Small Business Process Automation

In this, The Faces of Business, Wilton Rogers III, CEO, Simply Automate, talks about small business process automation. Wilton guides small business owners using robotic process automation to scale their business and allow employees to do higher level work.

In this, The Faces of Business, Wilton Rogers III, CEO, Simply Automate, talks about small business process automation. Wilton guides small business owners using robotic process automation to scale their business and allow employees to do higher level work.

We discuss things business leaders need to understand to facilitate aggressive growth and operate successful businesses.

Join us to learn how business process automation can help you!

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Robotic process automation (RPA) not only helps businesses handle tasks but also enables workers to do more important things. Wilton Roger III is a “serial entrepreneur” with 30 years of experience. He’s been making use of automation since 2017. To his surprise, it was not then meant for small and medium enterprises. When Wilton realized the true value of automation, he resigned from his job in 2019 and started his company. Five years on, this journey has never been void of problems. He has also been a part of SCORE imparting his knowledge on RPA.

Early adoption of automation principles allows a company to scale faster. It does not have to spend money on monotonous administrative tasks where it can just use automation. In other words, from invoice processing to highly sophisticated account management, automation can handle a lot of repetitive tasks flawlessly. New people bring in a new vision. The potential of the staff can be realized by delegating them more complex and valuable tasks. The growth of the company can be focused single-mindedly.

Wilton recalls his own story when back in 2017 he applied for the post of Vice President at a newly-made company. He came into touch with RPA. He was hit by an idea to start a company of his own. His company was an instant hit, thanks to automation. He saved thousands of dollars monthly and open many branches in different cities. In the meanwhile, he had struck an idea. As a large-scale enterprise, a business expands rapidly but what about the small and medium enterprises? He wanted to work for small businesses. With that intention, he met a couple of software vendors. Soon, he realized that little work had been done for small businesses.

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Wilton worked extensively for 6 years. Finally, he can help small businesses operate. Through automation, he can help them grow as per their priorities. Moreover, he uses his diagnostic abilities to suggest the right software for the right task. With a team of software designers and analysts, he can develop tailored software according to the requirements of the businesses.

He also addresses one of the common misconceptions related to automation. That is, doing the company’s work on a computer using different software is not necessarily automation. He quotes the example of invoice processing of bank reconciliation, where re-feeding the accumulated data from one software to another is a common practice. He calls it a total manual job. He believes that the right automation is to perform multiple tasks using only one software.

Similarly, Wilton further explains why there are limited automation solutions available. He explains that small and medium enterprises have the same vision that of larger ones. They want to achieve the same but they cannot afford to pay a seven-figure amount. For them, he managed to create Help System Automate. He worked with emerging software developers and shared his vision with them. To take full advantage of automation, the company is required to provide information for the development of Help System Automate. It, however, does not take long. Initially, there were only twenty teammates. Now the company has grown gigantic three hundred plus employees and the number is still growing. Now, at a low price, small and medium companies use automation as required. They can take a free trial for one day.

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He concludes the discussion by commenting on the very bright future of automation. He foresees that by 2025, almost every company would benefit from RPA implementation.

The discussion ends with Damon thanking Wilton for his precious time.

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53:22

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

automate, robotic process automation, rpa, automation, software, people, company, business, process, invoice processing, built, enterprise, realized, 1000s, clients, save, understand, growing, paying, educated

SPEAKERS

Damon Pistulka, Wilton Rogers III

 

Damon Pistulka  00:04

All right, everyone, welcome once again to the faces of business. I’m your host, Damon Pistulka. And I am excited for our guests today. Because with me today, I have Wilton Rogers, the third, from simply automate, Incorporated. And we’re gonna be talking about robotic process automation, and automating those nasty little business processes. So, welcome. Thanks for being here today.

 

Wilton Rogers III  00:31

David, thank you for having me, I appreciate it. Well, this is gonna be cool,

 

Damon Pistulka  00:35

because we’ve had a few conversations and talking about robotic process automation, and some of the things that we can do now in businesses to really help free our people’s time up and allow them to do more valuable things. I think it’s really cool what you’re helping businesses do.

 

Wilton Rogers III  00:53

Yeah, really, I’m having a great time I didn’t, I never thought it’d be in this industry. But now that I’m locked in, um, I love waking up in the morning and do what we do.

 

Damon Pistulka  01:02

That’s awesome. That’s awesome. So we always like to start Willdan with you tell us a little bit about yourself, and kind of where you got to where you are today, and kind of your journey. So can you tell us a little bit about that?

 

Wilton Rogers III  01:17

Yeah, absolutely. Well, I’m a serial entrepreneur, I’ve been owning and operating businesses for over 30 years now. And aren’t, you know, right now, RPA sort of fell in the automation world fell in my lap in 2017, I really didn’t know much about it.

Once I found out what it was all about, you know, I was blown away by the capabilities, but didn’t realize that it was, when I, when I got involved, I didn’t realize that it was pretty much primarily for the enterprise world at the time, you know, it wasn’t really set up for smaller businesses or medium sized businesses. And but I just knew that, you know, eventually, we had to come at to, you know, hit that, that market, and, in inside, figured out a way to sort of prepare for that.

