Cut through the confusion of automation and say hello to NexBotix.
Increasing productivity and driving efficiency is pretty much the priority for every business at the moment – FACT, and automation is just the tool to deliver this – GREAT. But knowing how to use it and where to start isn’t always as straightforward, let alone deciding who you can make sense of it all and deliver a solution that’s right for your business.
To cut through the confusion and complexity we thought it would be useful to introduce NexBotix, and explain why we believe our different approach to automation will empower your business with a new digital workforce AND optimise your business processes.
So, let’s kick off!
What exactly is automation and how can it help a business?
Most businesses, regardless of size or scale, execute manual repetitive business processes. Intelligent automation refers to the technology and services that we offer to automate the repetitive elements. For example, in an accounts payable department, or in human resources, or in operations – the majority of the business processing of data is done by a team of people who are responsible for the management and admin of this data. Now those processes may include thousands of documents or invoices, sourced from multiple suppliers, that arrive in different formats on different templates and potentially written in different languages. So there is very little consistency in the nature of that data.
This example of invoice processing is actually a very good use case as typically an averaged sized business would have 5 full time people assigned to processing 15,000 invoices a month. As you can imagine, when you have humans processing such a vast amount of data, in particular within very mundane and repetitive processes, the scope for an increase in process lag, bottlenecks and human error skyrockets.
At NexBotix, that is precisely the issue that we’re looking to tackle. By using software bots to eliminate the repetitive and low cognitive input work from your business, not only can we drastically reduce, if not eliminate, process lag and human error, we can also free up your staff to do more creative, strategic, and revenue earning work in your business, which has a direct impact on recruitment and retention as well.
Why are so many businesses yet to automate their business processes?
This is a very interesting point. Automation technology, AI and RPA are often perceived to be complex, expensive and designed to replace people’s jobs – ChatGPT is a great example of this. One of the main challenges out there is that everyone has a different level of understanding of what these different technologies are, what they do and how they work. This is where confusion can arise. But for many, the main reason for low adoption of automation is they don’t know enough about the technology. What process would it be good for? Will it really save them time, efficiency and all those things? Educating our customers and providing use cases so that they really understand what the technology is and can do is an important component for success.
The most successful businesses use intelligent automation in conjunction with their workforce – hence why we talk about Bots and Bods – so you can utilise automation to elevate the work that humans can do rather than eradicate their jobs. It’s about rethinking the workforce so that it is human led but tech powered. This means applying technology to achieve a better way of working. For example using machine learning and natural language processing so we can read multiple templates when we’re doing invoice processing, or artificial intelligence to increase our capacity to automate repetitive rules-based manual tasks and processes.
Where would be a great place to start with automation?
We always look for an area of the business where they are struggling with an operational process because it’s complex, high volume and there’s lots of time and effort required. Invoice processing typically is a great example that is relevant to all types of businesses.
If you think of an invoice processing process, you might have to log into a portal or receive a document by email, open that document, extract data, post it in onto a system, or onto a purchase ledger. You might need to upload those documents onto a system. All of that can be automated.
By automating this process, we’re able to drive efficiency through radically reducing the time taken to complete the process along with the associated costs. We are also often approached by companies that have very error ridden processes that they need smoothing out maybe for regulatory compliance reasons, or because they want a more scalable business, as well as clients who are just really concerned with the employee experience or facing recruitment challenges.
The main point being that every business may have a different end goal that can be achieved through automating a business process.
How does the NexBotix solution work?
You can break down our offering into three principle capability areas.
Firstly, you have our bots. These are the software bots centred on RPA and AI technology that we use to automate manual processes. Once we have scoped and mapped out your existing process and designed an automated solution, it is our bots that we implement to automate the repetitive, mundane elements of that process.
Secondly, we have our platform NIAH (NexBotix Intelligent Automation Hub). This is essentially your control centre to monitor and manage all of the processes that you automate with us. This is where we would manage all of your business exceptions, your approvals, workflows, and critically where you can source analytics. So anything to do with the performance of the bots, how much you’ve spent, the return on investment you’re accruing etc as well as being able to export that information into a report that you can share internally.
Successfully automating and re-engineering a processes is a very difficult endeavour so our third main capability is our automation experts. At NexBotix we offer a fully managed service from the very initial discovery sessions all the way through to BAU and beyond. We believe that it is impossible to meaningfully deploy automation without having a dedicated centre of excellence, so if you don’t have the time, resource, capability, or inclination to develop your own, you can become a part of ours. This of course that will save a massive amount of cost for organisations.
How do the Bots and Bods work together?
It’s about having both technology and people, or bots and bots, as we like to say, and them working collaboratively together to form a smarter workforce, using the talent and brain power that their people have and letting the bots do the repetitive, mundane work. The bots are not there to eliminate jobs, they’re there to provide digital assistance.
We talk about 85% straight through processing with maybe 15% business exceptions which could be something like a supplier forgetting to put a PO number on an invoice, or for an amount that needs approval. The bot is able to identify these business exceptions and flag to the human (the bod) which streamlines the workflow. This is a great example of Bots and Bods working together and assigned the work to whomever needs it, without delay – where the process diverts back to the human for some input and then is handed back to bot to go and execute. It’s essentially your central repository of truth as it provides you with an audit trail of everything that happens with your data.
And your pay as you go, pay as you grow model?
We understand that no business has a huge pot of money set aside for automation and in order to get sign off needs to not only have stakeholder buy in and be able to prove a ROI, but also has to have great commercials. That’s why we offer a monthly pay as you go, pay as you grow model. So, the customer only pays for what they use, with no massive upfront fees.
It’s probably also worth mentioning that we often encourage organisations when they’re first embarking on their automation strategies to automate just one or two processes, prove the utility of the technology. We secure on average, a positive return on investment for our clients in three to six months, depending on the size and complexity of an engagement.
Can you share a customer success story?
We recently worked with a manufacturing company in their accounts payable department where they were manually processing 113,000 invoices, across 5 different business areas, costing them £250,000 a year.
After a 3 month engagement, we reduced the cost of that process from £250,000 to £70,000, and the size of the team from 9 FTE to 1 FTE to manage exceptions and approvals. The business took the 8 superfluous people and repurposed them in the business into more strategic and revenue earning positions. That is a very standard result for us when we’re talking about very documents and data heavy processes.
Final thoughts ….
Automation is amazing at removing bottlenecks and process lag, reducing cost, driving efficiency, improving supplier relationships and allowing employees to do much more interesting work. That’s a very comprehensive list!
In the majority of businesses that we have worked with, through automation they have told us that we have positively impacted the mental health of their people, simply by eliminating the repetitive work that they were having to do on a daily basis, and that makes us feel very good about the work that we’re doing.
