Product Preview: Yoga Flexible Software 2021 & Beyond
Yoga Flexible Software by RPI Consultants helps fill the gaps between your everyday business requirements and your enterprise solutions that don’t quite meet them. We know these gaps well because we see them all the time.
From robust digital content capture to simple and light-weight document viewing, easy to design and deploy forms to custom alerts and notifications, and dynamic API data interfaces to unified reporting and analytics, Yoga exists to reduce complexity and cumbersome custom development between systems.
As our partners’ software evolves to close some of the gaps and even create some new ones, Yoga Flexible Software is also evolving to be more compact, light-weight, and maintenance free while providing important features and tools that reduce manual activities and points of failure.
Transcript
John Marney:
If you haven’t done this for a webinar before, just be aware that we are going to send a recording of the webinar, or a link to the recording after we’re done, as well as the deck. And you can submit any questions that you have through the GoTo Webinar Panel, there’s a questions area you can type it up there and that will come to us. Feel free to submit questions as we go, save them for the end, whatever you would like to do. The content will probably take us about 20, 25, 30 minutes, somewhere in that range so definitely won’t need a full hour today. Today we’re going to be talking about Yoga for 2021 and beyond. Yoga is RPI’s proprietary software platform, and there’s a few different products in there which we’re going to go through, and so let’s dive in.
John Marney:
So before we get into the content of our presentation, I do want to highlight a couple of upcoming presentations that we have. We do try to do webinars, fresh webinars, every first Wednesday of a month. And so next webinar Wednesday on November 4th. We have two presentations. The first is Yoga Forms for GHR. So we’re going to be talking a little bit about this in our presentation here but this presentation in November will go even deeper into discussing the out of the box form library that we’re making available for human resources and Infor GHR. And then the second presentation of the day will be Chad Tucker and Oscar Gutierrez reviewing new features and functionality in Kofax Total Agility 7.8.
John Marney:
In addition to that, we do have individual Yoga product webinars, so there are four products that we’re really talking about today. We are working on scheduling individual webinars for each of those which will contain a deeper dive into the features as well as the product demonstrations. And so keep an eye out for that if you are interested in something that you see in this presentation. And of course, any of our past current and future webinars can be accessed on rpic.com/webinars or on our YouTube page.
John Marney:
Okay, so my name is John Marney. I’ve been with RPI for about six and a half years. I have been working on business process automation and systems integration for over 10 years. I am our Yoga product manager as well as our devops manager. And so as part of that, I do quite a bit of cloud architecting primarily in Azure. And Mike would you introduce yourself.
Michael Madsen:
Hello everyone my name is Michael Madsen. I’m a lead consultant with RPI Consultants. I’ve been with RPI for a little over five years, but have been working with software integrations and support for, same as John about 10 years. I specialize in a lot of different business processes. I’ve worked with accounts payable, human resources, higher education, medical, manufacturing, automation, I’ve even worked with pharmaceutical solutions, so I wear a lot of different hats even though the terms change between business processes, the integration language generally stays the same so that’s kind of how we’re able to do that kind of stuff. I’m the Yoga Docs product owner so I specialize with kind of the design and look and feel and how the Yoga Docs platform works that we’ll be talking about today.
Michael Madsen:
So to kick us off, I’ll just go through some of the information that we’ll talk about today. So first, we’ll kind of go over some high level and more specific examples of the gaps between enterprise software and business requirements. We’ll go through a section that’s just bridging the gap with Yoga Flexible Software, so we’ll talk about Yoga Capture, Yoga Docs, Yoga Forms and Yoga Connect, the four different products that we utilize to bring together the yoga suite. And then we’ll talk about how you can get started with Yoga and then we’ll finish up with some summaries and questions.
Michael Madsen:
So our first section, the gaps between enterprise software and business requirements. This is kind of just for us to start brainstorming some things that you might have in your business that you notice is a gap or that eats up a lot of your time that you wish you could automate or that you wish you had a custom solution or something that was just easier for you to change on the fly to make work with your specific business process. So this section is just talking about when things don’t fit. So what I’ll be covering here is just some of the really high level gaps, and then after this slide, we’ll get into some more specifics so we can kind of try to identify these gaps a little bit more generally.