And, you know, five years later, here we are, and sure enough, it’s, it’s running fully, and we’re running 1%, and the small midsize businesses, small midsize enterprise, and we’re having fun, you know, having fun doing it. So, you know, it was, it was a sad accident. But I didn’t expect to do or do it right now, you know, five years ago, it was more like an opportunity to make good living, and to be able to support my family, in a way where I knew that it could be a good, a nice little nest egg. But once I got involved, I saw the real opportunity to really impact businesses, and there was really no thought leaders or resources out there, that I found that was doing it.

So I was like, I, you know, I want to just start doing it myself. And, and so I just sort of, you know, started hitting the ground running left my, the company that hired me, in 2019, open up my own company, and started from the ground up. And you know, of course, like any other business ran into a lot of obstacles. But, you know, just kept grinding away and, and finally found our little niche, and from that niche is sort of the practice start growing from that point. And it’s, it’s been, it’s been taken off ever since.

 

Damon Pistulka  03:37

Yeah, that’s awesome. That’s awesome. So there’s, you’ve got some interesting stuff in your background, because you talked about being a serial entrepreneur. And I see that you’ve done some score mentoring, in the past, as well. So do you think that doing that mentoring and score helped you see what a lot of other business people are doing or not doing right? And, and really learn something about what works and what doesn’t work?

 

Wilton Rogers III  04:06

Yeah, well, the reason why I got a score is because, you know, I’ve learned from I was I came from the school of hard knocks, right, you know, sort of opening up my own learning from a company, and I industry that opened on my own, and then I tried to go, and I tried to take my own route from that point and make it really easy for people to, to, you know, grab onto what we’re doing. And I realized that a lot of business people that were getting into business, they had great ideas, but they didn’t have the path to make it easy for them to for their ideas to really flourish to really shine.

There was a lot of red tape that they had to go through in order to get to where they want to get to. And so when I realized that, you know, automation and entrepreneurs Chip connected. I was like, wait a minute, if you can catch them early in the game, you can allow their creativity and their vision to happen a lot sooner. Yeah. And that’s, you know, we always say, you know, it takes you five years to build a business to really evaluate, you can either know, either be running or going to fail, right?

With automation, that’s, it’s totally changed the game. That’s what we grew up, you know, I grew up in the 70s. So back then it was different, like now it’s like, Hey, you can really tap into technology right away, then you can take your vision to a whole different level instantly. When I realized, put those two together, I was like, Hey, I gotta share this, somehow I have to share this. And so when I went back, when I moved, I was living in Houston, when I was working with I started the RPA. Industry, we moved back to New Mexico, and I realized that a lot of businesses there had no idea what automation really technologies ticked out technology.

And when I went to the score meetings, they were just still the old school leadership, like I was, like, I learned, yeah, you guys can’t do that you guys are the, you know, you’re going to cripple them for a while. And so I started, I started, you know, presenting there and good presentations there. And that’s when people started like, okay, you know what, let me talk to Walter to see what we can do to move forward. So score was a real big move for me. And then, of course, after about a couple of years, I, we got so busy, that was like, Yeah, I had to step away from the score. But yeah, that’s exactly why I got involved, I saw the need for

 

Damon Pistulka  06:36

  1. Yeah, because I never thought about that way. I thought maybe you were going in just to mentor other people, like you said, with leadership, but you are going in there or this specific to show them how automation could help them leapfrog. Because if you think about it, and that early, if you adopted some basic automation principles early, it allows you to scale a lot faster, and you’re not spending money on administrative stuff where you can just, you know, people wise money, and where you can have people do more value added work for you.

 

Wilton Rogers III  07:05

Absolutely. And not only that is is when you really understand how to use automation from the beginning. It allows you to really focus your attention on the front end of your business. So whenever you hire your personnel, your vision is already moving forward, you don’t have to do all these repetitive type tasks all these days, you know, grabbing data in or invoices in, you know, behind the computer type work. Because all that can be automated. And once you understand how to do that, when you start hiring people from the beginning, it’s all it’s really focus on the growth of your company. Wow.

 

Damon Pistulka  07:45

Wow. That’s a good point. Because that automation allows you to focus people on the higher value growth opportunities. Absolutely. Very good. So let’s back up just a moment. So you, your, your first exposure to robotic process automation. Let’s talk about that a little bit.

 

Wilton Rogers III  08:07

Yeah, well, what’s interesting is in 2017, why working in the fitness industry, and I own a couple of businesses in the fitness industry. And when I finally left it, I was like, Okay, what do I what I really want to do, and I have an old company, I left that sold it. And when I left that, I was like what I want to do, I sort of got bored since I worked in the hotel industry. But I just didn’t feel like, you know, I was at a point where I grew to two point in my position where I knew that I really couldn’t make much more difference. And I was like, Okay, I’m gonna look for something else. And before I was ready to be hired by this huge hotel, and I was like, let me look who’s out there.

While RPA came in 2017. It was a company that was opening up that said, hey, you know, we need a VP of Sales and Marketing, and want you to apply for it. So I applied, and I got the position. And so I moved my family from New Mexico to Houston. And when I got involved when I started seeing what it can really, you know, I really didn’t know what RPA was, I didn’t know what automation was. I knew technology, but just from just software, I just knew why the software, you can use it, it could really help you. I didn’t really know the next level automation.

And when I got involved before, even before, you know, I started thinking about one of my own I was like this, I can really make a difference this company already has, has the floor plan laid out for me. All I got to do is start working. And when I started seeing that, you know what we’re doing in large enterprise world. And I started seeing how much money we’re saving these company by automation. I was blown away. I mean, we were saving 10s of 1000s and hundreds of 1000s of dollars on the year. Based on a monthly basis, I like wow.

