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The Agile Brand with Greg Kihlström®: Expert Mode Marketing Technology, AI, & CX
#731: Automation and innovation with Karthik Ramakrishnan, Tapestry
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Foreign.
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Welcome to Season seven of the Agile Brand where we discuss the trends and topics marketing leaders need to know. Stay curious, stay agile and join the top enterprise brands and martech platforms as we explore marketing technology, AI, e commerce, and whatever's next for the Omnichannel customer experience. Together we'll discover what it takes to create an agile brand Build Built for today and tomorrow and built for customers, employees and continued business growth. I'm your host Greg Kilstrom, advising Fortune 1000 brands on martech, AI and marketing operations. The Agile Brand Podcast is brought to you by Tech Systems, an industry leader in full stack technology services, talent services and real world application. For more information, go to teksystems.com to make sure you always get the latest episodes, please hit subscribe on the app you listen to podcasts on and leave us a rating so others can find us as well. Now onto the show. Being strategic means asking the right questions and meaningfully applying the learnings. How do you do this while innovating and outpacing the competition? Agility requires a willingness to experiment and adapt quickly to changing market conditions and customer preferences. It also demands breaking down silos and fostering collaboration across teams. Today we're going to talk about how leading brands are leveraging automation and AI to drive efficiency and optimize their merchandising and trading capabilities in today's complex retail environment. To help me discuss this topic, I'd like to welcome Karthik Ramakrishnan, Director, Planning Systems and RPA at Tapestry. Karthik, welcome to the show.
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B
Thanks Greg. Good afternoon. How are you? Good afternoon.
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A
Good, good, yeah. Looking forward to having this conversation with you. Definitely. Lots to discuss here and very timely topic. Before we dive in though, why don't you give a little background on yourself and your role at Tapestry. Sure.
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Greg. I'm Karthik Ramakrishnan. I work for Tapestry in the IT department. A little bit of introduction about what Tapestry is. So Tapestry is a company that owns the brands Coach and Kate Spade. Each brand is unique, but Tapestry is a magical thread that weaves both the brands together. So Tapestry as You said I'm a director of Applications for Merchandise Planning, Robotic Process Automation. In addition, I also take care of Salesforce service, cloud or homegrown corporate applications. I also spearhead multiple generative AI initiatives and applications.
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Great. Great. Well, yeah, you're the right person to talk with about this stuff, so let's dive in. And as I said, we're going to talk about a few different things, but I want to start with what I touched on a little bit at the very top of the show is just automation and innovation. And I want to start by talking about how Tapestry defines automation at scale and how big a part automation plays in your approach to innovation.
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B
Great question, Greg. I would say this Tapestry started our business process automation journey as early as 2019. We were one of the first five companies on the planet to implement SAP S4 HANA and we just launched it in 2019. One of our core tenets was not to introduce customizations in package software or SaaS applications that would make the application complex, but we still wanted to help our users be efficient and feel productive. Hence a natural pivot to automation and tools like UiPath that would eliminate complex manual and mundane processes while maintaining a clean core of SAP. So from 2019 until now, we have automated several processes that touch SAP, our supply chain systems, HR, IT and even modern generative AI applications all using UiPath. Now it helped drive down customizations maintenance cost while increasing our ability to upgrade. Now the productivity gain from automation helps Tapestry focus on innovation, which is more rewarding, engaging and beneficial.
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A
Yeah, starting in 2019, definitely ahead of the curve there. As far as the AI bandwagon, let's just call it. That's really interesting to hear. How is the use of Robotic Process Automation or RPA and AI influenced the organization towards more data driven strategies? Step one is automating and then having access to the data. How does, how does that drive you towards data driven strategies and things like merchandising decisions and trading capabilities?
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B
That's an excellent question, Greg. In fact, I can speak for an entire hour on this topic, but I'll try to keep it concise.
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Yeah.
