The challenge

In November 2019, Patrick Olsen founded NyxTech, an RPA consulting company based in Denmark, with a key goal in mind: make Robotic Process Automation accessible to small- and medium-sized companies.Having spent nearly a decade working on IT and automation projects for the Danish importer of Volkswagen, Olsen knew that earlier businesses could see lasting benefits by starting with RPA sooner. “Especially when you’re just starting out, keeping your operating costs low as you grow is critical,” said Olsen. “RPA can provide you with a competitive edge by giving you back time and resources to re-invest in areas that will increase your top line.”But the majority of technology consultants only support legacy drag-and-drop RPA solutions. “These options are way too expensive for smaller organizations, and the return on investment simply isn’t there,” said Olsen. And despite the high price tag, Olsen found the bots broke easily and needed constant maintenance.

The solution

Olsen knew he could do better. He wanted something that was easy and fast to set up for his clients, and was built on a more modern language like Python. So when he saw Robocorp CEO Antti Karjalainen speaking about the benefits of open source and cloud-native automation at a Robot Framework conference, he knew he had found his match. “I think open source RPA is the future,” said Olsen.After settling on Robocorp, Olsen quickly got to work building robots for clients. As a completely self-taught programmer, Olsen found Robocorp’s documentation and keywords to be intuitive and easy. “You don’t need to have studied computer science to get started,” said Olsen.One of Olsen’s most recent clients is a rapidly growing Danish start-up that repairs mobile phones. A logistics-heavy business, a major challenge they faced was figuring out how to handle the shipping, invoicing, and ticketing of each phone they repaired. They were dedicating 100% of one employee’s time to the manual and time-consuming task of processing orders.“When I met them,” said Olsen, “they were processing about 50 phones per day, working until 10 or 11 at night just to keep up.” Clearly, this wasn’t scalable. And the startup was desperate for a way to make it faster while keeping costs low.After learning his client’s process, Olsen built a fully operational software robot, with detailed documentation, and delivered it to the client. The entire project took him just 15 hours.

The results

The client was amazed. With Olsen’s solution, the employee handling the orders could trigger the Robot Assistant from his Desktop. The bot Olsen built would create shipping labels, update their ticketing system, and migrate client data – up to 50 at a time – while the employee went to retrieve the phones from the stockroom. By the time the employee returned with the phones, the bot was already done.All told, Nyxtech automated 95% of that full time employee’s old repetitive work. And the startup is now handling 100+ phones per day at no additional overhead – more than double what they were able to achieve with 1 employee working full time.“The last time I saw the young employee who used to manually handle these orders, he seemed a little bored,” joked Olsen. “But I have no doubt he’ll soon be re-directed towards new initiatives as the company continues to scale rapidly.”And as for NyxTech, Olsen is excited about the future and plans to hire additional employees soon. “We are looking into using Robocorp to help with automating SAP workflows,” said Olsen. “I think Robocorp and Python generally is going to be a strong competitor in that space. It will even beat SAP’s own RPA tools.”

Need help creating automations that will drastically improve your own company? Contact official Robocorp partner NyxTech and jumpstart your initiatives today.