And then they start branching. And they start using more and more and more. And I was like, wait a minute, if these large companies are growing, that means a small, they’re taking business away from small businesses, because they’re able to, you know, move a lot faster, and they will leave the small, you know, small businesses behind. So at that point, I really started looking at different automation software’s talking to different developers working with different analysts. And just really understanding what RPA was really about, and how the different software can work for different companies.

So once I reached out to companies and said, hey, you know, what we have, you know, I can help you out with your automation processes, I could you can help automate, when I started talking to them, and I realized that there was a limit to where we can help when there was a you can go only go so far at that point, it was a cost too much the capability of the software, what is it something that they needed, or they couldn’t use was like, wait a minute, there’s, I have to really start looking at different alternatives here for different companies, because I was more of a service. I didn’t want to, I don’t want to put myself on the software.

So can they be sell this software was more about it was more about the client, it was more about? What does the client need? Not only now, but what do they need moving forward in the future? Is there a software out there that I can find that will help us move from help them now, but help them prepare for the future. And the more and more so reaching out to these companies or the software vendors, I realized there wasn’t very many of them. And, you know, I probably I probably worked with about 1520 different vendors over the last six years, five and a half years. And I finally found vendors that can cover all the way from large enterprise to small businesses.

So now whenever we talk to businesses, and they figure out what they’re looking to do, I can find out exactly what software they can use where they’re at right now. And we’re looking to expand if they’re looking to grow just locally, or they’re looking to expand nationwide worldwide. What are they? What kind of technology? What kind of automation? Do you need to do that? Once I realized that I have, you know, the software that can help them. That was a game changer. And I realized there was nobody really doing that. And it wasn’t like I was trying to become the first to figure that thing out or anything like that.

It was just like, what does this company need? How can I service them? What software is going to help them and from instead of them having to go through these different hurdles. And in trying to figure out themselves in all these roadblocks and expenses, let me try to be that thought leader that that subject matter expert to sort of lead them in the right direction. And once I realize, you know, this software that can do it, I was like, Okay, this is I need to do this, and I need to build a team around this. So now, when we start helping companies, I can teach people how to do that.

Because what I was noticing, when I was helping companies that even in the small midsize enterprise, and even the large enterprise, that were already doing it, they were using the wrong software, that, you know, they’re limited to what they can do, but they were sold on, hey, we can help you, we can help you do x and y. But we can only do this, we can help you do Z. But I realize, you know what you’re using the wrong software, you implement it in a way where it’s, it’s not going to be really productive.

I knew I had to really build a team around that. And so I start building relationships with developers and analysts. Were using the different software’s and little by little when we start being in business, I started asking them, Hey, you want to this, this, this, this group up this team up and start working together? So you know, now I have, we have nine, nine or 10 developers that have all RPA experience, I have two full-time analysts that have RP experience that have worked with multiple different software. So but I built these relationships over a period of time working on different projects.

And now they saw the better opportunity working on, you know, on an on a big on a bigger scope. And I’ve stuck to one software, they’re like, hey, I want to join. So we sort of built our team around that. And ever since then, it’s sort of, you know, we’ve been bringing in new developers, we’re creating a new analyst that doesn’t have don’t have the experience. But we’ve already built the platform. We’ve already built the process on how to follow it and you can learn it. So now it’s not like Okay, now we’re ready for scale. Now we’re ready for scale. So we’re prepared for that now.

 

Damon Pistulka  14:54

Yeah. Oh, that’s cool. Look, we’ll come back to that in a minute can because one of the things that I think people don’t understand and I’d like to understand better is the types of things that people look to make faster, easier, whatever with robotic process automation. So, back in 2017, when you are working with the big enterprises, how are they using robotic process automation? What kinds of things are they doing that saves them these hundreds of 1000s of dollars?

 

Wilton Rogers III  15:29

You know, I think one of the biggest ones, I think, you know, is invoice processing is one bank reconciliation, anything that they were really doing, when they were grabbing data from one source and trying to put that information into another source or another application. Those were all manual processes. And a lot of these soft, a lot of these software’s and applications, they don’t talk to each other, right?

Yeah, they’re limited, they’re limited. They’re in a lot of business, say, hey, we have automation software. If it’s already, if it’s a cookie cutter, if it’s something that’s already built in, it’s not full automation, because there’s manual work that either goes before it or after it, you can’t, most software you can’t take, let’s just say for invoice processing, for example, you scan in these invoices, you have to read those invoices, you have to put into the applicant into an application. And if an application, you have to save it onto your computer, you have to save it. And then when you save, you have to email it to everybody.

And then there’s different steps that go into it, trying to find a software that does it all. First of all, it’s hard to do that on a show on the enterprise level. Second of all, it gets very pricey. It’s very pricey, because every invoice we probably have done. I don’t know what to say about 100 Different invoice processing development over the last five years. In that one of them, not one of them is the same as the other, there’s something in between within them. That’s the logic, the logic that they have already built, is somewhat different, right?

So we always say, don’t change up what you’re doing, if it’s already working. Let’s see what you’re doing. Let’s map it out. You know, we’ll design it to build a workflow and see what works best. So it was processing was a huge one for for enterprise bank reconciliation. We were working with major CPA firms, you know, and I think like pay payables, receivables, things like that, were just massive. There were there were they were ones that were we start seeing, you know, that process that were right away.

