Kathy Gibson reports from the Roboteur launch in Johannesburg – A serious challenger in the robotic process automation (RPA) solution space, Roboteur is SpacePencil’s newest offering in its quest for a no-code future.
SpacePencil is an unusual name for a software company, but the founders believe it neatly encapsulates both the ethos and solutions of the organisation.
“We often get asked about our name,” says CEO Graham Fry.
“It’s a reference to the old story about the space race in the 1960, when one of the challenges was for a pen that write in zero-gravity. One side engaged a large team of researchers, engineers and a budget of millions of dollars to solve the challenge. The other side addressed the challenge directly and substituted the pen for a pencil to get the job done.”
Fry explains that RPA should make companies more efficient, and add real value. Instead, many solutions add complexity and cost. SpacePencil developed Roboteur to tackle the initial premise in a more simple and cost-effective way.
“At SpacePencil we like to believe that we are able, with our extensive expanse of existing technology and knowledge and experience of solutions-building, address and solve today’s business challenges today – affordably, extensibly and directly.
“We build solutions that directly address the business need. We do not obscure, we do not complicate unnecessarily, and we do not discard learned skills and experience where we do not have to simply because someone else has created unicorns and mystification around a mostly simple business challenge solution.”
The SpacePencil team has a long history of working in environments where complex problems need to be solved, engaging with people and business with short deadlines and limited budgets.
“This was our training ground,” says Fry. “What we found was a lot of repetition of endeavour and a lack of efficiency, some productivity and a large amount of activity.”
The first commercial product that the team developed was Tistro, a user-based activity tracking and analytical tool, that tracks activity online, on cloud-, internet-, application- and system-based activity.“One of the take outs from the Tistro analytics was that there is a vast amount of repetitive work – and so we looked to the RPA environment.
“Like many other organisations, we investigated available product offerings and found very high bars to entry, complex products to solve sometimes complex business challenges but in many instanced simple business challenges, and a reskilling of or need to employ both rare and expensive resources to address these challenges.
“This is all costly and this would eat into any possible ROI, limit RPA opportunities and solutions and even make it not worth while pursuing.”
The SpacePencil team found is was more cost-effective build its own solution, drawing on its culture for simplicity, plug and play, ease of use and directly approaching the business outcomes need. We needed a pencil.
“The result was Roboteur from SpacePencil,” Fry conludes.
SpacePencil believes the simple solution will eventually be more user friendly because everyone will be able to use it. And this brings the costs down.
“You don’t have to reinvent the wheel – just use the right wheel. And this is the essence of Roboteur’s value proposition: keep it simple and affordable.”
Fry explains that Roboteur works on the Lego block concept. “You can drag and drop any block on to any other block, and they all work the same. As with Lego, the blocks are of different sizes, shapes and colours, but they can all clip into one another. The system is designed by engineers, but it is simple enough for a child to use.
“We approached Roboteur the same way: it has to be simple enough for a non-computer techies to use. Obviously they can’t be computer illiterate, but as long as they can operate a computer and drag and drop object, they can use the solution.
Exactly like Lego, each of the blocks in Roboteur clips together using the same method, but each block does something different.”
In its simplest form, RPA is a process that is replaced by an automated system and is repeatable.
“It offers many benefits to both individuals and organisations,” Fry points out.
“The employees can be alleviated from mundane tasks that no-one likes doing, and where people are prone to making mistakes. They can focus more on the tasks that add to job satisfaction.
“The jobs that RPA can take over are often not done properly by the people doing them, They are usually repetitive and monotonous. So they sometimes end up costing more than they should, because people make mistakes, or rush through the tasks.
“By implementing RPA, the organisation can be assured that the jobs will be done, and will be completed correctly.”
Roboteur helps companies to achieve these benefits without the cost and complexity they have come to expect.
“We have come in and said: here is a single price for a bot and a single price for a server. You need a bot and server per machine, so the cost is very easy to calculate.
“We have also made the system very simple and user-friendly to implement, so you don’t need to employ new people, but can so it with your current people. Even people who are just slightly technical can use Roboteur to build new processes and systems. The solution has been built in a way that means you don’t have to be a rocket scientist to create new processes, but can quickly get solutions up and running.”