Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is becoming increasingly important to businesses. In a recent global RPA survey for growth companies, Softomotive found that RPA adoption improves productivity, increases accuracy, and lowers costs. However, two key things stand out, firstly the ability of RPA to create extra capacity without adding headcount so that companies can grow at a lower cost. And second, is that in most parts of the world there’s an aging population (for example in Japan) and this puts a constraint on the size of the available workforce. Subsequently RPA is being used by governments to increase national productivity and in some countries, for example, the US this is mandated by the presidential office. Yet the full potential of RPA is unrealized due to some fundamental flaws being exposed. Four of the major ones are perceived technical complexity, the fact that some businesses still don’t know where and how to start their RPA journey, shortage of RPA skills and difficulties in getting approvals for small RPA projects that are necessary for initial adoption.
Step right in. Founded in 2005, London-based Softomotive is the longest standing provider of Robotic Process Automation solutions, trusted by more than 8000 companies worldwide. They have additional offices in New York and Houston in USA, UK, Greece, and, India.
Softomotive has been in the automation market even before the RPA wave picked up. So unlike some other companies, they have vast experience with the automation technology and process automation, both from a business sense and from a technical perspective. Softomotive provides the smoothest RPA journey by allowing enterprises to start small, learn quickly and scale seamlessly. They are the only provider of process automation technology to offer a portfolio of solutions designed to meet the diverse needs of small teams, mid-size companies and up to large enterprises. Moreover, they have a deep understanding of several factors that may contribute to slower adoption. To address issues with perceived complexity, Softomotive takes a pragmatic approach to help companies achieve business outcomes today while avoiding the hype of promises that will only be delivered tomorrow. By doing so, their core purpose is to enable businesses to become more successful by empowering everyone to embrace automation and RPA in their everyday work. “We think that the market has so far only scratched the surface of what’s possible, especially the potential of RPA to improve people’s daily working life by enabling them to unlock their full potential. We intend to be at the forefront of this transformation now and in the future,” says Marios Stavropoulos, Co-founder and CEO of Softomotive.
"Our aim is to be a disruptive influence for the good of our clients and the market as a whole."
A Disruptive Influence for the Good
Softomotive offers both a desktop version, as well as server-based unattended and attended automation solutions. Both of these share the same RPA engine for easy transition from one to the other, are quick to deploy, easy to use and are priced to scale.
• WinAutomation: It is the world’s best Robotic desktop automation (RDA) tool and provides a powerful, robust and easy to use Windows-based platform for building software robots.
• ProcessRobot: It is a leading enterprise Robotic Process Automation (RPA) platform, including enterprise-grade security and controls, with links to best-of-breed AI technologies.
These two working together are uniquely qualified to support a People1st Approach to RPA. Softomotive’s unique People1st Approach to RPA is a totally different way of deploying RPA that puts the power in the hands of the end user or “citizen developer” to automate, what they want, when they want. This new approach consists of three stages:
• Innovate– to empower the many and accelerate performance collaboratively.
• Incubate– to filter and nurture the best output from the innovation phase.
• Implement– to scale what is proven to work.
The first two stages are the real difference between a People1st Approach and conventional thinking on RPA which so far is overpromising and under delivering. Additionally, as People1st approach involves training a cadre of “citizen developers” to do the automation as a result businesses are less reliant on a small number of more expensive RPA developers. Instead, everybody becomes attuned to an automation mindset which is vitally important in today’s digital world thereby making the democratization of RPA a reality. “The business is very much a challenger rather than a follower and our People1st Approach for RPA which turns conventional thinking on its head is a good example of this. Our aim is to be a disruptive influence for the good of our clients and the market as a whole,” carries on Stavropoulos.
Marios Stavropoulos, Co-founder & CEO, Softomotive
Furthermore, the desktop version is easily installed on a citizen developer’s computer to accelerate innovation; and once the best automation is filtered, tested and prepared by the COE, they can be scaled using Softomotive’s enterprise RPA platform. “Above all, we strongly believe in the widespread usage of RPA and not restricting it to the center of excellence. We feel that our mission is to democratize RPA and we want to see intelligent robots as a part of everyday life. We are in the process of building this technology by focusing on the effortless interaction between humans and robots, both at the execution and learning level,” states Stavropoulos. The company foresees that RPA will soon exit the boundaries of the center of excellence. That means that it will become a widespread technology in our everyday work life and at some point, it will be commonplace for every employee to have their own robot working alongside them so that they can put mundane, routine parts of their work on autopilot. It will be as normal as having a computer. And when this happens it will be a game changer and lead to a massive business transformation.
As for now discussing the big debate about robots taking over the world and everyone fearing for their jobs, the company’s stance is: “The fact is that the RPA technology is designed to automate manual repetitive processes. However, it is important to understand that there are two types of RPA, both attended (robots interacting with humans) and non-attended (robots acting independently). In some circumstances, particularly in the back offices, some jobs may be lost. On the contrary, the attended RPA is intended to augment the workforce to free up people so that they can concentrate more on value-added activities. It is a balancing act, whilst some jobs may be lost; RPA technology opens up and creates new job roles. Consultancies like McKinsey say that only about 5% of jobs can be fully automated which suggests that attended automation to augment people’s work is more important,” says Bob Weare, Chief Marketing officer at Softomotive.
Unique Value Proposition
As in the real world, nothing is as perfect and ideal as it may seem. This is also the truth for RPA. In order to eliminate errors; whether those errors come from humans or from malfunctions of applications or in general from any unexpected situation. Softomotive’s ProcessRobot provides the required mechanisms to support the controlled deployment of automations. Softomotive achieves this by offering built-in Process Lifecycle Management capabilities, including the tools and techniques for debugging and testing how processes work, ensuring errors are eliminated before these automations go live. Softomotive provides complete tracking of different process versions, and ability to view the history of a Process throughout its Development, Review and Production Lifecycle stages.
If the worst comes to the worst, Softomotive products offer four levels of Error and Exception Handling mechanisms that identify and remedy the situation if the need arises. Errors are logged by default with messages and additional details. Users can set specific behavior on how to treat an error, from sending an email down to recording a video of the running process or saving a screenshot upon the occurrence of an exception. By identifying errors and exceptions quickly, Softomotive empowers users to correct them in a way that ultimately eliminates them from happening again.
Future Roadmap
Softomotive has been growing its senior management team. Powered by a very strong “C suite” team, by attracting the best talent the company is ready to drive its next phase of growth. In addition, they are working hard to attract and build relationships with the right partners to work with to support the deployment of their People1st Approach to RPA on a global basis.
In the near future, you can expect Softomotive extending their global footprint, investing in their product roadmap and their people across the business with the help of $25m Series A funding.
These are exciting times indeed…
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