Michael Madsen:
So for ERPS/CRMs, we see a lot of gaps with content storage management and access, just your general document retrieval. Sometimes reporting can be an issue too. ECMs/BPMs, general user experience can sometimes be poor, not every platform was built with a great UI in mind. And even though it was built with the developers wonderful code in mind, they may not have been thinking about the end users. Data and document capture, workflow, transformation, all of these steps can be difficult depending on the platform you’re utilizing.
Michael Madsen:
External providers. So patients, employees, customers, suppliers, there may be data that you know that you have access to that could help your process but maybe you don’t know how to implement that data into your processes today. And then everything else under the sun that may be a pain point for you today that you would like to adjust from. So that is kind of just our general look from the top and then our next slide we get into some more specifics that users might actually say to reference [inaudible 00:06:33].
John Marney:
So yeah, that everything else might include the fact that some of the systems that you have are brand new and a focus of your enterprise, whereas other components, you’re maintaining platforms that you deployed 10 years ago and that user experience was fresh 10 years ago, the automation in it was fresh 10 years ago, and so how do we both improve what you have and connect it with the more modern platforms that you’re looking to leverage.
John Marney:
So here’s just some specific use cases these are the kind of things that we hear all the time and really are the kind of things that when we hear, or when we heard, led us to say, “Well, we have experience with all of these different processes and platforms, what kind of solutions can we put together to help solve these challenges?” So the first one. “My software as a service or cloud ERP made an update to their API or they deprecated some interface that we were using and I can no longer send my data from my workflow platform.” Often in an accounts payable automation scenario, we’re sending invoices and other data into our financial system. And one day everything is humming along nicely and the next day nothing is working and you’re basically production down. And so who is watching and managing updates to those interfaces?
John Marney:
The next one is something we hear all the time, “How do we get a human readable image for the EDI or other text transfers of information?” So again with invoices, but also other financial processes, or a purchase order for human resources processes like the transferal of benefit application information, EDI covers all sorts of different scenarios and business processes but for really just exception handling but also for auditability, you need to have some kind of human readable record to support that transaction took place. So how do we get those? Also something we often hear.
John Marney:
The third one is really a driver of digital transformation everywhere. And yes in this scenario the user’s saying, “Our HR department has to scan and store every single employee record.” I mean yes they took that first step and are at least scanning and storing and I work with plenty of departments that are still fully on paper, but in this scenario they’re still having to manually touch every single document that comes into their system so they feel the need to deploy digital forms yesterday so that they no longer have to manually archive every document.
John Marney:
The fourth is, “We need to customize our workflow system to fit our business.” So maybe this is a user experience issue, maybe they are getting 90% of what they need through the user client, but they want to add one feature that would really improve the processing and the handling inside of their workflow system. However, when they bring up this challenge or this enhancement request to the software vendor, they won’t even commit to putting it on a roadmap. They will generally advise ways to leverage their existing features and functionality but you’ve probably tried that and it’s probably not working for you, which is why you’re making this request. So those are just a handful, a small handful, of specific gaps and the challenges that they present that we hear all the time.
John Marney:
So what do you do when you encounter those? What are the common solutions that you’re trying to deploy or the things you’re trying to leverage while you try to seek a solution for these kinds of business challenges? First one is often a custom code and or lengthy development process. When we’re talking to our clients, we will talk them through why these things might be necessary to plug two systems together. And the common response is I’m sure that we can do this in-house, right? It can’t be that hard. And sometimes that’s true, but you can spend a couple hundred thousand dollars in two years and still have something that only works 50% or 75% of the time.
Michael Madsen:
Yeah, a lot of the time when have…
John Marney:
You’ve also got…
Michael Madsen:
Oh sorry.
John Marney:
No, go ahead.
Michael Madsen:
A lot of the time when you have custom development like that you might have a goal in mind where you say, “Okay this is the end solution that we require to make this work.” And when you’re thinking about that solution, you might just be thinking about that one process or that one step that you need that you need to get done. But once you actually break that out, you have to think about all the different connections you make along the way, all of the different validations where you’re validating that one item along the way. If there are any updates you have to make sure that your data is in sync. So even if we’re only talking about a few fields, that actually can become pretty complex once you actually start to design it.
