Introduction: Thoughtful Automation & Why Robocorp

Thoughtful Automation is a Bots-as-a-Service solutions provider. Their aim is to enable businesses in the mid-market to leverage the power of automation by offering a solution that is cost-effective, efficient, and scalable without any additional overheads.

 They were using UiPath to build automation solutions and it proved to be a very expensive platform when one of their customers (Fort Lauderdale-based behavioral healthcare company) approached to automate their highly manual invoicing process. However, the $55,000 implementation costs for a single UiPath robot was an absolute no-go and beyond budget for that mid-market customer.

“We were losing money to build that bot, just to prove the model worked,”  - Alex Zekoff, CEO, Thoughtful Automation

 Thoughtful Automation decided to research for an alternative solution which was not proprietary, offered ownership of code and was cost-effective to scale without any additional overheads. 

“We wanted the ability to basically own the code, control every setting, so we could send requests to the cloud platform and get it back a certain way. We don’t want to be in the business of managing servers or databases. We want to focus on solving business problems using all the tools available to our advantage.”   - Serheii Romanets, Engineering Lead, Thoughtful Automation.

 Romanets and team started evaluating open source RPA technologies and after considering Python-based Robot Framework and Selenium, they concluded that they needed a hybrid open source and SaaS offering, Consequently, the team came across Robocorp’s technology - the ease of use of Robocorp platform and resource-based pricing was a perfect match for their business model as well as for their customers. 

Thoughtful Automation realized that most SMB and mid-market companies miss out on the benefits of RPA because of the steep upfront costs and long (3-6 years) payback periods. In addition businesses also need internal technical RPA expertise for hosting and maintenance of post-implementation. 

For Zekoff, this was a “missed opportunity” and loss of potential revenue from businesses in that market segment. Zekoff wanted to drive the implementation fee of his bots down to $0, and adopt a “minimum viable bot” strategy that would accelerate delivery times. Clients could see a return on their investment right away and pay a nominal monthly fee for usage, hosting, and maintenance. Thoughtful Automation could then add to the bots’ capabilities over time as the client’s needs evolved.

However, implementing the above on UiPath proved to be challenging. Thoughtful Automation had to pay for not just the robot licenses, but also for the hosting and managing the robots. For each robot, Thoughtful Automation estimates they paid $1,000 for the SQL servers + $20,000 for the orchestrator + $8,000 for the license for a total of $29,000 per robot every month. Zenkoff realized that this was an expensive and inefficient way to build bots, just to prove that the model worked.

In addition, Thoughtful Automation’s development team had already started to run into roadblocks due to UiPath’s prescriptive ways of building. Built primarily for business users who don’t code, packaged offerings force developers to work within a highly prescriptive support model that fails to support more complex needs. As a development-focused company, sticking with a proprietary tool from a technical perspective was no longer a viable option. Even on their cloud offering, UiPath’s packaged technology meant Thoughtful Automation would still pay more for their support model and own less of the design decisions. “What we want is to be able to own the responsibility of the code. We don’t want to assign that to the vendor,” said engineering lead Serheii Romanets.

Knowing the team wanted to move away from packaged software, Thoughtful Automation started to evaluate open source RPA technologies. They had two key criteria: they wanted to be able to control development at the code-level, and they wanted a low-maintenance cloud solution that could easily scale horizontally from 1 to 100 bots without additional overhead.

The team considered frameworks like the Python-based Robot Framework and Selenium. But while that solved the scalability problem, it didn’t solve the deployment problem. They wanted to focus on solving business problems, not the business of managing servers or databases.

Realizing that they needed a hybrid open source and SaaS offering, the team found Robocorp, which was not yet generally available. Zekoff reached out to Robocorp to get early access. From just playing with Robocorp’s preinstalled examples, reading the documentation, and running his own Python tests, Romanets knew within minutes that he had found the solution for their needs. “Robocorp manages the orchestration, servers, databases, and makes it easy for our developers to quickly get up to speed,” said Romanets. “I just have to focus on automation as code.”

Robocorp’s resource-based pricing also easily supported Thoughtful Automation’s goal of a $0 implementation fee. Instead of paying per robot license that sits idle when in off-peak hours, Thoughtful Automation could ensure that their costs were as optimized as possible, paying only for the robot minutes that they used.

From start to end, migrating their bots from UiPath to Robocorp took just two weeks. “But that was just for our first bot, and I was spending a lot of time familiarizing myself with Robocorp’s libraries and getting the settings configured,” said Romanets. “Our next bots are already being developed in about half that time.”