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Now automation. It helped transform our data. Validations, reconciliations and journal entry creation. Finish good purchase order creation from several hours or even days sometimes into near real time. This helped Tapestry make faster business decisions in the areas of finance, supply chain and many other domains. Combining the power of AI with automation, we have built agents that provide insights into our sales, inventory levels, foot traffic, website traffic, store associate and customer feedback in near real time. No static reports, no static dashboards and no technical queries. It is all achieved through questions and natural language. For example, we could have some of our users and execs ask, what was the sales of women's bags last week in New York? What were the top five best selling products in California in June? What are customers saying about our coach, Tappy bags or Brooklyn bags? Compare the feedback from our customers in Texas and Colorado about Kate Spade duo crossbody bags and how does it correlate to sales patterns? If you look at these questions, some of these questions sound very simple. But the work performed by the agents in the background is monumental. The agents gather information from multiple sources, collect the information and present it to the end user. So with UiPath, automation and AI, I think the era of static reports is ending and we are in the process of building automated reports that would be sent out periodically by simply changing prompts. We are not there here at 100%, but we are slowly marching towards that goal.
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A
Yeah, yeah. And that's so powerful because having been one of those people that requests, hey, can you get me these numbers? And it sometimes takes days, if not weeks sometimes to get the right reports. Having that power at your fingertips is really powerful and does allow people to make more intelligent decisions and get answers to the questions more, more easily. You mentioned a few, you know, platforms and partners that you use. Can you talk a little bit about, you know, what's, what's the role of finding the right platforms and partners and being successful with automation and, you know, how do you choose the right tools for the work?
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That's a great question, Greg, because the role of these tools and platforms is huge. Right? So we are thankful that we chose UiPath for our automation platform because UiPath is robust, works seamlessly with web based applications, thick lines like SAP and even software SaaS applications. And do you know how many support cases we have created with UiPath in the last five years? Zero.
- [08:04]
A
Oh wow.
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B
So this single metric should speak for itself, right? I don't want to say anything else about UiPath, just with this single metric. Now, with respect to the choice of what tools you would choose, there are so many tools, a plethora of tools. But how would we choose the right tool? Our goal is to be, be very objective, have a scientific process. For example, we have a very well defined evaluation matrix. Before choosing tools, the tool needs to be a leader in the Gartner magic quadrant to demonstrate scalability, flexibility, adaptability to technology changes. Secure and also easy to maintain. Now, once we evaluate a certain number of tools and assess the scores the winner is chosen. It's a very scientific process and we have very good support from our leadership to help us choose the right tools.
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A
Yeah, that's great. And so choosing the right tools and having that, as you were describing earlier, having that, the ability to add, ask questions in natural language, get answers to things instead of either waiting or you know, worst case guessing or things like that. How has that plus other types of automation that you described, you know, how's it freed up teams to focus on more strategic and higher value activities related to things like merchandising and trading? You know, maybe provide an example.
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That's a great follow up question, Greg. So as I said earlier, we've automated tasks in many operational areas such as financial planning and analysis, cost center creation, lease management, sales and order reconciliations, invoice reconciliation, etc.
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Right.
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So this allowed for more efficient operations, freed up our staff to focus on more intellectual and creative tasks. For example, imagine in a finance teams, we have highly qualified CPA performing manual reconciliations over a weekend or over a month in and we want the CPA to perform tasks that they love and are far more rewarding to them and also strategic and beneficial Tapestry. So we have achieved close to, I would say 25% efficiency gain in all these categories because of automation.
