always say the boat name and then they call out the captain's name and then the story continues. And what's really nice in that world is that the whole crew comes on board and here was like 14 people in the boat. This is Sid Martin, I think 2003, Heineken Regatta And it tells a story 'cause I think, I didn't do it, these guys sitting here, they did it and Sam Alexander and his team did it and altogether, we made this happen. 'Cause these sailors also need to trust their navigator. They need to trust their captain, they need to trust each other and also deal with everything that's moving around them 'cause there's a lot of parts moving. Names I would really want to thank, Fenith Kikalo, Jash, rockstar number one in the UI world. He started as a UI kit specialist. He came on board and I've seen the guy cry 'cause he said, "What is this Constellation? I used to be the king in something and now I'm nothing." And now, he's a king in Constellation. So really thank you for that. New guys came on board, Alfie adapted really quickly. I think that's my main realization. It's not difficult, it's a matter of a mind shift. Look at it differently, it's prescriptive and that feels like it's taking away capability, but it's actually not. It's actually helping you to accelerate, becomes more consistent and you're really gonna move faster. That was my story. Any questions?

- Lex, thanks very much. That was a great presentation, really great to hear about the journey at LeasePlan. I'm just wondering, in that journey you've been on, is there any sort of business or technical outcomes that have surprised you? Any improvements to the customer experience or clearly you got some possible efficiencies through how you set up the model?

- Not sure what you mean. Sorry, could you rephrase?

- So I imagine from when you talk to the model, you've got some operational efficiencies in terms of developments, savings and time. Is there any benefits like that, that have surprised you that were better than you thought or alternatively, you know, customer outcomes in terms of how you've been able to improve the customer service?

- Yeah, so we're in that stage now that we use three countries as an example for the world. So we're still in that phase of getting there. The couple of countries life. I think the big difference where I started with my first project in a country, there we spent a lot of time building something, but it wasn't really easy to reuse. What we're seeing now, we have this application set up in the architecture with the layered cake where if you need to go to a new country, I would dare to say, we could do it in two weeks or two sprints. And that is a massive change 'cause you have a project of six months and now, we've done a lot of investment there in the accelerators, but now, it's starting to pay off 'cause if you want to go to a new country, it's more a configuration at the top layer. And you shouldn't code on there. You shouldn't send an essay to a country. You should send a BA and a change manager. And that's a mind shift and I think that's really where the benefit will come.

- [Faisal] Anybody's got more questions? Okay, I'll come there.

- Hi, I am Sandeep. In the journey of adapting Constellation, there must have been roadblocks. So what sort of lesson learned out of that and how did you remove the blockers?

- [Lex] Good question. Yes, there were definitely blockers and I think looking back 'cause this is something that evolves in you and navigate through it, I think looking back it's first have a really strong senior management on top of you that trusts you in your direction and that backs you when you need them. That was I think really key. And I have a wonderful management up there that does that. And on that journey to move. I think, and that's also something I mentioned earlier is a lot of the community is not used to it and it's not per se, resistant, but they're reluctant 'cause they're used to doing this for 20 years. And that move to do it in a different way. that's sort, I think the biggest challenge. And I also heard Pega, if you read on the website, they say if you have an existing application, don't go to Constellation. I dare to differ. I would say, do it tomorrow and start playing with it because you need a learning journey. You need to get people to learn to work with App Studio and let that be leading. And also, Constellation, it's a new thing and it's not difficult, but it's a mind shift and the way of working, add that all together, I think you should start tomorrow. And then by the time you can start looking at rebuilding, yeah, then you're ready for it.

- When you guys were deciding that you would move on to Constellation, that's kind of a challenging situation as well for a company-

- [Lex] It was really easy, yeah.

- Because team Cosmos would've been a defensive approach, right, but Constellation eruption was challenging.

- [Lex] Yeah, I don't really believe in half solutions and if the end goal was to have channels which would able with a process anywhere and you could shift channels and everything, then think Cosmos, yeah, it was not that. And it was really difficult then 'cause you could still have customizations and business logic in your front end and that's what we wanted to move away from 'cause that was just gonna give extra governance cost and time to market and all that. So moving to Constellation from a conceptual point of view was a no-brainer. You know, you have 30 countries, how are you gonna do that? If you want to have like six months projects, do that times 30. Well, the world's changed by the third country and then you need to do it all over again. So it doesn't make sense. I said, easy, but I think it is something where you really need to keep your back straight and just let them escalate, escalate, and then you come back and you constantly convince them that from an enterprise point of view, this is the way to go.

- Hi, Percy from Ford Motor Company, we're kind of trying to start up our center of excellence. And one of the things that you show there is the accelerators, right? The different components. Can you share what's in your enterprise layer or if that's that top secret, it's okay.

- I think Javi, you can actually tell that better than I can. I know the SSOs covered there, but maybe you can tell a little bit more.

- Yeah, so in enterprise layer, we mainly have functionality like SSO that Lex mentioned. But we have, let's say, exception handling, like every Pega applications that we have is connected to almost seven to eight system on average. So for 12 different systems, there could be around let's say, 30 external systems that we are connected to. So we have a generic exception handling pattern, which is there in that. And then we have some organization-wide data, which is used by multiple applications. So like some industry-wide standards. So we are maintaining a system of records for that in Pega so those kinds of data. So these are some of the examples.

- There's a question over there.

- Yeah.

- Thank you, thank you for your presentation. I'm interested in any metrics of pre-Constellation development, you know, Cosmos or before versus you know, what you find in Constellation and in second, what were the benefits that you see to help us say, yes let's go to Constellation?

- I think the end state benefits of course, that you get more consistency, it's much faster. I think if you look at the first applications, if you do build things in UI kit basically creating, also, you can deal with technical hiccups in your design in your front end. But by doing that you're gonna straightaway get yeah, like legacy or technical depth 'cause if you go do upgrades, you straightaway see struggles 'cause they need to fix things in the UI. Moving to Constellation, that's gone. Because you solving problems in your process and if you change something, it automatically reflects in the front end. If you change names, for example, legal, you need to add a nickname, then it's everywhere. And you can even say, "Well, I don't want it in that channel or I don't want it in that country." Everything you can still control. Does that answer your question?

- Do you have any kind of metrics comparing the title development?

- [Lex] Yeah, so it's little tricky. We did a first project in building one application, which is actually, we rebuilt it completely. I was very thankful for my management that they allowed me to do that. 'Cause that gave us the opportunity to really show the same use case basically, in the Constellation world. It's still somewhere maturing so it's difficult to compare completely. But what I think the big difference is, is the first application would be when it's done, it's only usable for that country and that specific solution. And now the second one we built, we can roll out through the world and you have channel flexibility and all that just in the box. And that's the biggest advantage, I think by doing that.

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