PegaWorld iNspire 2024: From Nuclear Safety to Safe Neighborhoods: Government Triumphs in Regulatory Compliance and Productivity with Pega & AI

(upbeat music) - Good afternoon everybody. My name is Graham Dawkes from Aaseya. I'm head of sales at Aaseya. We are a global elite partner of Pega and a platinum sponsor here at PegaWorld. We're very proud to be here to do that. And a little bit about us before I introduce the speakers today. So we have about 600 professionals who work globally on Pega. We've delivered over 150 plus go-lives in our short history. And yesterday we are very pleased to be awarded the Pega Partner of the Year Delivery Excellence Award.

So I think we know something about how to deliver projects at Pega in our time, so- (audience applauding) Thank you. Please do take the time to come and visit us at booth 21. It's easy to find us because we've all got red shirts on, so you can find us pretty easily and we'll show you some of the things that we're working on outside of the projects we're gonna talk about today, particularly in the areas like inspection management, where we have a solution for that built on Pega, where you will see where we have integrated Knowledge Buddy. So you'll see one of the first working live Knowledge Buddy applications that Pega has. So we're pioneering the work around Knowledge Budddy. Please do come and see that and some of the other things that we have to offer. So onto today. So this is... We're proud to sponsor this breakout session, and you get two for the price of one today.

I've got two clients here today to give two stories about what they're doing with Pega and they're both from governments, governments in different countries or government departments in different countries. And the projects are very different in terms of what their scope and what their aims are. But they have some very common themes, which you'll probably see come out in terms of how they're using Pega to do a number of things. One is to really make sure that regulations, government regulations are being followed. Two, is to make sure that they're much more effective in their use of resources, people in how they actually make those regulations work. And three, you know, it's all about keeping people and the environment safe. So you'll hear two different versions of that. One in terms of how that's being done in Saudi Arabia, and one on how that's being done in the context of a nuclear disposal site in Sellafield in the UK. So quite different environments, but ultimately they're all about ensuring people follow regulations, do the right thing, keep everybody safe and keep the community at its best.

So I've got two speakers here today to introduce. So Sarah Alghamdi, who's head of digital transformation and smart cities in Saudi Arabia, and she's gonna talk to you about the project that she's been leading on Pega there. And then Richard Wilkinson from Sellafeld Limited. He's gonna come on second and talk to you about the project that they've done there. And you hopefully see some of the common themes emerging that I've talked about. I would ask that you hold any questions until both speakers have had a chance to speak, and then we'll have a bit of a Q and A at the end of anything that you wanna cover. So I'll start off and ask Sarah. - Thank you. (audience applauding) First, allow me to thank PegaWorld conference and Aaseya team for providing this platform for me to show you guys the success story that we have in compliance and inspection using Pega technology in Saudi Arabia.

So first we have a vision in our government sector. For this government sector specifically, we are controlling 45% of the city and the services provided in the city, which means we control the assets in the street, the street furniture, and all the licensing happening in Saudi Arabia. So if you want to issue, open an establishment, a restaurant, for example, if you want to start a construction project, if you want to do some excavation, it's all under the process of compliance and inspection. So what we are trying to do here is to build an ecosystem from investor point of view, from citizen point of view, and the service providers by the end of the day. So if you want to start an establishment, it will start with the licensing process, then we will make sure that you comply and follow other requirements that we require for you to open this establishment or to do this specific project. So our message here is to enhance the customer experience by the automation and digitizing of the whole service from the issuing until the end of the value chain. So we would have a holistic view on the value chain completely, and it will give us the ease of using the access on all the services provided by us. So this is a government approach in Saudi Arabia. So it's not only one area, like today, all the services that you want to do, there is a automation and digitization for that.

So if you want to renew your license, you don't have to do anything, you can just do it through the app. If you want to renew your passport, if you want to issue a license, if you want to do anything, you don't have to go for a physical visit to any government entity. Everything can be done through the application and through the platforms that we provide for the citizen and for the investors as well. So before the movement or before the digitizing approach that we went for in this government sector specifically, the number or the percentage of physical visits to the entities or to the sub-municipalities in general, where 60%. So 60% of the services you need to do a physical visit for you to get this service. And if we compare this number now in 2024, after applying all these automated services, the percentage now is 1.6 only, and we are talking about this only. So from 60% to 1% is a huge number, which also give us the implying that customer satisfaction is much better now. We started... When we started measuring the customer satisfaction, we reached up to 60% and in one year we're talking about 88% customer satisfaction.