And the thing about it is once you start talking to these companies, they start coming back to us are saying oh, by the way, we’re doing this process, you know, we’re getting, we’re getting all these, you know, leads come in, and one from these leads, we had to go to the leads, we had to put them into our CRM and for CRM, web Celemony with do all these things. And then we have to put notes in him. And I was like well, is repetitive because the same thing over and over and over. Because yeah, it goes well, we can automate that. So they started doing is that start for you? Once they start seeing what we can do?

They start realizing I’m doing this manually. Let me call Wilton this team to see what we can do to automate. So they’re the ones are coming to us are saying, hey, this, automate this, this automate that because now that they start seeing one or two processes being automated, if that’s already taken away from their, from their, from their, their daily tasks, they start saying, Okay, we have more, I have more, this will only take me 1520 minutes a day. Okay, let’s automate that little tedious tasks I don’t have to worry about anymore.

And when we found out is, is once you take those tasks totally away from them, that there they feel a weight lifted off their shoulders. I have, you know, we had a client and enterprise a world saying that they had six employees that were doing invoice processing, they were doing 1000s and 1000s of processes. And they had been doing them for years. And the minute we took that process away from them, they felt a big weight lifted off the shoulders, because every day they knew exactly what they were going to do. They go to work saying, I got to do these processes over and over. And they didn’t feel valued.

They didn’t feel like they could be creative. They weren’t feeling like they were they were actually giving back to the company. They were just there for a paycheck. Once we move those and they were able to move on to other areas of the company. They felt like they were being they brought more value to the company than they felt like the company saw them in a different light. And when I started seeing that is like Okay, now we got to take this downstream and bring it down to the small midsize enterprises, small midsize businesses. But there’s probably hundreds of different ones but pricing about four or five of those for probably the biggest ones we’ve seen in the enterprise world. Okay.

 

Damon Pistulka  20:06

So when you so what really changed then to allow this to come from the enterprise to the smaller businesses now? I mean, was there a technology development that that made it simpler to the software just get better and better and an easier or what really changed? Now a small business can use this?

 

Wilton Rogers III  20:27

Yeah, great question. I was in enterprise, I tell the story that many people told a story, by the way, I was talking to one of our partners was, one of our partners is automation anywhere, there are huge opportunities. One, one of the top three in the world, multi billion dollar company. And I was talking to a developer that we were working with and analysts. And I was just like, I’m tired of working this enterprise, because at the time, we’re for enterprise. In 2018, I started seeing I’m not getting a lot of all the deals I was talking to was like, Okay, we know, we’re going to talk to you, we’ll talk to two more vendors.

So we want to work with them, like when we talked to other vendors. So it was more, you know, they were doing their bit trying to figure out where they wanted to go with. And I was like, I don’t play that game anymore. You know, I just didn’t want to play that game. And when I realized that, you know, no one was moving, moving down downstream. To me, I was like, Okay, I need to really focus on how to bring that out to bring that downstream.

So one of the analysts, from automation anywhere told me, you know, I’ve been working this game, I’ve been working technology for a long time, automation for a long time. And who’s gonna tell him, I told him, I’m tied to work in the enterprise world, he goes, there’s gonna, there’s software out there right now, that can tap into the small, medium sized enterprise that can, it’s more affordable for them. But they’re limited. They’re limited because of the capabilities. Because the small midsize enterprise still have a vision of a large enterprise, they want to do everything that larger enterprises want to do.

But they don’t want to pay the same price, they can’t afford to pay the same price. So I just started doing a lot more research on what software was out there. And little by little I start finding software we can work with this are working with other not small or medium sized enterprise companies. And one of them was called them help systems automate in from our home automation anywhere to help systems. And help systems allow me to move into the small midsize enterprise. So I start working with them. We did some project, obviously from them.

And I started saying, Okay, this is great. But as you know, I can, I’m in a market right now, where there’s not a whole lot of people and I can really market this. But my love was in the small midsize, most small midsize business. So when I started figuring this out working, trying to work downstream with help systems, I realized it still can’t help small businesses, because it’s still costing, you know, still seven figure, you know, software, even though it’s gonna save you hundreds of $1,000, it’s still I mean, six figures, six figure software, over a period of time, but it’s still gonna save you a lot of still save a lot.

But small businesses still can’t afford that it was just too much. And then in 2000 2020, in fact, it was September of 2020. My project manager, Dimitri said, Hey, you gotta look at this company called literally, I was like, Cool. Next celebrity. It was a real, it wasn’t a company just came out a software, that RPA vendor came out.

And they said that they can help the small midsize businesses, you know, service management providers, that is MSPs. And I was like, Okay, well, if they, if they may look into it. So I looked into it. And they basically said, you can do unlimited automation, you pay this amount, you can do unlimited automation, like, Okay, if I pay this amount, and I can do limit automation, my return is going to be massive. And my savings for my clients, this is going to be viewed from the beginning, who’s not working with them. At this time, we’ve already had developers we had for three or four developers that have been have expertise in RPA. But we realized there was limitations to their software.

