About Flobotics
Flobotics is an RPA development agency offering a broad scope of automation services, ranging from consulting to analytics, from automation to alterations, allowing it to cater to the needs of various industries, including healthcare, fintech, insurance, manufacturing, telecom, and more.
With such a diversified target audience, Flobotics has its hands full. So far, it has completed over 100 successful implementations for many prominent customers, including Paramount Residential Group, Docplanner, and T Bank. Each project resulted in an average ROI increase of over 350%, earning Flobotics its place among the best businesses in its class.
- Industry: RPA development agency
- Size: <50 employees
- Use cases: Resource and finance management
Overview
Flobotics is a small company with an enormous scope of automation services – and even greater ambitions. Unfortunately, its processes failed to share those qualities, as they were held back by oversimplified Excel spreadsheets and lacking tools.
Chris Szwed, the Delivery Leader at Flobotics, observed the impact of those shortcomings from up close. Overseeing all the operations and their finances, he couldn’t help but notice the errors in long-term allocations, the lack of sufficient billing models for his projects, and burdensome invoicing.
These problems constantly interfered with his work, limiting his ability to monitor and improve crucial operations while boosting the company’s profitability and productivity. From his perspective, “[Flobotics managers] were missing out on many opportunities in project management, as they mainly used Excel for that purpose.” This showed in stagnant KPIs and profits.
To facilitate its further development, Flobotics was determined to upgrade its management solutions and perfect its processes—and BigTime was ready to help it do that.
Challenges
Like many other small businesses, Flobotics started its management processes with Excel spreadsheets. However, after years of stable growth, it became apparent that the company had outgrown the tables – and so did its processes.
Resource management was most affected by the unchangeability, both in short—and long-term perspectives. Chris Szwed stated the managers “had very little idea of how allocations would look like,” as the company’s tools could only support simple assignments. They were also forced to calculate the work costs manually, as their tools did not offer such solutions. As a result, Flobotic’s invoices were prone to errors and required hours of labor to be corrected.
To make things worse, although Flobotics provides its services to companies worldwide, it lacks sufficient billing models and currency management tools, leading to another wave of error-prone spreadsheets and additional manual changes.
Issues Flobotics faced before BigTime Foresight included:
- Oversimplified resource management: Flobotics’s former tools could only create simple allocations, incapable of reflecting the complexity of allocations in the company’s flexible teams in the short- and long-term, leading to numerous errors and suboptimal use of resources.
- Separate plans and finances: As timesheets did not contain information on work costs, Flobotics’s managers spent hours preparing invoices—and they could never be certain of the accuracy of their calculations. Additionally, combining the information could take hours and did not guarantee data accuracy.
- Lack of sufficient billing types and currencies: Despite having numerous international customers, Flobotics managed its billings without currencies and bespoke billing types, adding even more workload to the already burdensome invoicing process and potentially jeopardizing it even further.
BigTime Solution
Having struggled with these problems for some time, Flobotics decided against using spreadsheets further and looked for a ready-to-implement, comprehensive PSA solution—and BigTime perfectly matched that description.
After its implementation, BigTime successfully eliminated any unpleasant surprises in resource planning, allowing Flobotics to test different scenarios for both short- and long-term perspectives and add financials to the equation. As a result, Flobotics managers are now “aware of all the financial scenarios they might face, and they know the exact work costs for invoices” – regardless of the currency or billing type.
Additionally, thanks to BigTime, all the data can be processed further in the system. With automated updates and advanced reports in place, Flobotics now has a complete overview of all the operations and can quickly gather and sort information to meet different business needs.
With BigTime Foresight, Flobotics now has:
- Complete overview of all flexible allocations: Flobotics managers can now check employees’ availability, create drafts and standard allocations, and test different scenarios to choose what’s best for both people and the company. They also do not need time-consuming meetings to do that – in BigTime Foresight, it just takes a few minutes.
- Build-in financial planning: BigTime Foresight automatically assigns financial data such as hourly rates or wages to new allocations and tracked time, creating an instant overview of project finances compliant with a chosen billing type and currency. This allows the managers to generate invoices in seconds—no errors included.
- Valuable insights available to key decision makers: All types of data are now automatically collected, updated, and processed into advanced reports, helping the managers control key processes and make better decisions.
Results
While Flobotics might be a small RPA development company, now it has everything a business needs on its way to greatness: scalable processes that grow with the business while responding to all its needs.
As Chris stated, “Having the ready-to-use tool for project financial management, his work is much more natural than in Excel. It is much easier to understand and use the data.” The results of such a comprehensive overview can be seen throughout the business, as it can now boast about newly acquired accurate allocations, precise invoices, and hundreds of saved precious hours that would otherwise be wasted on managing Excel spreadsheets.
Results:
- Reduced allocation and scheduling errors: Managers can now efficiently manage their flexible teams regardless of the type of project and allocations and create error-free plans for any circumstances.
- Quicker and more precise invoicing process: With all the financial information linked to the plans and allocations, managers can generate invoices in seconds and ensure their content is correct.
- Reduction in manual effort: BigTime Foresight has automated most data management processes, leaving the managers with little to do in the process and freeing their capacity for decision-making.