So I will focus on the inspection and compliance. We were strong in inspection and compliance all the time in Saudi Arabia. But the problem is that we have 17 municipalities across the kingdom. So each municipality have their own workflows, have their own systems, have their own inspection workflows. So we don't have a unified process through all Kingdom. So for example, if you have an establishment in Riyadh, and if you have another establishment in Jeddah, you would face two different experiences, two different workflows. So that's one of the issues that we faced before we created the municipal compliance platform using Pega technology. The other one is lack of visibility. We have unclarity about what's going on when it comes to measuring KPIs.

Are they doing good? Are they doing bad? Because we don't have full access to all 17 systems, 17 different systems before that. And that's caused an issue to measure the KPIs needed for compliance and inspection in general. Third, we had more cost, more effort, more time because instead of having one unified system, we have 17 systems in each municipality. So what was our road? What was our cause at the beginning to create this inspection platform? So first we wanted to have an ecosystem and we want to have one user experience for all the citizens and investors in Saudi Arabia by having one unified value chain of inspection. We want to be transparent with the citizen if they have an issue, for example.

So the value chain, basically you will do a visit, then it will be reviewed and approved before we issue any kind of fines or violations. After that, you have the right to appeal automatically. So whenever we issue a violation, you will receive SMS and you can click on the website, you will see everything. You will see the visit, you will see the images, you will see the comments, and you can appeal and you can see the whole progress through the application. So first is to provide the unified inspection platform across all kingdom. So we have the value chain, it's unified across the kingdom. So if we want to put it this way, building the inspection platform had four stages. First stage is the foundation, then the adoption from the 17 municipalities. Then comes the innovation part, then the sustainability part.

So we have the unified integrated platforms. So as you can know, government sectors has different entities and different systems, but our user or the citizen or the investor wouldn't have to go through all these steps in different government sectors because it's all integrated in one process that the customer can see. Also the scalability, because we have 13 different kind of inspections. So we don't want to build a different system for each inspection type. For example, we do inspection on health establishment, we do it on market establishment, we do it on construction, excavation, visual pollution, the assets registry, et cetera. So all of these different inspection types are covered within the same platform. They have their own customization, but by the end of the day they have the same value chain of inspection and compliance. The results and impact. Customer satisfaction was increased to 88% because of the transparency, because of the unified experience among the kingdom.

We went live in 2021, the revenue from this platform reached 2 billion Saudi riyals. We have 269 municipalities working with this application, we increase the productivity by 86%. We reduce the processing time and the process that's needed to do the inspection, to do the appealing to do the whole thing by 67%. We have more than 6,000 inspectors using our platform today. We have six other personas. So in total today we have 22,000 users using the application as we speak. So the other stage after the adoption from all the Amanas and from all the sub-municipalities was the innovation part. So inspections, if I say we have 13 different kind of inspections, you need a lot of people, you need a lot of inspectors. So if we keep hiring inspectors, we are not cutting costs.

So the innovation part was basically to find other alternative to do the inspection using crowdsourcing, using AI, using emerging technologies for us to reduce the cost and to minimize the effort on humans. So first we went with crowdsourcing. We built in our application a service that we call Snap and Send. So if you face an issue in the street, like you are walking in the street and you saw a water leakage, let's say, or you saw a pothole, you can just take a picture and we'll take care of the whole thing. And we had an (indistinct) with all citizens. So if you cooperate with us, there are some incentives applied to all citizen who cooperate with us. In one year, we got more than 14 million incident coming from citizen by 2022, by 2020, sorry. So after that we went ahead, we said, "If you want to control the city, you need a digital eye for the city specifically." So we thought of a lot of things. We had our POC with dashcams, we had our POCs with drones, other emerging technologies, satellite images to catch the infringement on the government lands, et cetera.