John Marney:
Absolutely. And that really plays into the second item, that even once something is in place, a lot of times the solution that was architected can be pretty clumsy. So you have a lot of different employees with different skill sets and so when each challenge is tackled it’s often tackled in the way that they know how to do it. So this is a common scenario, and this is very real world. Our clients would come to us with a problem that they have this integration built and implemented but it’s something like, ‘Well, I can get the file to the FTP site and then I have a batch shot which downloads the file onto a local share and then I have another script in an entirely different language and framework that translates that file into a csv which is a specific format because I need a specific format, because I’m feeding that up into my financial system through an interface that was designed 20 years ago.”
John Marney:
And don’t even get me started on what we have to do to interface data in fixed width formats out to banks and financial institutions and it’s all the same data but it ends up taking five different steps to massage it and import and export it. So not only is it the very difficult to even understand, it’s also practically impossible to maintain. One change may cause a breakage in the first step in the process or that change may cause a breakage in the third step in the process, and unless you are intimately familiar with exactly how it’s laid out, you are facing constant breakdown.
Michael Madsen:
Yeah, and you can even you can even run into situations like for example, with Lawson exports. If we’re exporting to Lawson utilizing a csv, then I’m just providing Lawson a list of invoices that I want to import into the system but I’m not actually receiving that data back. I’m waiting for some kind of error report that Lawson’s going to put together that I have to then go back and check and then go into my system, that holds all my documents, and then reorganize everything or fix everything from there. So that’s a pretty big maintenance nightmare because we don’t just get the messages directly back in those broken processes.
John Marney:
Absolutely. And so, on top of all that you say. “Okay well, this should be much simpler so I want to use the tools that are available to me. I’m paying the support and maintenance to our software vendors, they should be able to help me out with coming up with the best solution and how I can fix all this. So you submit tickets to the vendor and typically are going to get one of three responses. It’s working as intended, they will offer to connect you or sell you training that you’ve probably already had and was required when they sold you the software, or they offer a knowledge-based article which if you’re lucky may loosely apply to what you’re asking about. And ultimately, with any of these scenarios, close the ticket, and you’re left with mostly having wasted your time over a couple weeks of email communication and really no further along in solving the business challenge. So RPI is looking to show you how we have developed the Yoga Suite to help address all of these types of challenges.
Michael Madsen:
Yep, so how do we fill those gaps? So we fill those gaps with real world solutions and cloud software. So to kind of list out what those were, we mentioned them earlier, Yoga Capture, Yoga Docs, Yoga Forms, Yoga Connect. But what are those? So Yoga Capture is really a content capture solution to pull images into a system. Yoga Docs is a document viewing system, so access and retrieval of your images and metadata including analytics. Rapid electronic form deployment is Yoga Forms, so it’s a way that we can quickly create new forms that you can utilize within your workflow processes and get them implemented into your system. And then Yoga Connect is just a communication platform, so it’s just a way for us to agnostically communicate to anything. As long as it has some kind of communication tunnel we can integrate with it. So just a way to connect your systems and pass, not only metadata, but also images and objects, anything that you need to pass along, we can pass through Yoga Connect.
John Marney:
So we discuss this as being cloud-oriented and really that is the message with this webinar is that the Yoga products are architected and, in many cases, moving to the cloud as part of our 2021 vision. There are on-premise versions available for most components. However, our focus is on making sure that we are architecting for the future and as the industry moves so we move so through the Yoga cloud architecture you can leverage the Microsoft Azure security, the Microsoft functionality and all of the availability they’re in. That is our platform of choice. And because of that, one of the main reasons that we selected that platform versus other cloud providers, is the ease with which we’re able to integrate our clients Office 365 and active directories for functionality like single sign-on but also, even something as simple as sending and receiving emails, very easy through Office 365.
John Marney:
Extremely lightweight. It’s cloud so there’s really, as far as your infrastructure is concerned, no wait. But even further, you’re really only leveraging the components you need and you leverage them as you need them. And part of the benefit is that-
Michael Madsen:
You may have just lost your mic, John.
John Marney:
… industry and products consultants and there is no outsourced help desk at RPI. I believe I got a question.
Michael Madsen:
Yeah I think your mic cut out halfway through that slide.
