The 8th edition of one of the leading European conferences on digital transformation took place on October 26 in Krakow. WEBCON DAY is a forum for process digitization and automation practitioners, which for years has been attracting representatives of the most innovative organizations operating in various industries, both in Poland and around the world.
The previous edition of the conference took place in 2019.This year, WEBCON DAY returned to once again create a unique opportunity to exchange knowledge, experiences and ideas from hundreds of IT and business executives from all over Europe.
The conference was inaugurated by a speech by Radosław Putek, CEO and Founder of WEBCON, who welcomed the guests and talked about how the company has developed during the past three years, and where we are today. During his speech, he emphasized the importance of all areas of WEBCON's activity - such as running the WEBCON Academy training program or enhancing the cooperation with Polish universities. WEBCON’s CEO also emphasized the importance of the WEBCON BPS platform being listed in the Forrester report "Now Tech: Digital Process Automation, Q4 2021", among top solutions on the market in that category.
Next, Łukasz Wróbel, the SVP & CBDO of WEBCON, took the stage to host the keynote session. He talked about the upcoming IT trends, and why low-code technology is crucial in light of the ever-greater shortage of IT professionals. He shared the results of WEBCON’s US study among the CIO’s which shows how the role of low-code platforms will increase in the upcoming years, and why they believe it’s a better way to deliver business applications than custom coding or implementing off-the-shelf solutions.
Wróbel also explained what’s WEBCON’s true mission:
“How do we perceive the role of our WEBCON BPS platform today? It's an application factory - so it's not about creating one application – it’s about delivering tens and hundreds of them. A year. But it’s also about optimizing the entire delivery process and ongoing maintenance ”- Łukasz Wróbel, CBDO WEBCON.
Afterwards, Mike Fitzmaurice, Chief Evangelist & VP of WEBCON North America took the stage and shared some of the new functionalities the users can expect from the upcoming 2023 version of the WEBCON BPS platform. He also emphasized the huge role of WEBCON BPS users in setting new directions for the platform's development, admitting that WEBCON Community is a huge mine of interesting ideas and suggestions.
After the networking break, we gave the stage to the WEBCON clients, who shared their inspiring stories on how our low-code technology helps them transform and grow their business. This year, the conference speakers lineup included representatives from 7 organizations: Wyborowa Pernod Ricard, Grupa Azoty, Polpharma, Raben Group, x-kom, DSI Underground and PwC.
Digital transformation leaders share their unique experiences with low-code technology
"To travel a thousand miles, you have to take the first step" - was the title of the first session hosted by Przemysław Dziewiatowski, Business Relationship Manager at Wyborowa Pernod Ricard. A representative of one of the largest companies in the FMCG sector revealed the recipe for successful digitization and shared with the conference guests advice on how to arrange cooperation between IT and business, how to organize resources and what to emphasize - so that digital transformation becomes a reality .
After the session on how to engage business users to work closely with IT to make the process digitization happen, it was time to find an answer to the next question: why do organizations need a unified application platform? The session was hosted by Paweł Lustofin, the IT Manager at Grupa Azoty, who explained that every company should strive to create such an application infrastructure that will allow to provide solutions ideally suited to organization needs, and not go for ready-made solutions that cover only a part of them.
In the maze of available technologies, it is difficult to be sure which of them is the right one for a given IT project - and the larger the project, the more complicated the decision-making process. Andrzej Tołoczko, Head of the Corporate Platforms Team at Polpharma, shared how the company chooses what technologies to use in specific IT projects – and when do they go with a low-code platform. He covered the whole technology selection process and what criteria are taken into account when selecting systems for individual projects. He also emphasized the role of knowledge exchange and sharing experiences between teams within the company: “Due to the fact that we are open to new ideas, we can more easily adapt to the ever-changing business landscape. We try to constantly learn new things, but then we don’t forget share it with others – both within our company and beyond - hence our presence at WEBCON DAY."