For the first bot that the team migrated over, runs originally would take an average of 100 seconds. In Robocorp, the team saw run times decrease to 40 seconds, or a 60% reduction in individual threads.

“From an infrastructure and management perspective, what used to take hours getting up and running, with Robocorp, I don’t have to deploy anything. It’s gone from hours to really nothing,” said Romanets.

Thoughtful Automation also knew they needed to increase their robotic workers’ parallelization to ensure their clients’ backlogs were completed as quickly as possible. But because of charges per robot license, they were constrained to a 1x parallelization per license. With Robocorp, their already more efficient robots were running even faster at a 10x parallelization, the soft limit currently imposed by Robocorp.

What previously took 2 employees processing 30 invoices a day at full capacity, Thoughtful Automation was able to reduce to ¼ of an employee processing 90 invoices a day, or 8x in employee time saved and a 3x increase in invoice processing speed.

At the time of this writing, Thoughtful Automation has successfully implemented solutions for customers in healthcare.  

Check out this webinar to learn more on how automation can redefine your business outcomes

Need help developing intelligent automations to drive down costs and improve efficiencies? Contact Robocorp’s official partner Thoughtful Automation and kick start your business process automation initiatives today.

Become a Robocorp partner like Thoughtful Automation

How Thoughtful Automation switched to Robocorp and reduced OpEx by 90%

Teknei is a technology company born in Mexico in 2010 and established in Spain in 2011. Teknei’s specialization is around four areas: Enterprise Content Management (ECM), Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Cyber Security, and Blockchain/Digital Identity. Their main customers are in the finance, insurance and public administration sectors.

In 2018, Teknei acquired a small company (named FSI), which specialized in RPA. FSI became the RPA division within Teknei.

Teknei is now capitalizing on the opportunity to offer a low initial investment and an attractive modern implementation structure that grows with their customers.

Three different systems integrated in less than 4 weeks

Two integrated ERPs (and more in its way) at the time this interview was published

Two different methods of enrollment implemented in the National Health System

Teknei has several SMB customers in Spain whose Human Resources departments were using time consuming and error prone processes when enrolling new employees.

Small and medium businesses hand over these new employee processes to specialized companies that do the accountancy, tax registration, and all the interactions with government departments related to new enrollments and changes in labor contracts.

These processes around labor contracts require people to interact with more than three different environments and applications. Also, 24 hours after the information is sent they have to come back to the previous system to obtain a "proof of presentation”.

Interacting within multiple systems was a huge pain for users, having to enter the same data into three different systems. It took more than five minutes for each new employee record to be added to the three systems, cumulatively there was a massive opportunity to save time and eliminate errors.

The process Teknei implemented with Robocorp solves the issue end-to-end of these painstaking tasks. This time and cost saving automation will be used by a number of companies, run using different infrastructures, and the flexibility of Robocorp’s platform perfectly enables that.

Track and trace is essential in these kinds of processes. Also, the way you configure the steps within the process and the environments in which every step must be executed is crucial.

Robocorp Cloud allows Teknei to manage the entire process from a central repository, they can use work items to orchestrate the entire process and every step can be run in a different environment depending on the requirements.

The entire process of evaluating Robocorp, learning, and building this project took less than 4 weeks. Coding took less time but they needed to understand the Robocorp approach and how to make use of all the available libraries.

The Robocorp approach, based on work items, allowed Teknei to control new enrollments individually. The ability to track, trace and audit information about every step in every system for every new employee was very important for both Teknei as well as their customers.

As part of the project they built a new web user interface where the company enrolling the employee can enter the data and then wait for the robots to process it and return the results.

This approach frees up all that wasted time and allows the companies implementing these processes to concentrate on the more important things while handing over to the robots the repetitive, mundane, boring and error prone tasks.

This approach also allows Teknei to orchestrate all the work around more than one ERP system. External BPO’s work with more than one system and all this can be configured freeing users from manual “check and act” work.

Need help creating automation solutions with low initial investment and modern implementation that provides scalability? Contact Robocorp’s official partner Teknei and jumpstart your path to automation today!

How Robocorp Partner Teknei Deployed Client Solutions in Less Than 4 Weeks

Introduction: Babybots LLC, The Problem and Why Robocorp

Babybots LLC is an automation service provider (based in Houston, Texas), that develops, deploys, and maintains automated bots across companies of all sizes. Their goal is to reduce human time spent on tasks that are repetitive and rule based, allowing their clients to focus on the bigger picture of growing their business.

Their journey initially started from automating small tasks that made a big difference for a self-run ecommerce store. Immediately seeing the value it brought in day-to-day operations, the decision was made to bring this technology to others. After experiencing a number of small successes in automating tasks for other ecommerce players, the immediate problems regarding lack of infrastructure to manage and monitor the automations was noted as a limiting factor for scaling.