John Marney:
Oh really? Okay. Oh yeah, okay yeah sorry about that. So just quick recap. The main benefit of the Yoga Suite being provided, not only is it lightweight in its architecture and deployment in the cloud, but it is a service as a service where enhancements and maintenance are performed by experienced industry and product consultants and not by an outsourced help desk. So we’re going to jump into, I think the first one’s Yoga Capture. Oh, let me refocus.
Michael Madsen:
So to give a little bit of information about Yoga Capture. Yoga Capture is our content capture solution mainly for pulling email attachments from an inbox. So we can import those via API or file share, whichever you have access to and send it to your ECM, BPM, ERP, whatever system you need to send it to through the API call or the file drop. We can only pull what you need, so instead of just going in there and blindly pulling emails, we can actually configure inside of Yoga Capture what to look for. So to give an example, if I have an inbox where I tell all of my AP users to send invoices, because maybe I’m monitoring that inbox to pull all of my invoices and into my system. I can potentially tell the users to put invoice number and then the invoice number in the subject line and I can configure Yoga Capture when it’s pulling those emails in to read that text and capture the actual invoice number from the subject line to read it in automatically with the document. So it’s not just pulling in the image from the email, it’s also pulling in some of that that mail metadata.
Michael Madsen:
Along with email body, the to and from addresses, really any of the email metadata we can access. We can also input criteria for including and excluding emails so maybe in that AP invoice inbox example I have some other emails that come in that are just trash emails that I don’t necessarily need to pull in. Maybe we’re worried that they have the word invoice in them potentially but they always come from the same. So I can actually set up a rule inside of Yoga Capture to just say, even if you see the word invoice in subject line, never pull emails in from this inbox name. So there’s a lot of different customizations on how we can pull emails in or ignore emails. Even file extensions and file types, we can give a list of allowable file types so that you’re not pulling in signature gif images or anything like that.
Michael Madsen:
And then image processing. So PDF text extraction, parsing, so this is where we can actually kind of start to open up some of those files to pull some of the data from it. So if you always receive invoices in pdf form or you always receive a text file in your specific email that you’re receiving from whoever, then we can actually open that and look for specific data. So a good example is like if you’re using a standard format of a PDF for a file that you process day in and day out in your business process, then as long as that format doesn’t change and we know what those tags are, then we can actually put in there specifically where we want to pull the data from directly from the PDF so you don’t have to type anything out on the document at all. It just pulls in all the metadata based on what’s actually inside of the PDF, so it’s a really cool platform, very helpful. It works with, kind of like I said before, as long as it can communicate via API or file drop, then we can get it over to a system, so it’s very handy.
John Marney:
And you may think, well you know we already have some solutions for these kinds of things, and that’s probably true. Each content platform that we consult on has some module for email capture, right? Or they have a module for barcode reading or they have a module for image generation from EDI. We’ve sought to consolidate all of that functionality into one platform. If I had to state a primary goal behind Yoga Capture, it’s that, as soon as the content enters your actual workflow system or system of record, that it is ready to be processed or put in front of a user or sent through OCR or something, and it doesn’t need any additional splitting, extraction, logic perform, And so that’s one of the main reasons that we built it.
John Marney:
Another big reason is that, we found that there was a big gap with the existing platforms in that they didn’t really have a way to audit that, everything that we think we should be importing, we are importing. So if I’m scraping files out of an inbox and putting them into my accounts payable automation system, am I able to make sure that everything actually came through? And so that is another piece of inherent functionality. We take each individual unique ID out of exchange and make sure it’s attached to that content so that reporting can be leveraged later to be sure that we have a one for one with everything that was received into the inbox.
Michael Madsen:
Yeah and that’s built directly into Yoga Capture’s database, storing the audit trail for those emails. I have one other point, it’s escaping me.
John Marney:
That’s all right.
Michael Madsen:
So next, we’ll talk about Yoga Docs. Yoga Docs is really just the web-based document viewer of the Yoga Suite. So just like all of the other Yoga products that we’ll be talking about, as long as there’s some kind of API or communication method that we can connect to then we should be able to integrate Yoga Docs with whatever platform. So this is really to cover the gap for just viewing images, searching for images, filtering the images that you’re searching for. And I talked a little bit before about Yoga Analytics, I’ll get to that in just a moment. But really with Yoga Docs document viewer, anything that you need to do with that document, if you need to route the document between workflow cues, if you need to annotate the document, if you need to search across single or multiple index keys or properties tied to the document, you can do all of that. You can even enter electronic form data if you have forms with the document, so anything that you can do in your system should be replicatable inside of Yoga Docs. Oh and then version control even, so checking in, checking out perversion control and editing.