Next, it was time to look at the issue of business process management in an international organization. Robert Ogierman, IT Project Coordinator at the logistics company Raben Group, talked about the role of a well-planned IT infrastructure in an organization that grows its business by acquisitions, and is currently present in 15 countries. The speaker put the greatest emphasis on the unification of business processes: "We approach the implementation of new applications according to the approach we call uniflex. This means that our processes are unified and flexible, i.e. standardized and flexible. We also like to use the second term: changes in our processes are implemented in accordance with the "sell or jail" principle. Either someone who wants to implement a change must present a good business case, somehow "sell" this idea to us, or there must be a legal requirement that will force us to make the modifications."
After Raben’s session, it was time to learn about the perspective of an e-commerce business. Artur Opara, Product Owner at x-kom, raised another important issue in the context of digitization and automation of business processes: striving to build a competitive advantage, which in the e-commerce industry can be achieved by striving for hypereeffectiveness.
E-commerce is one of the most competitive industries on the market. Companies operating in this sector must constantly strive to optimize their business processes. In his speech, Artur Opara emphasized the role of properly selected technology and mature organizational culture in processes digitization projects. He also drew attention to the importance of building a team of competent IT architects: “If we had the awareness we have today during the first project, the process would be completely different. It is not the fault of the partner, software or ours. You just need experience for that. Architects are the bridge between the platform, the partner and the organization implementing the solution."
The next speaker, Mateusz Borkowski, Head of Global IT and Digital Strategy at DSI Underground, devoted his session to the topic of building an application factory for a global manufacturing company.
Application factory is a concept thanks to which the digitization of each subsequent process brings us closer to achieving a company-wide process optimization. Mateusz Borkowski shared his experience in achieving global IT management goals without the risk of losing the involvement of individual local teams. He also talked about the concept of "new IT" - one that focuses on solutions, not just infrastructure.
The part of the conference devoted to customer case studies ended with the session hosted by PwC: "Digitization on a large scale". Monika Domitrz, Senior Manager at PwC, and Grzegorz Józefiak, Director at Data Analytics PwC, presented their experiences in building a solution supporting one of the most critical business processes of the organization – e-contracting. The implementation took place in as many as 27 countries in the CEE region. PwC representatives admitted that they owe their success to an appropriate approach to involving business users in the process of creating new solutions. "Our process came from dreams - dreams that you no longer have to look for scattered information in different systems or platforms," said Monika Domitrz. “Thanks to the low-code technology, we could finally make those dreams come true.”
WEBCON MVP: the most prolific and dedicated members of the WEBCON Community
During the conference dinner, we have hosted the very first award ceremony for the WEBCON MVP program. It’s goals is to distinguish the most prolific WEBCON Community members who regularly and in a special way contribute to sharing product knowledge, support other members of the international WEBCON community, create inspiring materials on how to work with the platform, and represent WEBCON at global events around the world.
The first ever WEBCON MVPs for 2022 are: Daniel Krüger, Marcin Grotowski, Markus Jenni, Martin Meze, Paweł Hołdak, Razvan Ogrezeanu and Sebastian Gębuś.
WEBCON Expert Zone
During the conference, participants had also the unique opportunity to talk with WEBCON employees from various departments. In the WEBCON Expert Zone, they could meet and ask various questions about the platform, covering such areas as WEBCON BPS development, WEBCON Academy, infrastructure and migrations, integration with other systems, use of OCR technology and platform licensing method.
The meeting is just the beginning
WEBCON DAY has been attracting specialists to Krakow for years, who are ready to look for new solutions and share their experiences with digital transformation practitioners. The conference organized by WEBCON is the only one in Poland that provides an opportunity meet so many IT and business executives to share ideas and experiences with. We are proud that we got this opportunity to meet with so many of our clients and partners again, and we cannot wait to see each other again soon.
We hope that our guests got inspired by our client’s stories, and have new ideas on how to further optimize their processes with low-code technology. But we still encourage to keep on learning: in our Resources tab, we have numerous articles, studies, session recordings from previous WEBCON DAY editions, and inspiring case studies that can give even more ideas on how to leverage low-code to accelerate business growth.
Thank you for coming to WEBCON DAY 2022, and we hope to see you again in Krakow next year.