That is when Babybots partnered with Robocorp. Our Cloud and Control Room provides them with the infrastructure they need to manage and scale as the business grows. Not only does our product enable them to optimize their bots for scale, they can also access real-time insights into how much human time is actually being saved - all in a single pane of glass!

“This project has proven that Robocorp was built for any type of automation. Our initial scope of this job was thought to be smaller than it turned out to be. The beauty is that Robocorp’s infrastructure didn't break or stall any step of the way, and we are able to continuously offer these product updates monthly because of it.” -- Cory Shreffler, Automation Analyst, Babybots

One of Babybots’ first clients—a commercial appliance repair company—was looking to revamp their supply chain through automating the import of products to their store on a monthly basis. This included everything from the initial upload of 130k+ products to a consistent feed of updated pricing/quantity each month. This wasn't a type of RPA request Babybots had encountered. This is a fresh case for RPA, as they hadn't found another way to efficiently meet this need.

Babybots’ approach was to assess the feasibility of what they were looking for, identify any bottlenecks prior to kickoff, and construct the bots in a manner that they can rely on monthly for consistent inventory feeds.

They built a total of five bots that handle the pulling, formatting, and aggregation of 130K+ products, utilizing Robocorp for infrastructure, with a mix of Python and RPA Framework for programming. Each product had roughly six to ten data points, ranging from the price/inventory level, to user manuals and store location as well. Babybots was able to cut down the runtime substantially, e.g., some of the bots could pull over 60k+ products within an hour.

Rather than spending the time and retaining the technical staff to operate the bot on a regular basis, the client elected to opt into Babybots’ Robot as a Service model (RaaS). With this model, Babybots not only manages the bots on the client’s behalf but runs them as well. On the first of every month, the client will receive a new sheet containing the most up-to-date inventory/pricing for their store. All the client needs to do is upload the details to their webstore.

One of the main challenges Babybots faced was lowering the scrape time. The initial buildout took days to run. But, through careful optimization of the process they were able to gather all desired results in just a matter of hours.

“The Robocorp team was very helpful with quick responses throughout the process. While they also set up a dedicated Slack channel for direct support, their community Slack channel also provided lots of helpful information to resolve and troubleshoot issues”.  -- Cory Shreffler, Automation Analyst, Babybots 

From signing the Statement of Work to implementation, the project lasted a total of 5 weeks. As this was one of Babybots’ first projects utilizing the Robocorp platform, they had questions on where to start and how to ensure everything is set up properly. The Robocorp team was very helpful throughout the process, including the Robocorp Slack community.

“I reached out to Peter Steube, Head of Partner Alliances at Robocorp to understand the best way to set up our implementation and suggest options for our unique use case. He was not only receptive, but went out of his way to assist in building a few models that could be beneficial to both the client & myself.” -- Cory Shreffler, Automation Analyst, Babybots 

Now, thanks to the automation, Babybots’ client has more product availability in one centralized location than all their competitors. They have also minimized the chance of making any customer unhappy, as now they will be able to accurately view what's in stock and what isn't - No more overselling! This also enables them to be more dynamic with their pricing to accommodate for market value changes.

It would not have been possible to achieve these benefits without automation. Babybot’s client estimates that just the initial product data load would have taken one person at least 4 months to complete if they were inputting manually and then it would be a full-time job to keep up with the monthly updates.

It takes the robot roughly 4-6 hours to complete the entirety of this job. So, the time savings are real but the true benefits are the new revenue opportunities and business models the client can explore as a result of the automation.

Transform your business with the power and flexibility of Robocorp’s RPA solution. Reduce costs and increase productivity, efficiency, time to value as well as customer satisfaction while gaining a competitive edge to grow your business. 

Contact Babybots Sales to create robust automation solutions and realize significant savings in cost, time and more!

How Babybots created multiple bots that significantly reduced processing time from 4 months to 4 hours

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.

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 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.

How NyxTech automated 95% of their client’s manual order handling process while doubling output

Quandri is a Bots-as-a-Service provider based in Vancouver, Canada, founded in 2020 by two entrepreneurial brothers. They had experienced the benefits of RPA first-hand while working at another company and wanted to create a Bots-as-a-Service offering so all businesses could benefit from this kind of technology, instead of just large enterprises.

They started using UiPath, but made a switch to Robocorp relatively quickly because of the flexibility of building digital workers in Python and to leverage our consumption-based pricing model with no up-front licensing fees. It was an advantage for them to build robots from scratch themselves instead of relying on and having their technology housed in a third party like UiPath. Working in Python also opened up their talent pool to a very broad range of developers who didn’t have RPA experience.