And I was like, man, okay, this is, you know, we start, we start working with our present clients that were on automation anywhere and help systems and we say, Okay, well just try the software and just do it side by side and see what we can do. And so we will build a process that we’ve already built for one of our clients. And I would go back to literally exist, you know, like it but we can use your service because you can do X, Y and Z with our client, automation and word count, help systems can so we’re gonna stay with them. When I realized that they come back at about a day or two later, say, hey, upgrade your software, we can do it now, that wouldn’t make it do it.

So our developers would begin with our developers. And they came back to me and said, you know, we can do this, we can move, we can move this client over. And one of our clients has been moved over, they were paying, I think they’re paying like about, I can’t remember what it was, but let’s just say they’re paying about $10,000 a month for the software, right. But it was still saving them, you know, probably about 50 $60,000 a month. But if I move more to electronic software, you know, in and I can cut that cost, they’ll be paying like $1,000 a month.

So I was like, Wait a minute. That’s a huge savings. So their returns can be huge. So I was able to move them over, and we saved them hundreds and 1000s of dollars. I was like, Okay, who are these guys, so I reached out to all the founders of the company. And I want to figure out who they were, what their vision was, where they really go with this company, where they really going. And so I said, Okay, I want to try to invest in this little bottle and try to invest and see why developers start working in startups finding little hurdles that we can do, but we start seeing the same thing, they will go back and we put in some, you know, our little tickets to them.

And they’ll come back in 2448 hours and say, we think we can do it. Now you can do it. Now, I was so impressed by them. And in this, this is two and a half, but little over two years ago. And they’d grown at the time, I think when we first started with them, they might have 20 employees, now they have I think 300 plus employees all over the world, because they grow so fast. So we got involved with them really, really early.

So we’ve been blessed to do that. And, and I in our developers were able to work with them directly, and find out what the limitations were. And they were able to work on those limitations that they had, and improve those areas. So at that time, I was like, Okay, we’re all in, we’re all in with them. So being able to work with the, with these vendors from the beginning, and really building relationships with them, allowed us to be able to do what we’re doing today. So now we know going into a project. What, whatever our clients need, are we capable of doing it? Yes or No?

If we well, not only capable, we know we’re capable of doing most of the automation. But is the price going to be you know, it’s going to be a return for our clients? Yeah. So now we build that relationship with, especially the electronique, to be able to say, Okay, now we’re hitting the market. And we have we built a process that can be duplicated 1000s and 1000s of times. So, you know, it took us a while it took me about, you know, three, three and a half years to really go out there and do my research. But we found we found some really good partners that have allowed us to really tap into a market that’s really, that’s hasn’t even been cracked yet.

 

Damon Pistulka  28:04

Yeah, that’s cool. Because I was wondering what it was, you know, it any basically you found an innovative vendor that was willing to work with you to, to solve customer needs. And so that’s, that’s cool. We had Demetrius in here he comment said the story is powerful. So and then the Teddy share in the free playbook, too. So if anybody wants to see the playbook, go to the website there. So as you as you looked at this, and you went, Okay, now we got the solution.

Now we’ve got this solution. We’ve been doing this in the big companies and going into the small ones, you’re starting to work into them. What are some of the things that happened that you were like, wow, I didn’t even I thought we were going to come in here and be able to do this.

And we were but unintended positive consequences. What are some of the things that you see when someone takes the time to really think about this and go back and holistically look at their business and say, Okay, what can we use robotic process automation to do in our business? So what are some of these things that you’ve seen and go? Wow, I didn’t even think that that would we would be able to help that. But we’re helping it now.

 

Wilton Rogers III  29:24

Yeah, great question. You know, what I learned is, pretty much everybody that we talked to, really doesn’t know the impact that RPA can have, right? So having $1,000 conversations, I was like, Okay, what am I missing? Why aren’t they really understanding the impact that he can have?

Because I can go in there and say, you know, what, we’ve done invoice processing. We’ve done, you know, bank reconciliation, we’ve done, you know, whatever we did all these manual processes But to them, it doesn’t matter. That’s not my pain point from a pain point. So for us, we really have to hit a feeling. It’s like, okay, we’re are you seeing the pain of your daily routine? Where is that? Once we understood that, and once we were able to figure out what that was? And we were sure we could show them exactly. taking that away from you. What does that do for you?

First of all, they get the feeling, they know how it feels, all of a sudden, like I said, that weight is lifted off their shoulders. But the educational part, and the knowledge part is comes a lot faster. And the reason why is because like I said, every business is different. And their processes, and their pain points are different. So you have to figure out internally, what’s what do they want to make change inside the walls? Only they know, we don’t know, we can give them ideas. But we really don’t know. But once you show them and educate them a one process that they can take it and they can understand it. They’re the ones that gave us the leaves in a by the way, let’s do this.

Let’s do that. Because you know, we just did one now for a law firm. And they collect, they get hundreds of hundreds of checks every single day. And they were getting these checks in I think they’re they do. Credit or debt collectors, the debt collector, okay. Right. So they will get checks every single day, right. And they have people getting these checks. If they pay online, they will get, obviously the get the loan online statements, and it’s been paid, that person would input it information into the computer, or they get a mail check that came in, they would have to put it in.

And well, they said, Hey, we want you to automate. Can you automate this? So yeah, we can automate that in any check that came in once we understood what check that where that came from the bulk of information from the check, put into the system, save it, then close that account out saying it’s taken care of, or here’s the balance, whatever the case may be, whatever the logic was built behind it, you know, it would do that. And the reason why we’re able to do that is because they understood from the beginning, you know, that RPA can work with invoice processing, why can they do this?