Michael Madsen:
Yoga Analytics is really just a way for us to give you some instant reporting to look at directly from the browser. So if you have an auditing database or even just… We can work with you to build what queries you would need, or if you already have the reports built, we can implement that directly into Yoga Docs so that you don’t have to run your reports and go find it inside of your file share or wherever you’re storing them now, you can just log directly into Yoga and see those reports.
John Marney:
Awesome.
Michael Madsen:
So next we have…
John Marney:
A couple screenshots?
Michael Madsen:
Yeah, so this is just a screenshot of Yoga Docs. So this would be like if… You can see on the left side there, that views is broken out, right above that is the workflow section, so if I wanted to process documents in workflow, I could see my workflows listed out there. But really the main things to point out here, is that on the left side you see your views, you can see that there are filters underneath that accounts payable view that we have there, so we can include filters to just prompt the user to search based on specific metadata. And then on the right side, you can see both the filtering option and the data return underneath. So up at the top, you can see that you can add or remove additional filters, we can filter on… If the metadata exists on the document then we can filter with it.
Michael Madsen:
And then below, what you can see is the return data of the return forms, and in this example, they’re actually grouped by vendor name so we’re able to also perform grouping in the return view. So most of the functionality that you’re looking for when it comes to searching is there in Yoga Docs. This is an example of Yoga Analytics, just one screenshot example of the workflow dashboard. So you can see in this report that’s returned, I have a list of queue names, the number of documents in each of those queues, and the date of the oldest document. Just to give an example of what you can do with Analytics. You can also do user reports, any other kind of auditing reports that you would do in your day-to-day work.
John Marney:
All right, I think there was one other screenshot that we dropped.
Michael Madsen:
Yeah, [inaudible 00:29:38].
John Marney:
The document viewer, yeah. So within the document viewer, you can also annotate documents, thumb through the thumbnails, enter electronic form data, see image metadata. So really everything that you would expect.
Michael Madsen:
It’s very similar to if you have a client as well, you can adjust the size of all of the windows. If you want to change how big your image is or if you don’t want to see the image and you just want to see the e-form, you can see the index keys and the properties right there with your image so it’s all there at a glance.
John Marney:
So now we’re going to talk now we’re going to talk about Yoga Forms. Yoga Forms is classified as a rapid electronic form deployment software. And what that means is, if you take the concept of taking your forms that you traditionally would have on paper, or maybe even existing electronic forms that are very custom built, and really rapidly taking tons of different document types and moving them out and making them available to the enterprise, as well as making them even potentially available to external facing customers or clients, and doing so, making it so easy that you no longer have a need for shuffling that paper around. So Yoga Form scales from very simple to complex, very-
Michael Madsen:
Mic went out again John.
Michael Madsen:
Well, while john’s figuring this out, I’ll pick up where he left off. So Yoga Forms, like he said, rapid electronic form deployment. So the intention here is to give the power to you for building the form. So obviously, there are certain scenarios where a standard user just isn’t going to be able to build the form, like if they have to put together database lookups or queries or anything like that. But if we’re just talking about a standard form where maybe all you’re doing is a simple onboarding form where it’s just having you enter in onboarding data or anything like that, then it’s very simple because all you have to do is literally drag and drop the fields into the form creator, give the fields a name, and then you’re done. Then you just submit it and it’s now published and ready for you to start submitting into your system.
Michael Madsen:
That said, you can also get really complex with it and build in different kind of lookups inside of each of the individual fields. So if I, for example, have an employee ID for an HR form and I type in that employee ID, then when I tab out of that field then, it pulls in all the other employee data that might be tied in with that employee record. So very similar to forms that you’ve used before, we’re just trying to make it really simple to build them, so you don’t have to go through that really long expensive build process that you do for most forms.
John Marney:
All right, I think I’m back.
Michael Madsen:
Yep, you got it.