“UiPath and other providers are built for the enterprise and are clunky.  Robocorp is modern both in platform and pricing and gives us the flexibility to build our business how we want and provide more value to customers.” - Jackson Fregeau, Co-Founder, Quandri

Robocorp’s consumption-based pricing model was also very appealing to them as it was how they wanted to charge their customers and with no up-front licensing costs, they did not need a large initial capital investment.

One of Quandri’s customers, Cornerstone Insurance, had a full-time employee who was spending 6 hours every single day downloading around 300 insurance policies in their broker management system (BMS), opening up those policies, reading them, storing their contents, naming the policy and then assigning a follow-up activity for the appropriate broker. This cost Cornerstone Insurance approximately $45,000 per year.  

The delays in processing policies also hampered/decreased time to value as the brokers couldn’t get back to customers immediately. Additionally, it was hard to staff because the work was quite boring.

Quandri built a bot to automate this process from end to end. It logs into Cornerstone Insurance’s BMS system every day, downloads 300 to 400 policies, reads them using OCR, stores the information, names the policy, and assigns any follow-up activity.

One of the biggest challenges in designing the solution was building all of the logic into the bot. First, they had to sit down with Cornerstone Insurance and map out the process. It was quite complex with a few hundred steps and had to navigate the logic of understanding and making decisions based on over one hundred different kinds of policies. It took time to build in the logic, however, the bot is now correctly categorizing and naming 98% of these policies every single day and is getting smarter with each passing day.

Robocorp was also on hand to help throughout the development process. “Any time we had an issue, they were extremely responsive through our shared Slack channel. This is a huge value point for Robocorp as their developers are always available to help us. We submit an inquiry at night, and wake up in the morning to get an answer.” - Jamieson Fregeau, Co-Founder Quandri.

The entire project, from process documentation to development and implementation was completed in 6 weeks. After the bot was deployed, Cornerstone Insurance reached out to Quandri about a week later to get started on a digital worker  which Quandri is now almost being deployed

Quandri’s solution achieved initial cost savings of 47% on the process with projected savings of 60% per year after the first year (savings from development and ongoing maintenance costs). The process that took 6 hours per day to complete is now done in 1 hours. Every day, 300 to 400 policies are processed by this bot and with an 83% reduction in processing time, 120 hours are saved every month. 

There were also a number of long-term benefits. Cornerstone Insurance was able to repurpose almost one FTE to high-value work and they no longer needed to staff a mundane and repetitive job that was notoriously hard to staff. Because the process is now done when they show up to work in the morning the brokers can get back to customers much quicker than they could previously.

 In the quarter prior, 16,000 policies were processed, the majority of which are now being processed by the bot. 

 The most important metric for Cornerstone Insurance was whether the cost made sense and would this be cheaper than a person. In the end, it was about 50% of the cost savings.

Need help creating automations that will provide cost savings, increase efficiency and time to value? Contact Robocorp’s official partner Quandri and jumpstart your path to automation today!

How Quandri automated 100% of time-consuming repetitive work of daily processing thousands of insurance policies while saving costs and freeing up FTE for valuable work

Introduction: Roboteer, The Problem and Why Robocorp

 Roboteer is an intelligent automation agency based in London, UK. Consisting of a small team of two as of right now, they’re expected to grow quickly over the next 12 months as they acquire more clients in the property management industry and related sectors. Since their inception, their primary focus has been on working with small businesses who want to automate repeat, monotonous tasks that cost lots of manual hours per week to complete. In other words? They’re on a mission to “superpower” small businesses through automation, so these business owners can begin maximizing efficiencies, labor-productivity ratios, and their ultimate profitability. Part of this goal is to dispel the common misconception among small business owners that the benefits of automation are exclusive to multinational, public companies - this is not the case anymore. 

Roboteer’s main automation offerings include reading text from images with OCR, as this is a deliverable many of their clients are looking for in automating key business processes. However, early on in their journey, Roboteer discovered that using other vendors was prohibitive to even getting started providing automated solutions to their target market: the huge yearly licensing cost associated with these solutions were neither feasible nor practical for their clients. In other words? Traditional RPA providers were a “non-starter.” They needed a flexible solution that matched their (and their clients’) needs. Enter Robocorp. 

When Roboteer first discovered Robocorp, they were delighted to learn of several key features: they could use raw python to build a solution from scratch; the billing model was based on pay per use (so the cost was directly proportional to the use their clients would get out of their solution); and the top tier customer service meant they could be guided over any potential roadblocks in their path in good time, with little problem (a massive deal since they wanted to deliver a solution speedily and easily). 