Right? So for us, it was more important about educating, educating our clients first. And that’s the most important thing, because like I said, we have hundreds of use cases, if you go to our website, or if you go, you could download the use cases.

But it’s not until you, you can work internally, and that allow them to feel the, you know, the impact, that is going to make a difference. So for us, it was like education is the most important thing. And on the way to educate them, and allow them to be able to see it, fill it and be able to fill it in and feel the impact on it. So in now, we’ve done so many I don’t even know what they are David, I can tell. We’re finding new ones, I have to tell our developers a by the way was that input? What was that one called? An Excel file something processing?

I’m like, what is that? I don’t even know we start making up things, right, like, but they told us what it was okay, well, because that was a pain point for them. Ya know, and that’s not in our use case, downloads, because it’s not normal, you know, so it’s not one that everybody uses, but for that company specifically. It is. So for us, it’s the most educating is educating because once you educate internally, they’ll start looking at different processes. In fact, I’ll give you one more example is we have a property management company, they have 12 employees, automate, I think nine or 10 processes internally.

The first couple of ones were ones that saved him a lot, right and saved him, you know, 1015 hours here and there every single week, right? Now, we’re automating processes that saved them 10 minutes a day, 15 minutes a day, 30 minutes, you know, here and there. And the reason why is because now they understand the capabilities. And now they understand the capabilities. They’re all in. They’re all learning so the educational part was the most important thing. So we’ve done, you know, processes name naming process, we’ve probably done you know, 5060 different types of processes in the different industries and the different levels of companies so yeah, it’s it’s growing.

 

Damon Pistulka  34:52

Well, I think about so if you’re, if you’re if you’re like a distributor or you’re a If I think about because I come from manufacturing, right manufacturing ecommerce. So what’s it what’s a pain in the butt in a manufacturing? Is Incoming, incoming, specially if I’m doing a lot of different things, you know, because you can get literally truckloads that has, I don’t know, a bunch of different stuff from a bunch of different vendors.

So it’s not like I have a big list on a sheet of paper. And uh, yeah, this is it. This a lot of different different formats, different kinds of incoming paperwork from different places. And people spend hundreds of 1000s of hours a year, just going, Hey, Damon sent us these six bolts that I needed special made for us to do this. And then Jim did this. And Sue did that. And Wilson did that. And, and there’s people sitting there punching that stuff in every day, because going from the paper to the computer, which we you guys do a lot of that robotic process automation on that, I would think that these kinds of things is in a warehouse or distribution situation. Could be very good for that.

 

Wilton Rogers III  36:01

Oh, it’s a major impact we have in the grid, think about manufacturing is that manufacturing? is most of them that we worked with. They’re built on legacy systems. Yeah. The systems that have been there for a long time. Oh, right. Yeah, yeah. And, and they have so much information that needs to be, you know, transferred from one area to another area. And we have effect, we have a couple of testimonies of go to our YouTube account.

And what we’re able to do is, grab that information that there, you know, one of the processes that we did is like shipping or something I can’t remember, but it was shipping, but every time that they would get if it didn’t get there on time, it was the wrong stuff. They wouldn’t get paid, or they’ll get fined, or they get whatever the case may be, right.

Yeah. So so they were paying a lot of fees $100,000 a year on fees, but because of wrong paint, wrong shipments, wrong paint, or you know, wrong, equipment, whatever, we eliminate the whole thing, we eliminated that completely. And the reason why they were doing it because they had the system they’ve been using for 1015 years, I don’t know how long, it’s been a long time. And they didn’t even think that we can grab that information from there and move it. And I said we can. And when we did it, they were just blown away.

And they were able to take what we built, they had five locations. Nationwide, we did one, one location. And they were able to take that what we built and implemented all five other locations. And it saved them 1000s and 1000s of hours. And it saves them hundreds and 1000s of dollars because it didn’t come back with mistakes. It didn’t come you didn’t make these terror these these manual errors as human errors that you know, that we’re making on the regular basis eliminated that, if the bot didn’t understand, you know what to do or where to go. It was like it send it back to the we call it a gatekeeper to someone’s you didn’t tell me about this one. It’s almost like an assistant, right?

Hey, I never heard about this one. What about this one. And once you enter that information in there, the you know, the button and hit send about will continue and now the but now the button knows. Okay, next time, I know that that this will happen if this, you know if I do this again. So it was always the process improvement as well. And once they saw that it was a game changer. So manufacturing, I think right now is manufacturing in the counties are probably the two top industries that we see for us that are really, you know, taking RPA by storm right now.

 

Damon Pistulka  38:37

Wow, that’s cool. That’s, that’s really cool. Because as you were talking about that earlier, I was just thinking about the, you know, 1000s of people that are working on that every single day, you know, with paper in their hand, and yeah, I gotta check that I got everything. But then I go over to the computer, and I put everything in which if you don’t have to do that stuff is huge for them.

Because at that time to put it into the computer a first of all time be mistakes. This inventory accuracy is crucial in those kinds of situations. And if you put 10 in and you really only got one or something like that, you know, it’s a big deal. It’s a big deal. Yeah, we got a few more Greg Gregory hills here. Thanks for being here today. He downloaded the download the information too. And then we got Rob, Rob’s here today. Rob says hello.