John Marney:
Yeah I had to switch to my computer audio, I don’t know what’s going on with the phone here. Thanks for jumping in. So beyond the capabilities of the forms, maybe I might have covered some of this but I’m just going to run through it real quick. There are mobile responsive so adaptable to desktop or tablet or phone. And the forms themselves generate images, PDFs or can populate PDF templates. So if you’re looking to populate a government form such as W-4 and I-9, we can present that information in a more user-friendly way and walk them through filling out the information, while still meeting the requirements of the forms that we need to complete.
John Marney:
And there are a number of ready integrations for common ECMs to submit the completed documents too for any further processing via Yoga Connect. On top of that, in today’s world, digital signatures are becoming increasingly important because no matter how we fill out a form, if we aren’t able to get it in front of the people who need to see it, review it, authorize it, sign it also digitally, then it’s all for nothing. So I can’t tell you the number of times that we have come into clients who have electronic forms but they fill them out electronically then print them out and sign them and pass them around the enterprise and then re-upload them, which is just so painful.
John Marney:
So Yoga Forms has built-in functionality for signing fields, just the kind of thing you might expect that you’ve probably seen on various websites, where you can draw your signature, which works much better on mobile than it does trying to use your mouse but if you wanted, it does also support signing pads that can plug into a computer. Instead, some organizations prefer to just use uploaded signature images so that when a user clicks sign that it would apply their signature image onto the form. But even on top of that, oftentimes those digital representation of signatures really aren’t necessary, it’s usually an organizational requirement, not a legal one. And so when you actually do need true legally binding digital signatures, digital signatures from a technical standpoint and that be chain of custody is maintained and fully insured and the document integrity, those are not a service that we’re currently looking to replace so we do partner and build integrations with a number of great services that do offer that.
John Marney:
We use DocuSign a lot, we use it internally. We probably prefer that as far as our integrations, but we’ve also integrated with a Suresign and Adobe Sign, both very popular products. One thing we’ve run into relatively recently, is a requirement for notary which you might right off the bat think, well how can that be done electronically? But it is a service that’s offered, I know through DocuSign in about half of US states that allow it. And it may be available through other providers but I have not seen that. So, on top of the features that the forms have, in terms of their integrability and their ease of filling out, Yoga Forms does also include a form builder so that you can actually create all of these things. It is a simple drag and drop interface, it has a GUI based setup for service and database calls to facilitate those integrations for data lookups and data submission. It contains really simple rules that you can set up for validation. Is this field required? Is this field required when this field is filled out a certain way? As well as security so that certain fields are locked or unlocked or visible and invisible only in certain scenarios.
John Marney:
Also offers dynamic form controls and whole sections so that based on those validation rules and security rules that we can show and hide entire sections of the form. And of course maintaining the ability to actually access the forms or not access the forms based on active directory if you want. If you want, it also does provide for security just within the product. Oh, wrong way. So here’s an example. On the left is a Yoga Form and it’s constructed very simply that it lays out the W-4 very similarly to the paper document, for demonstration purposes, contains all the same instructions so that nothing’s missing, but is a little bit more user friendly interface and can even pull in you know your existing elections if you want it to and then submit those elections back out to your human resources or payroll system so that they don’t have to be entered by a human resources clerk.
John Marney:
But maybe between those steps you want it to be reviewed, that would be the job of your workflow system or within the Yoga Form subscription service, we do offer review and approval workflows included. But on the right, you see the final output, it fills out the government form with that electronic information so that we’re satisfying the requirements of the US gov. And so I mentioned briefly that, with the subscription service, that we do have some approval and review workflow built in. So, this is an offering within Yoga Forms that we’re beginning to grow, so we have our HR forms library available as part of our subscription service. So this is a growing repository of common forms, I-9 and W-4 included and it is for human resources right now and across all of the sub-departments of onboarding benefits enrollment payroll, disciplinary what have. And again, it does have a built-in approval and review workflow available so that you don’t have to send it to another workflow system or in many cases, find one because many of our clients just don’t even have something.
John Marney:
And so this should facilitate every step that the these HR forms need to go through from filling it out to submitting the data to the business system of record. And we do offer pre-built HRIS integrations to populate that employee data within the form and then also update employee data when necessary inside of the HRIS. That actually flows through Yoga Connect, which is the fourth and final Yoga product we’re going to talk about, but it is ready to go. And we are working on similar form libraries for your IT, such as user provisioning and laptop or equipment provisioning, medical, financial type documents and other libraries coming soon. So this HR forms library is what we’re going to be discussing in that November 4th webinar. So if you are interested in finding out more, feel free to reach out or join us for that webinar. Finally, Yoga Connect.