“Being able to build and deploy solutions quickly and run them in the cloud, on a really startup friendly pricing plan is an absolute game changer and that is what Robocorp provided us with. RPA is no longer just for multinationals, RPA is for everyone with manual, repetitive work issues to solve!”  — Roboteer

One of the first automations Roboteer undertook after partnering with Robocorp was to automate repetitive and manual tasks for a property management company, also based in the UK. This business was struggling with an expensive, time consuming process which involved charging tenants for standard fees, such as a replacement key, a deep clean of their apartment, and so on. These charges were compiled across several lists, of which there were hundreds of records on each. To process each record, it took approximately 3 minutes. Since there were hundreds of records to process weekly, this was costing at least 20 hours a week in manual processing time. 

Roboteer knew that, to begin, they needed to document the process of billing tenants and invoicing suppliers. Starting with a video of the process (provided by their client), they were able to populate the Process Definition Document (PDD) template provided by Robocorp. After the client signed off on the PDD, agreeing that it accurately described the process, they were then able to build an unattended robot that could pick up information from an easy to use Google Sheet. The robot would then log in to the web application that processes invoices and transactions for rented accommodation, and from there enter all information in the relevant fields. Since the unattended bot ran on Robocorp Cloud, the client was extra happy, because they could remotely run it from anywhere in the click of a button (without ever needing to acquire or build any additional on-premise infrastructure to house or manage the bots).

"Control Room provides the ability to easily run bots from anywhere with a click of a button and also schedule the bots to run at a specific time throughout the day. This is crucial for our clients with small businesses who don’t have the time or resources to learn and navigate through complicated systems. Also, being able to run the bots in a hosted container in Robocorp Cloud and manage everything through the Control Room is really nice and saves us a lot of hassle." — Roboteer

The timeline from first receiving the process video to implementation was just three weeks. Any hiccups in the iteration of building the solution, which included a challenge in finding what libraries performed best (since they perform differently across different websites and browsers) was immediately solved. All issues were resolved in a matter of hours.

"It was amazing how Robocorp was able to support us in getting our first few bots off the ground, from technical support to help with setting up billing , they were there every step of the way, always available on Slack!" — Roboteer

Clearly, Roboteer’s unattended robot presents a more cost-efficient and time-efficient solution than the manual process the client was using before. But exactly how much better is it for their business? Well, the bot can complete the same task in 30 seconds (versus 3 minutes), which is 83% faster and saves around £12k per year in manual labor cost. The capital that their property management company saves from Roboteer’s solution has been immediate, since from the very first time they ran the bot, they immediately yielded a 2x return on investment. This return will only compound as they continue using the unattended robot while scaling their business (without the associated heavy labor costs this doubtless would have prompted otherwise). 

In addition to the initial and ongoing labor cost savings, the client will no longer need to train someone to do this manual data entry work. This is welcome news to the rest of the team since this is a position with high turnover (due to the monotonous, repeat nature of the work), and the associated hiring fees, recruitment fees, time investment, and onboarding costs all meant this position was difficult to fill and expensive in more ways than one. As a result, the client is happier, this key business process is more efficient, less costly, and can scale without the associated headache of manually computing tenant records and invoices. On the other hand, Roboteer is similarly happy to know that - thanks to the resilient, flexibility, and affordability of Robocorp’s software - they can expand this client’s use cases for RPA, in addition to using Robocorp’s technology with other clients as Roboteer too grows their business. 

Transform your business with the power and flexibility of Robocorp's RPA solution. Reduce costs and significantly increase productivity, efficiency, time to value by automating mundane processes and investing the time saved in more strategic/revenue generating work.

Contact Roboteer and jumpstart your path to automation today!

How Roboteer saved £12k costs with simple but efficient automations

Kind Lending’s Problem, and How Robocorp Could Help

Kind Lending is a fast growing mortgage banking startup headquartered in Santa Ana, California. 

Founded in 2019, it’s rapidly expanding. Their focus is on leveraging “new technology and process efficiencies” to reinvent the mortgage lending process and introduce a contemporary approach to mortgage banking.

From the start, they knew that process automation would be essential to ensuring their success. The responsibility of selecting and implementing the right RPA solution fell onto Jacob Hightower, Automation Engineer. 

Jacob had built a number of automations at his previous employer, and now once again had an opportunity to engineer and build efficient processes at Kind Lending. He knew it was of paramount importance to pick a robust solution that had the common development tools they needed, but also the flexibility and dynamism to build whatever they needed if the functionality wasn’t already available in the tool.

