Today we talk to David Quijano, Managing Director of Grupo Retabet. In our chat, David talks to us about the importance of technology in the development of his business and how thanks to it, and to the improvement of their efficiency, they have been able to compete head to head with much larger companies.
What is the Retabet Group?
Retabet Group is a multinational group, because we are not only in Spain, but we are also in foreign countries such as Peru and some other countries, selling technology to them.
We are a group dedicated primarily to the management and monitoring of sports betting, but not only that, because we also have a small street operator of B machines, which are the slot machines of a lifetime, and in turn we have a company that manages and monitors databases.
We are data intensive and it is a product that did not exist in the market, we had to develop it for ourselves and we realized that companies that also had that importance of data and that the database was part of their core, could use our product, so we packaged it and we are marketing it and we already have many customers who use it.
In these 20 years of Retabet’s history, how important has technology been?
We are, as I said before, a multinational company fundamentally dedicated to the management of sports betting, but what we are is a great technological company. Technology is behind us, it is at the base of our daily work.
Why? Because the sports betting business is a very competitive and technological business. Things are constantly changing, new functionalities are being introduced, new products, new customer services, and so you must have a very strong technology team to be able to develop it continuously.
What happens? Our competitors are basically massive companies that have many more resources than us and, if we are not very productive and we optimize a lot and get a lot of productivity, we could not compete with them, so technology makes us try to be much more productive, much more efficient and do things in a much more effective way, with fewer resources of people and trying to replace what we can with technology, so that we do many more things in less time, to be more productive and more efficient.
You are strongly committed to the automation of administrative processes, why?
In this continuous search for efficiency, productivity improvement and process improvement, four years ago we came to a technology that we did not know about, which was the automation of administrative processes.
We were told that it existed, but it is true that it was incipient, there were many people, perhaps in the United States, but here there were very few companies that developed it.
They told us that Eroski was working on it. We went to visit Eroski, they opened their doors to us, and we realized that we could perfectly apply what they were doing.
And now, four years later, I can say that we have more than 12,000 automated hours. We have three robots that do administrative processes for us and we have become, I go back a little bit to what I said before, a much more efficient company.
Why? Because now we are able to carry out processes that were unthinkable before. Before, to give an example, in the financial department, to balance certain magnitudes, they could do it every three months and on top of that they only stayed a little bit on the tip of the iceberg, in large magnitudes. Now they can look almost down to the last level of detail day by day, if they want to, because thanks to robots they do processes that used to be very tedious, very complicated, and that you had to handle a lot of data and a lot of applications, and the robot does it much more efficiently.
And what we have become is supervisors and analyzers of the information generated by the robot.
Last year we enjoyed a TOP CEBEK meeting at Retabet focused on automation through RPA. What other innovative lines are you going to work on in the coming years?
We, as I said before, are a big technology company, so we have to be at the forefront of everything that comes out. Our strongest department, and the core of our company, is the software development department and the technical department, the technology department, where we have about 80 people who are both 80 technology fierce men and women.
And from there, we develop all the applications that we use to manage our work. We develop them in-house with this team that we have.
What happens? From the technology department outwards, this department, as it were, is dedicated to managing applications that are purely for our betting business. What happens? Then we are a company that has the different departments that all companies have: purchasing, human resources, marketing, finance… So, these are the applications that our technology department cannot manage, and these are the ones we try to develop with other technology or with other external companies.
In this case we have the help of Devol, which is a company that is helping us to automate administrative processes and, from there, little by little we are also introducing artificial intelligence processes. We are already carrying out small artificial intelligence projects that will give us a little bit of life in the following years. That is the direction we have to go in.
A final thought…
We have the doors of our house always open for people to see what we do because we are a very transparent, very professional, very technological company that does things, I believe, in a very efficient and productive way, and we are married to technology, including it in the DNA of the company.
We are a multinational, as I said before, with more than 500 people in more than 20 companies in several countries. But we still have the DNA of the startup we were when we were born in 2003. We are in continuous search for efficiency, effectiveness and productivity improvement, and that has to be done with technology.
We are fervent believers in technology and everything that goes with it. The technological world is going that way, and we have to follow that line. We want to continue to survive with the big monsters that compete with us.
