The search for efficiency in business is never-ending. Arguably, it shouldn’t end; efficiencies make more opportunity, create more wealth, and offer more value to the world. Unfortunately, though, the ruthless pursuit of business efficiency often came at the expense of the worker. Efficiency was seen as antithetical to employee support or engagement, as we’ve seen in the initial history of what is now known as business process outsourcing (BPO).
Technological innovation—automation in particular—brings with it a new arsenal in the battle for efficiency, but this time employees and businesses are aligned. Employees are tired of tedious, ongoing, repetitive work that is necessary to the business but mind-numbing. On the other side, companies want to upskill their people so they can move up the value chain, providing higher-paying brain-work to clients.
We have an opportunity to do better with automation, but the current system is broken. A new solution that takes into account both business needs and employee desires is necessary. While the tide of automation is unyielding, the process does not need to have the same negative externalities that previous outsourcing strategies produced. Instead, we can learn from our past mistakes to design a new future that works for companies and for people.
Every business has processes that make it run, from HR and finance on the backend to sales, product, and customer service on the frontend.
As businesses grow, these processes scale in complexity. In the early days of the 20th century, businesses tried to ‘locally outsource’ the issues, moving certain parts of the business to low-cost cities within their countries (for example, moving a sales office to Kansas City but keeping headquarters in New York City).
When that strategy was maxed out, companies looked to “near-shore,” keeping processes geographically close but in a different country, for example, Mexico for a US-based company. With the growth of globalization, low-cost outsourcing became preferable, and many outsourcing companies, including giants like Accenture or Tata, grew rapidly in India, China, and more.
With the complexity of outsourcing came the rise of management consulting. Advisory firms offer outsourcing strategy, meaning they will help you figure out what you need and liaise with the builders and maintenance teams—all for a very expensive price tag. This again helped with some efficiency but was only useful for massive enterprise firms who could afford the consulting retainers. And it still didn’t address the problem of employee disengagement.
While the evolution of outsourcing reduced costs for large enterprises, it created a myriad of other problems, including:
Now, these outsourcing firms are looking to automation. This caused the proliferation of multiple horizontally integrated specialists, including strategists, automation software developers, integrators, and maintenance teams.
The current mentality of trying to use automation to remove humans results in a fragmented process of multiple stakeholders at different levels. Costs can easily reach $2,000,000 - $3,000,000 annually for an automation program, largely due to high initial setup and fixed costs.
A company would need to develop about 50 automations to make the return worth it. This inherently excludes mid-market and SMB companies, most of whom only need between three to ten automations to add noticeable efficiency to their operations. Since mid-market companies employ an estimated 60 million people across Canada and the United States alone, this inability to take part in automation adds serious risk to our economy.
While about 50% of tasks can be completely automated and 80% of tasks can be partially automated, these tasks don’t necessarily make up the totality of an individual’s job. That means that many automations coming into a company will, at some level, work with and for humans.
Robots are great at routine, mundane tasks. Humans are great at critical thinking and assessing context. This is a powerful coupling—if solutions are built for this end.
Based on our research and assessment of the problems in the market, a human-focused automation solution must be:
When mid-market companies take on an automation project, they want results as quickly as possible.
That’s exactly how we built Roots.
Our product encompasses the entire automation process:
If you were to build your own automation project using a mix of consultants, BPO companies, and internal teams, you could easily hit $500,000 in setup costs and then millions after that for maintenance and growth.
By designing our system to focus on the entire lifecycle, we were able to find massive efficiencies and cost savings, which we pass onto our users. That means you can start an automation project with Roots Automation for $4,000 per month—not $2-3 million.
We designed it with our customers’ needs in mind.
Our infrastructure and software costs are spread across multiple customers, meaning you don’t have to pay for capacity or capabilities you don’t use. Further, we focused our company around the value we provide—successful automations—and make sure we do everything in our power to deliver that value.