 

Wilton Rogers III  39:33

Robin Demetrio. I’ve been huge on the left. They’ve been with the company since you know, for the last couple of years. Obviously. Rob started off at the beginning. He was my you know, I think when I first saw my company, I reached out to him say hey, I need someone to help me with this. Rob has been on board ever since. So, Robin Demetria a huge part of the growth of the company and where we’re at today. So, you know, those are my brothers. That’s family. That’s fam Nice.

 

Damon Pistulka  39:59

Nice Good stuff, good stuff. And it’s nice when you can have people around you like that, because it’s, it allows you to build a culture and a business that really lifts everyone around you.

 

40:11

So that’s good. It’s good.

 

Damon Pistulka  40:13

So so as we do this, this is really interesting, because I think more about this now and learning more about the robotic process automation, and what you can really help people and talking about manufacturing and accounting. Those are a couple things that madness is huge. It’s huge when you set and I’m thinking about these man. He said, growing up in manufacturing, I just think about all the warehouses I’ve been in.

And all the other places that you can use this even in places where you have people that are doing manual, whatever, where they have to write things down, and then it has to go into a system somewhere. And there’s people that were doing that. This like, wow, there’s a lot of stuff that happens.

So anyways, you’re talking about invoice processing, you’re talking about, like, if people are paying invoices, you have that example of people are paying something a lot of checks coming in a lot of probably mail in payments, kind of stuff that while there’s just so many applications for this, where you can radically change the way you’re doing business because that’s, that’s there’s really not value added work for those people doing it. It’s necessary, but it’s not value added that that person can be exactly, yeah, making sure that, hey, I got 1000 payments in and 1000 payments went into the system, that’s a lot better, and they can be off to doing much better things.

 

Wilton Rogers III  41:40

Absolutely, I think the fastest way to really understand RPA. And the power and the impact it makes is if you can just sit back, and you could think about okay, when I go to work tomorrow, what I’m going to do when I go to work on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, what are the things that I do? What are the repetitive processes that I do on a regular basis, I’m gonna do over and over and over again, that’s where you want to start, at least, it may not be the process you want to automate right away. But it’s the place that you want to start to be educated. And once you get educated on that you see it, then you know, the power of RPA.

Because anything that you are doing manually, that’s repetitive, that you can do over and over. And that it is rule based, and that you’ve already built a logic from it, right, you’re gonna turn your computer on, you’re gonna do, you’re going to grab that, that that Excel spreadsheet, you’re going to open up this, you know, this application, you’re gonna grab that information from an Excel spreadsheet, an Excel spreadsheet, you’re gonna save it here, and then you’re going to download it to QuickBooks or whatever the case may be what it you know, all that different things, all the different things.

Once you realize that is a manual process, that’s a great place to start, at least to be able to get the knowledge and education you need. Because after that, you can say, that’s the process I want to automate. Or you say, I understand it, but I have a bigger pain point that I want to take care of.

Right now that I know it’s gonna save, it’s going to really impact our company. Yeah. And so will we go, what we’ll do is we’ll go and map it out, right. And then out of that map, it may be five or six 710 different tasks within that process from beginning to end, I needed that they do manually, right, we’ll find one part of that process to do a POC proof of concept. And we do that right away. Because once we do that, and we shown that proof of concept. That’s the like, okay, I get it. I get it. So it happens quick. I mean, it doesn’t, it doesn’t take months and months, it takes days, maybe a week. So happens pretty fast.

 

Damon Pistulka  43:56

So you can identify and try these things pretty quickly. And then so if you automate it one step in the process, is it pretty easy then to go? Well, if I’ve got this part of the process automated, let’s see if we can add this piece and then this piece and this piece to it to actually do more and more is, or is it pretty much you want to go on and do the whole thing at once when you’re doing it?

 

Wilton Rogers III  44:17

Great question, what we’ll do is we’ll go in there and we’ll map out from beginning to end, we’ll map it out. Okay. And we know exactly how much of that can be automated, right? All right, but we picked one part of that to automate first because time wise your time Our time, you know, getting on getting all that information gathering and all that may take a while. But information gathering in development for a part of that task doesn’t take that long.

Right? And in once we do that, then you get a bigger picture like okay, now I get it once that’s already developed and deployed and you’re seeing it work. What you already know that we can do The whole thing has already been mapped out for it. Yeah. And most of times, like, Okay, now to do the POC, let’s go ahead and automate the whole thing at that point. They’re bought in, because they see it.

Yeah. Right. And if you do the whole process at one time at the beginning, sometimes it’ll get bought in because like, Okay, you gotta, you gotta get information here. The this step in this step, no, it takes a while, let’s do this one little piece first. And then once you see this, you’ll be bought in and you’ll see the value, and then you’ll, you’ll be able to give us the information because there’s so many, once you start seeing how we work, and you see the value of it, like, Okay, now we know and I could have done pretty fast. And when you know that this process can be automated, fully, and you see the value out of it. You’ll want to get it done right away.

 

Damon Pistulka  45:43

Yeah. That’s awesome. That’s awesome. So we’re about the time but I do want to ask you a couple things about the future. What do you really see for the future? This? Because I mean, we’re talking about the things that you’re doing now. But what do you really see things that you can automate now that may be able to be automated in the future? That’s pretty exciting.