- [10:26]
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That's another good question. I think the challenges are very similar across multiple large organizations, but I will highlight the ones that we faced. I think the very first challenge is helping the end users understand the benefit of automation, its capabilities and limitations. We should explain the automation process in simple and plain English without using jargon to the end users. For example, we are building front end or UI based automations, we should explain to the user that the automation mimics the actions taken by the end user. Automation does not involve building new systems, dashboards or metrics that were not already there. We are not building phantom applications. I think that should be clear. And once we gain the user confidence, it becomes easier. Now the second challenge I would mention is alignment with various system owners. When automation touch multiple systems, we have to explain to the system owners that the automation itself is not changing the system design, application design or functionality. We are only replicating a user action in a much faster, efficient and error free mechanism. And please have the business or the users by your side, they're your biggest supporter. The third challenge I would mention is when the automation scales with more data, it is not just the automation platform that has to scale, but the application systems that it touches also have to scale to meet the increased demand. Now users cannot match the speed and volume of automations. So when the automations process data at a faster rate, can the application that it touches cater to the load? Because this was another key learning that we had and it helped us think ahead when we are building automations and we scale them.
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A
Yeah, yeah. And so a lot of what we've talked about so far, the customers, so to speak, are internal customers, using the products, getting access to the data and certainly a very important set of customers. But let's talk a little bit more about those end customers as well and how the end customer experience gets enhanced. So beyond operational efficiencies and things being able to be done more quickly, how has automation contributed to enhancing the customer experience at Tapestry Brands?
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Awesome. So if you look at some of our automations, we have induced improved response times, reduced frictionless interactions between our end customers and customer facing teams. So we have built self service automation for our end customers for some of our top contact reason. For example, where is your order? Can we track the order and order cancellation or changing certain features or parameters in the order? Now these self service automations make it easy for end customers, especially with generation C who prefer interacting with digital products and digital ecosystems. So that's an interesting area where we have made it easy for end customers to shop or to change their orders and contact customer service. And we are also continuously expanding the scope of these self service automations to multiple contact channels. Right. So we have it in our digital products now, we want to enhance it to phone, sms, even Instagram in future. And all these could be done with or without AI. So that's another angle we are thinking is don't Try to solve all problems with AI, but we can solve many problems with simple but powerful use cases.
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Yeah, yeah, love it. And so those efficiency gains, I mean certainly there's looking at some of those top use cases is really important. I know, depending on the person, I'm one of those people that does anything to not have to call customer support. So those automations are, are much appreciated on that end. Building on that though, you know, using automation and AI to personalize customer experiences, what about customer engagement and customer loyalty? Like how does, how do some of those improvements translate then to more loyal lifetime customers?
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That's another fantastic question. Now if you look at Coach, Coach is currently ranked fifth among the hottest brands in the luxury market. So we have climbed 10 places since 2024. Now there are many reasons for that. So we should thank our designers, our marketing teams and the digital product teams that have built an ecosystem to connect better with our end customers, especially Gen Z. Usage of automation, AI are key factors in this equation, but not the only factors. I would give equal credit to all the teams that helped us engage with our end customers better. So AI and automation definitely contributing factors, but I think it's a shared credit.
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Yeah, yeah, definitely. I mean you've got to have great products and great design and all that and then back it up with great experiences and support and all those things for sure. Definitely looking ahead a little bit. Tapestry has been doing this since 2019, so definitely ahead of the curve in many regards. But looking further down, what emerging trends in automation and AI are you most excited about and how do you see them shaping the future of retail?
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B
I think it's another interesting question where I can talk for an entire day, not just one hour. But I'll try to keep it short. I mean there are so many emerging trends, right? If you think about it, there's computer vision, self healing automations and some of the LLMs outperforming traditional forecasting models. There's AI engineering, AI based app development. Now I'm imagining a utopian phase where an end user can build an app by just issuing a few commands or directives. For example, build me a tax engine that would incorporate all the latest rules from the federal, state, city and local municipalities. Just talk to an AI tool or write it and it'll build the app for you. Now how cool that would be. There are also video and audio generation models that have paved way for a totally new world for us to create our own videos for advertisement or even virtual dress fits. That's another new world. I think it's a highly untapped potential, but I think few are marching towards that realm. And also think about completely new line of business that nobody has thought about like a virtual tailor. So AI could be a virtual tailor, your phone or a webcam could measure your physique and somebody could build custom fit apparels that are stitched locally and are shipped to the end users at a much faster rate instead of the product being manufactured in a different continent and then shipped back to you. Then you could also think about physical AI bots as store assistants in the actual store to augment the store shopping experience for end customers. But also tell this While I'm a strong proponent of AI and automation, I also want to reiterate that innovation shouldn't be confined to just AI and automation. Right? There are so many other ways that you can innovate and increase the end customer experience or make it better for end customers to shop and buy more products.