And we came up with something that we call Balady Lens. So basically instead of installing the dashcams in municipality cars, there is a phone application who will do the job of dashcam. You just put it in the car and it will capture images automatically. Then we had a computer visioning or machine learning that can detect all the assets in the street. So it will help me with assets registry and it can capture all the visual pollution in the street. So after we capture the incident or after we capture the visual pollution, it will be transferred as an incident or as a case in our Pega platform. AI engine and emerging technologies for sure, like data analysis. Now, using AI or using emerging technologies is different than using human, because with human you can raise 1 million incidents per year, let's say. But with emerging technologies, you have thousands of cases per one trip because it captures everything.

And we capture every six seconds a new frame, then it will analyze the frame, it will give you more incident and more huge volume of these incidents. So we had to use AI to do some clustering for these cases because probably a citizen walking the streets can take the same incident that was taken by our dashcam. So in order for us to minimize and reduce the process time in each municipality, we went with clustering engine that will cluster the duplicated cases in one case. And also we went with priority engine. For example, prioritization means that a water leakage is less dangerous than a pothole on the street. So AI can do this measurement to decide what is the prioritization for each incident that we receive by the Amana. And also we have a violator detector engine. So for example, we have contractors doing some projects, excavation and construction projects in the street. If they caused an issue and we issued the license for them.

So we would be able to detect the violator automatically without going on a manual or physical visit. So what is the workflow specifically? So this application will capture the images every six seconds, then it will go through the AI to do the visual pollution and assets registry analysis. After that, it will go to our Pega platform to do the case management and to deal with the cases one by one. And also it will appear in the reporting portals that we have. We have inspection review portal and we have the command and control center dashboard and everything is captured there and reflected there in real time. Allow me to show you a video here. How can we play the video? That shows the whole process of the application and the detection through AI.

(calm music) So here's the assets registry. (calm music) And the other case is for visual pollution detection. (calm music) And as you can see in this process, zero human interaction needed in the whole process. It appeared as incident in our Pega platform and they can deal with it. This is the heat map where you can see all the incident on the map. You can just click on any frame and it will give you full visibility on the frame. What happened to the incident? Is it in progress, is it still new, is it closed, et cetera. (calm music) (audience applauding) Thank you.

So as a result of using smart inspection approach with AI and emerging technologies, we increased the geographical coverage 12x more. We used to have 12% coverage per month comparing to 100% coverage per month now, after using this application. We increased the visual pollution detection by 15x more. The efficiency at time and effort because we used to have inspectors going on the street to take these pictures and to take these frames. Now all done automatically, you just need to drive and to cover the whole city per month actually requires three hours from the inspector to do that, comparing to eight hours daily, previously the whole month. So we have efficiency in the time and effort, we reduced the need for a number of inspectors walking in the street by 82%. We used to have thousands of inspectors and for now using this application, we only need 360 inspectors driving each month to cover the whole city. We also saved amount of $50 million per year using this technology. So we reduced the cost by $50 million per year.

So where are we going with that? So we set foundation, we set adoption, we set innovation, now for the sustainability. So now we know that we own the 45% of the city. Now we have the digital eye that goes into the street to give me a full feasibility on the visual pollution index, what do I have? But by the end of the day, you need the contractors to deal with this also and for the contractors to be embedded with this ecosystem. And the sustainable part is to build a city management system. What do we mean by city management? We mean that now we have our contractors, they have their own duties for the sidewalks, for the trees, for the street itself. So the contractual would be part of this journey.

So if I open an incident in Pega in the inspection platform, instead of sending the case to the internal system of the contractor, he would also be a part of this ecosystem. So we would have the contractors on the map. So the future of this is to go with map centric solution where I have all the contractors and I have all the incidents captured and measure the performance of contractors through this map, which is the city management concept or city management system that we are going with this year in (indistinct) So where is Pega positioning from all of this? For this slide, I want my friend, (indistinct) to come and explain to you guys in details where is Pega from all of what I explained in the previous slides. - [Presenter] Use this one? - Yes. - Good afternoon everyone. Thanks Sarah. So like Sarah explained, we have three different parts of business problem we have.