 

Wilton Rogers III  46:09

You know, a lot of things that we’re working on right now is a lot of it was called unstructured data, right? We can automate that. But it’s a lot of the takes some AI work into it working with the client right now. That gets hundreds at night to get back 1000s and 1000s. of documents from different vendors all over the world every day. And a lot of them come in with handwriting and different parts, right? So it’s almost like when you go to the bank right in, and you if you go to ATM and you write a check, and you could put you put on depositing a check, you put your hand right at $200 in there, and you stick it in in the ATM and sucks it up. Oh, citizens?

Oh, yes. It’s $20 or $20. Yes, except right. Those are things that we’re doing now. Those are the things that we’re actually doing right now. Wow. So we see that growing right now. Because there’s still a lot of handwritten stuff that are being done. So we’re trying to figure out how to do that. Not only that, we try to do that. But now we have an easier way that we can grab that information, how to get it to someone so they can actually make that manual change. And put that information hit send about we’ll take it from there. It’s almost like NASA somebody, I can’t read that it says the same dollar the $300. This is $20. Okay, I put $20.

And they’ll just they’ll send it to the bot and the bot will take it from there. Right. Yeah, that’s, that’s a huge thing. But the biggest thing right now we’re seeing is, you know, from 2017 to 2020. It was more about RPA software. I mean, the software was growing. UiPath just went public. They’re huge. Right, automation anywhere, blue prism. I mean, there’s probably 5060 vendors out there right now. But what we’re seeing right now, is that the software’s is sort of slowing down, it’s still growing, but it’s not growing as fast.

The service part is booming. What I mean by that is, when a client does one process, they’re gonna do multiple processors. Yeah. So the service part is growing. And the what we’ve seen from 2017, to now has, I mean, it’s, it’s not even close, it’s probably, for us, the speed has totally changed. But people are being educated on it, and wants to educate on it, and they see it happening. They’re just wanting more and more and more of it. So the service part of RPA is really taken off, it’s totally taken off. So the future is really bright.

You know, it was either Gartner or Forrester, Kimber, who it was, but they said by 2025 Every company that’s going to move forward move for fast will have some kind of RPA implementation doesn’t matter what side you are. So people have to this is the time to sort of really understand what it is because it hasn’t really even cracked the surface. It really hasn’t. It’s barely getting off the ground right now. But if you can get in now, men, it’s going to be a huge game changer for your company. And you know, in right now, the price the demand is in the clients favor, you know, it’s on their side.

And we’re starting to see even from our point in, you know, we’re starting to see the change in the price and demand because, you know, the demand is a little bit more now. So we’re not the same price that we were two years ago. Yeah, no, we’re not gonna be the same price. Today like we are in two years, right? So this is the time to really get in and understand that because you’re gonna, you’re gonna see that your ROI is going to be ridiculous and be able to show the ROI even before you start the build.

 

Damon Pistulka  50:03

Yeah. Awesome. Awesome. Well, this has been just an incredible conversation because I learned so much talking to you about it, and, I enjoy getting educated myself on it. It’s great because I see the application for this in so many different places. I just, I just want to thank you for being here today and talking to us about business process automation and robotic process, automation, and really helping these small and mid sized businesses take advantage of it so they can be competitive and get the people do doing the higher value work.

 

Wilton Rogers III  50:38

I appreciate it. I appreciate it. This is I love spreading the word. And you know, for me, it’s really helping people understand it, whether they go with us or not. That’s up to them, but it’s just really getting to understand it. And that’s why thanks for Demetri really bringing out the RPA playbook, which I built. I created a playbook about a few months ago. And Gregory thank you for downloading it.

Because it’s I think that’s important for people to, to grab because I’ve talked having 1000s and 1000s of conversations. Everybody is in a different mindset and different level of technology and automation. And the RPA playbooks gives you an idea of where are you in your automation journey. That book would allow you to go from where you’re at and take it to the next level and beyond?

 

Damon Pistulka  51:26

Awesome, awesome. Well, your RPA playbook, the robotic process automation playbook is on the simply automate i nc.com. website. So make sure if you’re interested in that playbook, get there download it, take a look at it, and get educated. And if go ahead, and I’m sure you’ve got a contact us form, there is a where’s a good place for people to contact you are the right person that simply automate is that on LinkedIn here?

 

Wilton Rogers III  51:53

Yeah, the best place to contact me directly is on LinkedIn. Right? If you send me a message, I read through this, all that different kind that we get. So if you’re, you know, if you mentioned that you saw me on here, I’ll definitely contact you here. Reach out, you can contact us on on our website, you can go to our website, simply automate inc.com in you know how to contact the Contact Us there myself, Dimitri, Rob, we have more people that will be able to help you out there, especially if you’re industry specific.

You can go on there, just say what industry you’re in. We can send you use cases, for your specific industry. That way you can get a better idea. So get at least start be a little bit more educated on RPA. And a little bit more awareness of where what’s happening in your industry, but also have the resources and the experience to help you guide you as you start to you know, going into the journey or starting to improve your journey of where you’re at right now.

 

Damon Pistulka  52:54

Yeah. Awesome. Well, thanks so much. Today we got Welton Rogers the third here today from simply automate Inc, talking about robotic process automation and showing us how to get those business processes automated. Thanks so much for being here, Welton. Thanks for all the listeners, Dimitri. Rob, and Gregory. Everyone else is listening. We’ll be back again with another great guests later this week. Thank you.

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