Already familiar with traditional RPA tools like UiPath and Blue Prism, he knew these providers not only had huge startup costs, but were also very limited in their ability to customize automations. In particular, their drag & drop interface meant it was easy to get started, but any roadblocks presented a long and arduous process. In his experience, as soon as you ran into something that wasn’t supported on their platform, their support team would have to get involved (in addition to submitting a feature enhancement request), and you would be in for a wait, simply hoping they prioritized it.

For that reason, Jacob started looking for an easy to use, open source, developer-focused RPA technology. 

He knew that most automations are not so complex as to require a developer with over a decade of coding experience. On the contrary, he understood a lot are simple scripts that require knowledge of how to navigate an API, read JSON data, and enact some basic web-scraping. Simplicity was so important in this case because the majority of the employees at Kind Lending who would be building automations were not trained in software development. As a result, they needed a platform that - on the one hand - would be flexible, but on the other would still be easy enough to manipulate that staff could understand it and build their own automations. 

"I expected to be able to have a platform where I could easily take an automation from concept to actual product in a short amount of time with the ability to report on the effectiveness of that automation. Robocorp definitely exceeded those expectations. The keywords and libraries already have so much functionality I need, and I very rarely have to custom code things."

- Jacob Hightower, Automation Engineer, Kindlending

Jacob’s research into open source, developer-focused RPA solutions quickly led him to Robocorp’s RPA Framework. 

From there, Robocorp’s customizability, built-in reporting with logs and analytics, and friendly cost, paired with its consumption based-pricing model, worked to seal the deal.

With other RPA vendors, Kind Lending would have to buy licenses just to train their staff and have them start building automations. (At that rate, they might never see any return on that investment!) With Robocorp, however, the team could immediately try it out on their own, knowing that - worst case - if they were to fail, there would be no harm or financial loss, simply just a few hours of time wasted. 

The final consideration for Jacob was scalability. Jacob looked into Robocorp’s cloud native Control Room, and immediately saw that it would provide seamless scalability, thus allowing Kind Lending to quickly create automations in tandem with business growth. Robocorp also provided Kind Lending the ability to create self-hosted environments when necessary to protect data, as it does with all customers.

In the case of Kind Lending, current implementation consists of both Attended and Unattended bots with Control Room in Robocorp Cloud, and most of these automations run on-premises. 

Let’s take an example of one of these bots in action. 

One of the first automations implemented at Kind Lending was put in place to help the Capital Markets team determine the fair value of loans. It had previously tackled this business process by downloading and formatting the pricing information from government loan websites. Unfortunately, this information gathering task was very tedious and time-consuming, not to mention routine. In other words? This resource-intensive, repeat exercise was a prime candidate for automation. 

Previous to automation, the process used to take anywhere from 30 to 45 minutes, each and every time it was run. Now, with Robocorp’s RPA technology, it takes approximately 4 minutes. This includes the time it takes to gather all the report data, format it correctly, and input it into a shared location in which the team can either use it, or upload it into other tools. In Kind Lending’s case, they have put the bot on a schedule it can adhere to, but it’s worth noting that it also has the ability to run on demand. In either case, this 90% reduction in process time allows their Capital Markets team to dedicate their time to more interesting, revenue-generating channels. 

"The automation tool has really helped in increasing the efficiency of my workflow, allowing me to simultaneously perform other functions of the process and significantly cut down on the overall processing time"

- Howard Chu, Kind Lending Wholesale Trader, Capital Markets team

From there, Jacob decided to look into using Robocorp to accelerate the quality assurance processes at Kind Lending.

For instance, whenever Kind Lending would roll out a new product, their QA team traditionally had to check the online pricing tool. This was to make sure that all rules have been correctly applied, and that it will not show products that are not available for a given scenario.

This testing often required walking through hundreds of different pricing scenarios, which led to long wait times and other distractions. As a result, the process would often take an entire day!

Now with the help of a Robocorp Assistant, QA can let the robot automatically check the online pricing tool. QA simply has to select a spreadsheet containing those different pricing scenarios, then let the bot handle all the heavy lifting. This process, from start to finish, now takes only 30 minutes. Beyond the pricing tool, the QA team also uses other automation suites built into the attendant that allow them to run full smoke tests of particular systems, in different environments, based on the options they choose and the business operation they’re fulfilling.

Fortunately, Robocorp’s built in logs make it super easy and intuitive for QA testers to see if any of the test scenarios failed. If yes, screenshots are automatically generated, which details exactly how it failed. As you may guess, this greatly reduces the time it takes to resolve issues with the online pricing tool and other processes. And if QA testers want to verify the accuracy for whatever reason? These same logs detail the logic path that the code took, so they can see exactly when, where, and how the bot detected the roadblock. 