One is citizens, they will observe an issue within the Kingdom. Once they observe, then they have to feed those incidents into a system which is Pega. And then that system should capable enough to raise required inspections so that somebody will go there and then visit the places at right time. And then somebody will go and then solve the problems by having these contractors and all that. So how we solve this problem? So we have created several Pega applications, right? One is an inspection application, which is called Momtathel. CMS application, which is city management applications to handle contracts and all that. So once we identify the incident, once the inspection is over, then we go and then we give a contract to the contractor so that they will go and then fix the problems there.

And then we have Furas, which is a investment management application. And then we have incident gateway to handle all the list of incidents. So if you look at the digital experience mediums, we have satellites, we have dashcams, we have Balady Lens application, we have (indistinct), we have web and mobile applications, we have self service and we have open APIs. So all these are different channels, different mediums from where we feed all the lists of incidents through APG to all different applications within the kingdom, right? So we have... Within Pega, the main core components that we are using for background processing. We are using queue processors, data streams to handle huge volumes of incidents and all that. And then we are using job schedulers for periodic incidents. And then we have data flows and all that.

For UI, we have dashboards, portals, mobile apps, and mashups we have, because we have to present the dashboards to all the inspection managers to rightly allocate the inspections to the right inspectors. And then we have several portals for all different personas we have. And then we have mobile apps for the inspectors, so the inspectors in the kingdom, they're actually using Pega mobile app to go to the inspection site and then do the inspection visit. And then they'll submit the inspections to the inspections managers. And then for automation point of view, we have DevOps, we have routing, we have service levels and agreements. Then case management, we have delegated business rules, dynamic workflows we have, we have approval flows, we have global incident and search functionality we have. So this is the data layer that we have where we have several databases because we have the different data sources that we need to get the data from. And also we need to push the data back so that the analytics can be happen and for the AI can read all the data and then, you know, they can present dashboards so that like, you know, we can take the right calls there. So this is where the Pega is.

So overall all the case managements in the kingdom happens through Pega and then the volumes of data is actually processing by using Pega. Thanks, Sarah. - Thank you, (indistinct). (audience applauding) So as you saw in the previous slides, now we're focusing on the AI powered solutions for inspection and compliance. Specifically we have the mobile centric application, we have the ministry API marketplace. What are we aiming for in the future? So in the present we have a unified platform. We've used the emerging technologies and AI and smart inspection specifically. And in the future, we're aiming more for map centric solutions, map centric inspection tool for the inspectors and other personas.

And also we are aiming to go with the option of AI, GenAI, which we saw today. How do we embed or merge this experience of GenAI within the existing application. Just, I hope it would be useful for us, but like we will use Aaseya experience in this area. And by the end of the day, our main goal is to provide the quality, a better quality of life for our citizen and to provide the ease of access to all the citizens and investors and service providers in Saudi Arabia. Thank you. (audience applauding) - Thank you, Sarah. That's an amazing story that you've gone through over the last few years and I think that shows the real extent of how far you can take this technology in Pega. So thank you for sharing that. And now for something completely different as they say, Richard Wilkinson from Sellafield.

- Good afternoon everybody. (audience applauding) I'm Richard Wilkinson. I'm the product owner for Sellafield Limited. I've been doing the role for a circa two years and I'm taking through the presentation today of what Sellafield use Pega for, which is a management system and how we use it and what our journey has been from taking the process through to going live and taking it forward with the rest of the Sellafield environment. Sellafield Limited, unfortunately I have to read this word for word because of the way Sellafield is. Sellafield started 75 years ago to create a nuclear deterrent. And today we're unrivaled knowledge of nuclear to create clean and safe environments for future generations. At every step in between our people have decoded the mysteries of the nuclear atom, those that went before us to first harness the power to generate electricity on a commercial scale. They closed the country's fuel cycle by recycling fuel used and went on to reprocess it more than anywhere else in the world.