Michael Madsen:
Next is Yoga Connect. So Yoga Connect is our enterprise integration as a service. So how do we communicate with all of your different software? Yoga Connect is primarily an import or an exporter of data, but you can also export documents, images, objects. It communicates through EDI, TEST, SOAP REST, JSON. Again, if it has a method of communication, we can connect to it to communicate. It’s bi-directional so it’s not just dropping off a packet of information and leaving it and walking away, it’s picking up that response so that we can bring it back and let you know what’s going on with your documents. Really assist with on the fly troubleshooting if you have issues with integration.
Michael Madsen:
Scheduled and real-time transfers maintained by RPI. So by this we mean that if you do have a system where you’re required to follow a scheduled task process and you really can’t do real time and to upload it at a specific time each day then we can configure for that. Otherwise, we can just do the direct call each time we get that document so that you’re getting your messages in real time as opposed to waiting for that update. So another problem is that with updates to APIs and everything that can get pretty overwhelming to manage, especially from an IT maintenance standpoint. But if, I mean, it’s our software and we will help you do that, so you can stop having to worry about that and work with us, we can help out with getting that stuff covered.
Michael Madsen:
That’s one of the great things about having all of this stuff in-house is that we don’t have to go to a third-party vendor to ask for help, we don’t have to reach out to somebody to see how long a change will take. We aren’t wondering where on the roadmap something’s going to land because we have all of that information because it’s ours. So we can give you really quick responses, we can work with you on customizations right away, we really have an agile approach with the Yoga Suite. Custom data massaging, Yoga Connect will perform, so whether you’re receiving the data, sending it, or if it’s in between your business process. And then like I’ve mentioned multiple times, the real-time error handling and notifications is huge. I mean we could even set up situations where if you have known issues on imports, if we’re receiving that response back, then we can script trying to fix that even. So if you have known issues with known workarounds, then if we were to receive that response back, we can run it through some other script that then makes the necessary adjustment to make it work for the work around.
Michael Madsen:
Now, your IT staff hasn’t had to touch that once, and it’s just working throughout the day. So really, I mean, Yoga is just about trying to, like we’ve said throughout this entire webinar, trying to bridge the gaps in between your software and what you need. So uh I think one of the one of the little footnotes on one of the section slides was that your ERP will get you 80% there, but you’ll spend 80% of your time on the rest. And that’s pretty true for what we see around all of this kind of stuff. So next what we’ll talk about is how you can get started with Yoga.
John Marney:
Well, real quick before we do that, I think, wow, we’re definitely eating up time here. I was dead wrong on my estimate. The couple real world examples of why this is necessary, you will have your ERP out in one vendor’s cloud and you’ll have your workflow system out in another person’s cloud and you may have your OCR out in another club. And as those APIs morph and change over time and how they integrate, we generally stay on top of those changes, but so that they are rolled out and available in Yoga Connect before the vendor even makes the change, so that there’s no upset to the business process as the changes occur
John Marney:
But as Mike said, even if they do occur, RPI generally can catch it and fix it before anybody even is aware that it’s an issue. So if I need to interface my financial master data in an Infor or in Oracle or in Dynamics, and get that vendor and purchase order information out to AP automation system, which is, maybe it’s Kofax Total Agility, maybe it’s Read Soft Online, maybe it’s a homegrown thing, maybe it’s on prem, and so facilitating the transfer of that master data down into that system and then the invoice data back can often be a very expensive setup on the professional services or even in-house, and then you’re still stuck maintaining it for years and years as errors crop up.
John Marney:
With Yoga Connect, that’s all handled for you, can generally be deployed extremely rapidly and even then, another benefit is that let’s say, you change one of those systems later. Well normally, you’d be faced with rebuilding the entire integration. However, with Yoga Connect, we are able to interface into whatever next system that you’re looking to use. So it is extremely flexible in adapting to your enterprise vision. Okay, yeah. So let’s get started.