Thanks to exceptional time savings as a result of automation, the QA team’s morale has been greatly improved, and by all accounts employee satisfaction levels have risen. In particular, since the pricing tool receives regular updates, there used to be a constant pressure on the QA team to complete the testing on tight timelines. This is most easily illustrated by the fact that when tests were completed manually, some QA engineers had to stay up as late as 2am in order to complete all required testing, in advance of the next update. Since their implementation, Robocorp’s helpful bots have resolved this issue. 

In the next evolution of this QA automation use case, Jacob is using a popular tool in Robocorp’s Robot Framework called “Data Driver.” As you may have already guessed, this is for conducting data-driven tests. As an example, when QA submits a spreadsheet, the automated process will split it into 10 chunks. It will then submit each chunk as a separate work item in Robocorp Control Room, and from there run a batch of robots using Robocorp’s parallel-processing feature. This makes it possible to significantly reduce execution time: instead of a single robot completing this task in 30 minutes, 10 robots can execute this process concurrently and validate all 300 different scenarios in only 3 minutes.

One of Jacob’s favorite parts of all this? To get a holistic view, he simply turns to the Control Room, which provides analytics that give a visual representation of execution status across the entire robot workforce. This is in sharp contrast to the software at his previous employer, in which Jacob had to build his own reporting and analytics (using SQL queries and Tableau business intelligence software), just to get basic info on automations such as how the automation ran, how long it ran for, where it failed, etc. 

From there, another time-consuming process which was automated with Robocorp was scheduled file transfers. 

The process was already partially implemented. Windows Powershell scripts were used by the operators to generate the data files, and Kind Lending then used an SFTP client manually to securely transfer them to Partner services. Because the RPA framework can run subprocesses, the PowerShell scripts were simply called by the robot, so it was not necessary to reimplement the functionality they provided. Also, there was a bonus to having all the processes in one large chain: if any step in that chain failed, the data would not be sent, and the proper parties would be alerted. 

Unfortunately, this was not happening when things were being run through the scheduled jobs previously implemented. Jacob ran into a problem with the file transfer step. The SFTP servers hosted by some of the partners were not compatible with the standard openssh library calls available with the Robot Framework. Fortunately, due to the flexible nature of Robocorp’s open source platform, Jacob was able to write a simple library that spoke directly to the lower level Paramiko SSH python module. Using this library, the robot was able to successfully connect with the partners SFTP server. Problem solved. 

Sometimes, creating robots to automate complex business processes can be challenging and that’s where Robocorp’s support stepped up to help.

"Robocorp's support is great! I have even seen Antti jump in to help and I cannot think of too many organizations where the founder/CEO would jump in to troubleshoot and solve customer problems. The engineering and CS teams have been super responsive with a turnaround of less than 24 hours to answer and solve complex issues! I am impressed to see how committed everyone is at Robocorp."

- Jacob Hightower, Automation Engineer, Kind Lending

Unsurprisingly, this is of utmost importance for Kind Lending due to the nature of their business. Some data just cannot leave their environment, and Robocorp’s solution enabled them to create automations that they could run on-premise. And for non-sensitive data, such as QA testing? Kind Lending was happy to have this simply run in the Cloud, knowing that they could always use the Vault as a useful and secure feature to store user credentials. 

“The main thing that was really important to us”, said Jacob, “from my direct discussions with Robocorp’s security team was the fact that their developers follow OWASP principles, and that they have SOC 2  compliance, both of which are absolutely vital”.

What Does The Future Hold For Automations at Kind Lending?

Kind Lending is currently working on automating their HR employee data information system for the employee lifecycle, and they’ve already identified additional QA and ticketing system processes to automate. 

In total, they have approximately 90 to 100 business process automations that they want to implement within the loan system in the next 6 months (and many more that are currently being identified and backlogged).

It is great to see how Kind Lending is leveraging the full potential of Robocorp’s stack to transform their business and successfully reinvent the mortgage lending process with this new technology. 

Although they are still early in their process automation journey, the Robocorp Assistants and Unattended automations already implemented at Kind Lending are generating savings of $5,500 per month. This is far more than the monthly subscription they pay for Robocorp.

 With the automations that Kind Lending is currently implementing, Jacob expects savings of $12,000 a month before the end of the year and $50,000 a month by the end of next year. These estimates are very achievable, since the Employee Data Lifecycle automation alone is expected to save around 13 full time workers worth of work every single day.