And they solved the problems of how to safely look after every type of nuclear waste. In doing so, they made significant contributions to nationally low carbon power generation. Currently we're taking the waste out of our buildings and focusing our attention on decommissioning. Solar Field is a huge organization with over 11 and a half thousand direct employees and circa 16,000 contractors that all work together on the one journey and mission to make Sellafield site a decommissioned asset going forward. The SEMS program. The SEMS program was... SEMS stands for the Sellafield Enterprise Management System. The program was set up to deliver two aspects. First one to look at the processes and make us to current standards and to optimize the work going forward.

And the second one was to look at business performance and change how benefits could be realized across the piece. Our mission is to deliver a coherent management system, which enables us to perform with pride, passion, and pace by connecting people systems and processes. To date our biggest problem is we have a lack of visibility across our pieces and therefore with the lack of visibility and the siloed work and it makes operations difficult. So the SEMS program is set out to deliver on six main benefits. To maximize value and cost, to simplify and standardize processes. Give an overview of the golden thread of compliance so it's visible and understood, generate clarity on roles and responsibilities, improve end-user experience and increase procedural adherence. The main area from my role, we look at compliant and making sure that all of our processes are compliant by design. That's one of our cornerstones of our operation going forward from a development Pega team. And it's really key that we...

While looking at all of our re-engineering and the ways of working that that is adhered to at all times. The significant benefits that we're aiming for going forward is in excess of a hundred million saved over the lifetime of the program and to improve visibility in ways of working. So what is a management system? A management system currently is a collection of documents to tell people how to operate and how to work. It leaves clear rules and guidance of how each operation and task across the site is undertaken. It's a single entity that houses all of our content in one place and it ensures complaints and obligations are met across the piece. Now this comes from many different sources from regulation to law, et cetera, et cetera. And therefore it's key to understand that when operating and it enables integration across the many different places across the Sellafield estate. So what does SEMS contain currently?

Before this program started, the management system was a tell, it told people how to operate and how to do. It gave a holistic approach to the ways of working. So we had processes, forms, manuals, practices, and this gave the totality to an employee of how to do work. Going forward, we want to take the switch to take the product, the Pega product to giving a doing management system so somebody can go in and actually activate work and collect information and collect information and work in a more holistic approach so that everybody, when they create a workflow, that data is saved and harnessed and the information et cetera is utilized going forward to improve decision making, improve future work, improve the ways of working. And that's been a key driver for all of the areas. And we are stepping from that tell to a doing management system. So this is the overview of our delivery process. So these are our high level design principles and they'll be very similar to many other organizations. Each one in its own right creates the cornerstones of how we operate going forward as a SEMS management team.

As I said earlier, compliant by design is something that we do and is at the forefront of everything. And when we come to the later slides, I'll explain how we do some of that. Do work right first time. In a nuclear organization that is key. It's so important that we do everything right first time with safety being paramount at all times going forward. And as you can see going around there, none of them will be a surprise to anybody around timely approvals, requirements in one place, digitalization and focusing on the end user. None of these are new. They're just the SEMS process and the SEMS program brings it to the forefront to enable that future ways of working and to enable a better place to work. So this is our toolsets or our product delivery lifecycle.

At each of these stages, different people from the SEMS team and the business come into the process and enable us to take a product from start to finish. So our products can be anything from taking on a new employee to a new strategy document or our core envelope is how we create and develop assets. So that may be a new building that we're bringing onto site, (indistinct) and the SEMS management system shows the totality of all these operations. So toolset activities going forward, there is over 400 Pega processes that has been identified that we will look to re-engineer. At no point will we go to a process and just digitize, it's against our cornerstones of our processes. So the first stage of the process across the toolset activities is envision where we bring the high level stakeholders into the room to understand what they want from their product, how far do they want to drive it, how far do they want to push in the future, and to enable work to be done easier and better going forward. And then section two is just an area that I just wanna highlight again around compliance. Before we start to do any of the work, we do a full review of what compliance activity has been assigned to that area of the business and then look at that from its totality and validate if that is accurate, look at the gets and the gives all across the management system to ensure that when we do this, we have a compliant by design right first time product and it's key for us going forward. Then we go into detail definition, which is very similar to what everybody else will be doing.