Michael Madsen:
Yep. So regarding licensing for Yoga Connect and Yoga Capture. Starting at $5,000 annually and then on-prem pricing available depending on the solution and the requirements. Yoga Forms starting at $999 monthly, again with on-prem pricing available. Yoga Docs starts at $5,000 plus annual maintenance, SaaS pricing available, and we also bundle all of these, so we have bundle options.
John Marney:
Yep. And as you’ll see, primarily our cloud versions are our preferred. And because of our ability to continually maintain the products, especially Yoga Connect. Yoga Connect as an on-prem is available but generally not recommended except in very specific use cases. As far as implementation, I don’t remember whose slide this was but I’m just going to run through it. So the pricing that we provide you includes installation or provisioning, includes training on the product, and includes any of the ready or pre-built integrations that we had. More often than not, especially when it’s on-prem, there may be additional customizations or integrations that you require. Those may require professional services to implement. However, after the implementation they are covered under the software. So any integrations that we facilitate we will cover under the support agreement. So SaaS tenants, so for any of the cloud subscriptions we can generally provision the environment in 48 hours, oftentimes it’s within a couple hours of receiving the subscription.
John Marney:
And then any integration support, how are we getting data in and out of those subscriptions that’s ongoing, right? And oftentimes this is part of a larger project or implementation so we are not going to be the ones that hold that up. For any on-prem products. Install and training is usually a one to two week process. And again, that’s software maintenance for… The annual maintenance would cover any brake fix. However, any new enhancements or new integrations that you encounter downstream would require additional services.
John Marney:
And for sales and support, so if you saw something you’re interested in, please contact [email protected]. You will speak to a real life PRI human being. You can discuss adding enhancements if you’re an existing client or even something you’re interested in seeing and we’ll discuss how we can work that into our product roadmap. You can also schedule demonstrations and for some products, access to a sandbox, we can provide that information. And as far as upgrades, how do upgrades work within this our support model? All of our subscription products leverage the continuous deployment or continuous improvement models. So they’re generally aren’t big upgrades. We follow the best practices within a devops to make sure that rollouts are tested and solid before moving to the production instance and then for on-prem products, generally upgrade paths are available. Some legacy products, if there’s anybody on this who’s using older versions, don’t necessarily have an upgrade path because they’ve been rebuilt but that’s a very specific scenario.
John Marney:
So I believe that is the content of our presentation. We are open to questions, I have not received any so far. Again if you have questions please feel free to throw them into the GoTo Webinar questions panel. We’ll give that a minute or so here and then we’ll wrap up. So again just as a quick review, Yoga Capture for ingesting all types of content and making it ready for processing. Yoga Docs for document viewing and workflow driving. Yoga Forms for rapidly deploying electronic forms to your enterprise, and Yoga Connect for integration as a service.
Michael Madsen:
Yeah, and when john was mentioning the Yoga Forms HR Library, I just wanted to mention that we’ve got some cool stuff in the works just for some other business processes. So we’ve been playing around with some items. One of the things that sticks out to me specifically, is just thinking of creative solutions for business need. So John spent a lot of time talking about the signature field inside of the Yoga Form, well that functionality you can actually expand to things more than just signature. Because if you think about it, it’s really just kind of like a paint window where you can just move your mouse around and create that mark. Well, we started to think, wouldn’t that be good for diagnostic forms in a hospital environment or something like that? So imagine if a doctor, who is performing his diagnostic process with a patient, and they have an image of a body on their iPad or whatever they have in front of them at the time, and they’re asking the patient, “Okay, tell me what hurts, what areas are you having problems with,” and they will on those diagnostic forms actually have that that body or that body part that is the problem and they’ll circle different areas on the body part to identify those specifics.
Michael Madsen:
Well you can do that directly in the Yoga Form on that iPad that he’s using, so there are some really, really intuitive cool solutions that you can do with forms like this when you’re thinking outside the box and not just pigeonholing yourself with invoices or vendor data or something like that, so really the options are endless.
John Marney:
Absolutely. All right. Well, stay tuned for individual Yoga Product Webinars, where will contain demonstrations and more information about features and pricing. Thank you all for joining us today and please don’t hesitate to reach out to myself to Michael or [email protected] to further the discussion. Thank you.
Michael Madsen:
Thanks everybody.
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