Perhaps more important than these cost savings is the flexibility and autonomy Kind Lending now enjoys on all RPA projects they plan to implement with Robocorp. 

They are assured by the fact that, if there are integrations that are not natively supported, it will be fairly straightforward to create custom libraries. And, because Robocorp is built on top of Python, the huge repository of custom integration libraries means there’s a really good chance that they already exist. And unlike RPA solutions from vendors such as UIPath and Blue Prism, by going with Robocorp, Kind Lending is not locked in. The skills learned whilst working with Robocorp are easily transferable (as opposed to gaining a deep knowledge of a proprietary RPA tool which will only be useful for as long as that tool is used).

Kind Lending’s executive team is impressed with the business value provided by Robocorp as the technology is enabling them to align with their vision.

Click here to schedule a call with one of our experts and jumpstart your path to automation today!

How Kind Lending implemented multiple automations and gained 400% ROI within three months of using Robocorp platform

BLV Solutions is a Robots-as-a-Service (RaaS) process automation service provider founded by a group of expert RPA practitioners, based in Sydney, Australia. They offer affordable and end-to-end automation services for small to mid-sized businesses, from initial process discovery, bot development, to ongoing support throughout the lifecycle of each bot.

Before starting the company, the founders accumulated deep experience in the technology through building and delivering over 300 process automations, predominantly using Blue Prism and UiPath.

The BLV Solutions team understands that automations fail when they’re cost prohibitive and are challenging to sustain. The overhead required to support traditional RPA was beyond the means of most companies.

“In the past, many businesses couldn’t afford the steep costs of automation. Robocorp enables us to provide cost-effective solutions that make automation accessible to every business.”  – BLV  Solutions

BLV Solutions leveraged Robocorp’s open-source software to enable full-service automation for small and mid-sized businesses at a fraction of the traditional RPA cost.

BLV Solutions’ RaaS approach is particularly helpful for smaller companies who want to reap the benefit of automation without having to employ their own development and run management team.

One of BLV’s clients, a small merchandising company that produces custom branded merchandise for sporting and corporate events, was struggling with processing new orders. The client’s use of separate software to accept quotes and communicate with customers was time-intensive and manual.  Time spent on administration tasks was valuable time that staff could be using to close more sales.

 The client had tried to solve this problem using an automation software (Zapier) branded for small business to DIY, but quickly realized it could only solve very simple issues. Solving anything more complex was beyond their team’s skills. The client’s options were to hire a developer just to assist with Zapier development or continue to lose sales due to slow response times – both expensive outcomes.

In consultation with the client, BLV Solutions built a robot that runs every time a new order is confirmed by the client’s customer. The bot seamlessly processes the order and updates the deal status in CRM when the customer accepts the quote. It then creates a new project in the client’s ERP system and creates an order confirmation for the customer.

With Robocorp’s cloud-based solution and consumption-based pricing, BLV Solutions are able to provide a clear value proposition to their clients by creating efficient automations that can reduce costs, increase productivity and create value to attract more customers.

The process automation removed 80% of time on the task, allowing the account managers to focus on closing more deals.

BLV’s bot has also improved the order accuracy. Before creating a new project, the bot performs a validation check. If it discovers missing information, the bot notifies the account manager to add the information. 

The client’s CEO was impressed with this bot solution for several reasons. He now has confidence that all order data is complete and accurate. And, instead of spending their time on admin tasks, his account managers can now focus on growing the business.

Without this automation, the client would have needed to hire two full-time workers to handle the administrative work. This first automation has opened his eyes to what automation can deliver and he’s already planning to invest in additional automations.

 For him, it’s not a discussion of “what can be automated”, but “how can BLV Solutions help me grow my business?”

“Initially our client was looking at automation to free up time, but now has realized the possibilities of growing his business through automation! Our client could not submit quotes fast enough to the prospective customers and now he is looking at using automation combined with machine learning, to instantly respond to customers.” – BLV Solutions

The client’s next challenge is their long tail of many one-time customer quotes, most of which are lost due to slow response time. BLV’s new automation, Lightning Quote, helps to capture more of these new customers by providing an instant quote, using machine learning to compare past orders and return an instant quote to the customer.

 BLV Solutions are thrilled to work with Robocorp to make automation accessible to businesses of all sizes.

Transform your business with the power and flexibility of Robocorp’s RPA solution. Reduce costs and significantly increase revenue, efficiency, time to value as well as employee and customer satisfaction. 

Contact BLV Solutions and jumpstart your path to automation today!

RPA Resources

Learn about the many uses of automation and the technology behind it with original content from Robocorp.