We do some work around current state, what are we doing today? And that may be very different for different areas and elements of the site. The site have hundreds of buildings across it with multiple separate siloed areas of working. So we bring them together, find out what they do, how they do it. 'Cause obviously by the management system being a tell, each person can understand that and deliver slightly different each time because we haven't got the standardization that workflow will enable. And then we collect the user stories the same as everybody else. The development cycle is where say it comes into the run (indistinct) but it's more than that, that we come to work and we work as one. My (indistinct) is my right hand man from Aaseya. He's there with me at every step understanding what my expectations are, delivering every time, absolutely fantastic and I couldn't thank him enough.

So development cycle is all run from Aaseya point of view. We've got very little internal resource for development and that's an area that we've highlighted a concern in going forward. So each stage as we go through the development cycle, different aspects of showing, of where we need to improve as a business and improve as an area. We're only four years into this journey. A lot of other areas, five, 10 years into Pega and Sellafield aren't quite that far. The last two areas enact and embed a key. Large IT programs for implementation, often it lacks a change management that's required. The SEMS program has invested a lot of time, money, and effort to ensure that that area is not forgotten about. And it ensured that when we come into any kind of delivery or release, all areas are considered and enacted on appropriately.

And as we go further to the next slide, I'm just gonna give a quick overview of what we delivered as early access. And then the next slide gives us success that we came from early access. So early access was a free month period that we released the product to the business to see how they understood what we had delivered and if it was appropriate to what they needed going forward. And just to give a little overview of what that was, it wasn't delivering 400 workflows, it was delivering the first set of workflows to enable change to the management system. And we identified that as key to ensure that if we're delivering something new, we have to be able to do change appropriately. So the first access was all around giving a flavor of what Pega looks like and how it'll operate. We gave a guided tour on access, it's a first access for any employee going into the system. They had a guided tour of what each of the areas are like because Pega never been seen across the site. And it was very different ways of working for people.

We give some more views about favoriting another key elements of the platform. We did a huge help section with videos, PowerPoints, et cetera going forward. Additionally to this we identified people within the business to help. So we had key contacts that could be used and who had slight training and more information that was released so that they were ideal opportunity for people who's working locally to go and see. So just from our SEMS early access, we had 7,000 users. That was over 65% of the business went in in them three months to see what it was like. We had a charity case. When people went through the guided tour, there was then a set of questions on completion, they would give some money to charity. So we encourage people to use the product and to go forward.

We had 124 data issues raised, which sounds a lot, but we had thousands of lines of data and information that had been hand processed into the system and we had a huge 58% positivity from people's first impression of the product, which is phenomenal for digitalization of a new product. Going forward, what will SEMS look like going forward to the rest of Sellafield? So this shows an overview of the transitional journey. The first stage is where we're at, just at the first line. We've gone live with the first set of processes and the portal. The progression steps afterwards are the next three to 400 processes once re-engineer is being complete and the final state is continue and improve at all stages going forward. And I will hand back over to Graham. (audience applauding) - Good job. - As I said, two very different kind of scenarios of deploying Pega, but both in government, in highly regulated environments with the purpose of actually making things better for the employees, the government workers and for the citizens outside.

So very similar themes, interesting to contrast them. Any questions? We are nearly out of time, but if there are any quick questions for the speakers, then we'll take them now or you can catch 'em afterwards after the break. So any questions? - [Audient] Question for Sarah actually. - Yeah. - [Audient] So you had a bunch of municipalities in the beginning and they all had different processes. Did you have a problem with people going for their licenses or whatever, picking which municipality they wanted to go to because one municipality might be better than another one and if so, by putting in your application to kind of rein all that in. - Yeah, so actually people had their own ways for sure.

Like some cities they were tough. The municipalities in some cities were tough so people would like to go with other option and other cities, which they're like more tolerate... Would tolerate more with the citizens. So we put this into consideration actually. Like we put the citizen and investor first so we can give them the best experience. So we wouldn't face this resistance because we would have a unified workflow among all cities and it would be beneficial for the citizen first, the investor, then the municipality and the workload and operation, the operation insight. I hope I answered your question. Thank you. - Any other questions?

Thank you for your time. Thank you for your interest and please do speak to the speakers afterwards if you have some specific questions for them. Thank you. - Thank you, all. (audience applauding) - Well done, well done. (upbeat music)