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A
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. But yeah, lots of exciting things there and definitely look forward to seeing some of those come to fruition. Karthik, thanks so much for joining today. Really appreciate you sharing your insights and the story that Tapestry has had so far with RPA and automation. One last question for you before we wrap up. What do you do to stay agile in your role and how do you find a way to do it consistently?
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That's a good question too, Greg. Right. So I would say this. I think number one is staying passionate and loving what you do. Because when people ask me this question, even some of my friends or family members ask me this question. I say, look, some people say you need to be disciplined. But I would refute that by saying if you love what you do, the concept of discipline goes away. Imagine you're in college and you love to spend some time with somebody. Your friend, or it could be a girlfriend, anybody. You don't need a reason to be with them. You don't need to go to a concert, you don't need to do fishing. You don't need to watch a movie. All you need is just to be with them. That's how you should feel towards some of the upcoming trends and technology. You just need to love it so much. It doesn't matter what time of the day it is, whether you're even tired after a long day at work, you're frustrated, or you have so many different problems you would still go towards that. Now that that's the kind of passion I would say one should inculcate to keep in touch with latest trends and technologies. And the second most important thing that people have to realize is if you want to learn something new, you also have to unlearn some of the things that are already doing right. So it's give and take. Otherwise there's only 24 hours in a day this professional commitment and personal commitment. So what I've done is some of the professional comments I have had Certain areas are well established and runs like a well oiled machine. I don't need to micromanage it or don't need to over focus on those areas. Delegate the responsibilities, let your subordinates take care of it and I'm sure they'll do a good job and it's up to us to groom so they can take care of it while we focus on something that you like and it's also more rewarding and latest the third most important thing is make sure that leadership is aligned with your goals, are with what you're trying in newer areas because there's no alignment, there's no point, nobody's going to see the benefit. So I would say it's a combination of all three passion, unlearn or delegate what you already have and also align with the leadership. Greg, it was a fantastic interview. I enjoyed all the questions. Thank you so much for having me on the show.
- [22:25]
A
Oh thank you so much. Yeah, it was great talking with you. Well again I'd like to thank Karthik Ramakrishnan, Director, Planning Systems and RPA at Tapestry for joining the show. You can learn more about Karthik and Tapestry by following the links in the show notes. Thanks again for listening to the Agile Brand brought to you by Tech Systems. If you enjoyed the show, please take a minute to subscribe and leave us a rating so that others can find the show as well. You can access more episodes of the show@theagile brand.com that's theagile brand.com and contact me. If you're interested in consulting or advisory services or are looking for a speaker for your next event, go to www.gregkillstrom.com that's G R E G K I H L S t r o m.com the Agile brand is produced by Missing Link, a Latina owned, strategy driven, creatively fueled production co op. From ideation to creation, they craft human connections through intelligent, engaging and informative content. Until next time, stay curious and stay agile. The Agile Brand before we continue, I wanted to share a key strategic resource that a majority of the Fortune 500 are already aware of. Finding the best technology, business and talent solutions is not easy. With business demands and competitive pressures mounting, you need to be able to design, deploy, and optimize your technology to provide leading customer experience experiences while driving business growth. Those of you that have been listening to this show for a while know that this podcast is brought to you by TechSystems, a global provider of technology, business and talent solutions for more than 80% of the Fortune 500. Tech Systems accelerates business transformation for their customers. Whether you're looking to maximize your technology roi, drive business growth, or elevate customer experiences, Tech Systems enables enterprises to capitalize on change. Learn more@techsystems.com that's teksystems.com now let's get back to the show.