At the start of 2019, the government stated there was a total of 8,000 “medium and large” sized organisations across the UK with between 500 and 5000 employees. In businesses of this size, there are undoubtedly a variety of repetitive, inefficient and labour-intensive business processes, that could hugely benefit from solutions like Robotic Process Automation and Intelligent Automation. The RPA industry is set to grow to $1.89 billion by 2021 according to Gartner and the adoption of such technology in large enterprise organisations, particularly in sectors like finance and insurance, has been steadily growing for over 10 years. A leading RPA vendor was also recently valued at over $1o billion dollars further signifying the rapid growth in the category, so why then do we see such low levels of RPA and Intelligent Automation adoption within mid-market firms?
As the need for digital transformation accelerates, many mid-market businesses will explore RPA and Intelligent Automation to help improve their inefficiencies and overall business performance. After all, why wouldn’t boosting productivity and increasing output be at the top of their agenda after a year like 2020? However, until recently, they would have been presented with a variety of challenges with deploying such solutions, like complex implementations and high up-front costs, that probably would have stopped them in their tracks. Many RPA solutions are tailored for the large enterprise, which unintentionally isolates mid-market businesses. The implementation costs quickly add up across software subscriptions, implementation fees and training and these firms lack the in-house, highly-skilled, expensive expertise to manage their infrastructure and support their solutions, presenting them with more barriers to utilising automation.
Our approach is different, with accessibility at the core of everything we do, whilst minimising costs and maximising ROI for the mid-market. We aim to quickly deploy a suitable solution for your business based on and measured against your KPIs and long-term goals, ultimately delivering important ROI more quickly. Our Managed Service offering eliminates the high resource costs for mid-market businesses, providing them with all the benefits of enterprise-grade automation solutions without the enterprise price tag.
Almost a year on from launching NexBotix, we’re going to review some of the key things the mid-market needs from their RPA and Intelligent Automation solutions, based on direct feedback from our customers.
Specialist Support
Most mid-sized businesses don’t have the means to build a team of in-house experts to deploy, support and scale Intelligent Automation, which is why the vendor support they receive is paramount to the success of their project. Understanding which business processes to automate and the type of automation to deploy or even the extent to which automation can help the organisation can be challenging without the right expertise. As part of our Managed Service offering, we structure our customer onboarding sequence to ensure that these questions are covered and clearly outlined for our clients. We work as an extension of their in-house team; helping them identify the best candidates for automation during our Discovery Workshop session and working with them to build a business case that they can share with key stakeholders in their organisation. Our Virtual Centre of Excellence allows them to visualise your automation programme on our project dashboard, from basic status updates, project requirements, build progress and solution testing ensuring they have full visibility and governance over the project from start to finish.
Fast ROI (Return on Investment)
With smaller budgets and more time pressures, mid-sized businesses need to demonstrate the impact of their automation solutions quickly without investing huge capital, so it’s understandable that pricing and cost are their main concerns when it comes to Intelligent Automation. For businesses exploring automation for the first time, it is important to understand all the costs involved in the project to allow them to effectively manage the project within budget. We provide a range of pricing options that focus on providing mid-market businesses with the transparency and flexibility that they need. Our pay-as-you-go billing means they pay for their automation monthly in arrears based on the bot’s activity, lowering the upfront costs and ensuring they only pay for what they use. We then price our bots in two ways. The first is per transaction, more frequently used for automations which involve document processes where they pay a fixed price each time the process is completed. The second is consumption-based, for more complex automations, calculated on the time the bot is active. Both models ensure that our customers don’t pay high licensing fees for bot capacity that they may not use.
We provide our clients with a faster, seamless, and more cost-effective Intelligent Automation in three main ways:
- Low upfront costs and flexible pricing, means that they stay in control of the costs with no nasty surprises along the way.
- We provide a clear business case before their proof of concept or run service, clearly demonstrating the ROI they can expect to see, allowing them to measure against it throughout their subscription
- Faster implementation, with our range of predefined “plug-and-play” processes, which are available off-the-shelf and can be live in as little as 12 weeks.
Actionable Data and Insights
Mid-market businesses struggle with tracking and measuring the results, successes and overall benefits of their automation investments. This lack of data means that they cannot achieve the level of governance that is required from such an investment and they may struggle to effectively communicate the impact that the technology is having on the bottom line. We believe our clients need to be able to see and track the results of their automation investments to improve and scale their solutions effectively, which is why we built NexAnalytics, our data and analytics dashboard where our clients can plan, track, and monitor the performance of the software against their core KPIs.
Our Intelligent Automation-as-a-Service model equips businesses with all the benefits of a large-scale automation project at the fraction of the cost, an end-to-end solution for all your automation needs. Our team will work with you to future proof your investment guiding you at every stage of your automation journey. Whatever stage you are at, if you have deployed automation before, have a vendor that you are currently working with or if you are looking to get started with automation for the first time, our team is ready to help move you forward.
If you are a small or mid-market business looking to leverage Intelligent Automation as a cost-effective solution to your processes or want to understand how Intelligent Automation can help you, contact our team today.
