How ProcessGold was Created and Ultimately Became Part of UiPath

Learnings from ProcessGold, UiPath and Chris Esmeijer

As a student of history, I think it is important to understand why things occurred in the past to have the proper context for our current world. That’s why I am really excited to have the opportunity to host Christiaan Esmeijer who was one of the original founders of ProcessGold and now is a vice president at UiPath focusing on their growth products and their business strategy. With Christiaan’s background, this will be a fun deep dive into how UiPath developed its capabilities and what can be expected in the future!

Christiaan started his career supporting process mining as a BPM consultant, believing in the technology, knowing the pros and cons of using it and how this can revolutionize company’s operations. This put him and ProcessGold in a position where they were initially focused on consulting and implementation of other toolsets, but eventually there was a gap in the market due to competing priorities, shifting strategies and external acquisitions.

One of the tools Christaan OEMd in this previous job was a BI software built by a company called MagnaView and during a coffee chat one day, they discussed how bringing in some simple components/code could reimage the toolset into a process mining tool. This led to the current CTO (Roel Vliegen) implementing this functionality over Christmas of 2015 with supporting research provided by Wil van der Aalst from the University of Eindhoven. 

Now ProcessGold is focused on consulting and sales as they are the exclusive distributors of the new tool and MagnaView focusing on software development.  Seeing as this was a close and exclusive relationship, the two companies merged a year later to bring the entire team under the same roof. The name of ProcessGold was kept as this had a better market presence with Christiaan becoming the CEO and Roel Vliegen becoming the CTO and Co-CEO.

In terms of selling this new company’s software, it was pitched as “an X-ray for your processes” with the only thing needed is data out of your system to visualize end to end processes. There was a lot of disbelief and evangelizing back then because process mining was really new and unknown. The first customers were pulled in through the website and previous contacts, customers and by leveraging their extended network.

So thinking back, what was one of your key learnings in this phase of the company?

“I'm a technologist, so I love technology, so we were talking a lot about features and functionality and not about the value that it will bring. So that was a very steep learning curve for us in that time to really switch between talking about the product and the features and how great it is, instead of talking about what it will deliver for you and the return on investment.“

Ultimately what made ProcessGold successful?

“I think we did everything for our customers that was humanly possible. If customers had questions or they wanted to have a feature in the product, we did everything we could in the weekends, in the evenings and the nights to fix that expanding the products with functionalities customers really wanted.  And back then we were just a company of I think 60 people before we sold it. So we were a very small dedicated team and the only purpose we had was making our customers happy and that's what our customers felt as well.”

Expanding in terms of capabilities and team size is a testament to how well this strategy worked, however in 2019, ProcessGold was looking for further investment to expand the sales and marketing teams, when they were approached about being acquired by UiPath.  Initially, the goal was not to be acquired, but it was a good fit with culture, technology and made sense as the team was thinking about taking the next step with the product. Beyond culture, the two main drivers were:

Product Synergies - From a product perspective, process mining by itself does not really solve problems. It creates a visualization, showing where process improvement can be made, but ultimately you still need to act upon them. This merger would help to drive further user and system action in driving improvements by leveraging UiPath’s existing RPA capabilities.

Selling Capability - UiPath also had a large portfolio of robots, out-of-the-box connectors, and integrations for off Prem and on Prem cloud providers. This combined with their huge sales and marketing force made it attractive to bring ProcessGold into their environment so that they could further leverage this broader network in cross selling to a broader audience.

After this merger, it took some time to fully enable the existing salesforce and position process mining within the broader UiPath framework of tools. Additionally, the core code needed to be updated to better fit into the pre-existing UiPath cloud native SaaS product.  This was no easy feat, taking over two years and involving the original development team as well as additional developers pulled from other UiPath development teams.

Now that there is a unified platform, leveraging security, authentication and multiple different capabilities UiPath is now able to better leverage these different individual capabilities to offer more value and ultimately more ROI for their customers.

In terms of what’s next for UiPath process mining, Christiaan indicates this is an area of continued investment as there are numerous new technologies and customer expectations impacting the market such as:

Changing Customer Expectations - Customers are now expecting near-immediate insights into their data, as there are many more pre-existing connectors and analysis.  Process mining is becoming more commoditized as there are more toolsets with the focus now on driving broader value.

Suite of Tools - Stand-alone tools are expected to be able to integrate and have additional capabilities to drive additional insights and execute immediately on these insights with actions.

GenerativeAI - Customers want to be able to interact with their data in new ways and in an upcoming release users will be able to ask how the process is performing and be given recommendations based on specific customer data as well as areas of traditional improvement.

It is easy to look at toolsets for what they are today - but I think the history and insights provided by Christiaan are indicative of a broader trend we will continue to see. Companies and solution providers need to continue to innovate both internally and through external acquisitions to ensure they are staying relevant and delivering maximal value to their customers.