A manufacturer streamlines management of customer complaints about shipping delays. An accounting firm automates a business function, then offers the automation solution for sale via a store. A school saves thousands of hours a year dealing with student admission forms.
Despite years of business process automation, that story is far from over. And it’s grown more interesting with the emergence of generative AI, application marketplaces, and modern development tools.
Among those working with Australian organisations to take advantage of these trends is Nick Beaugeard, Chief Software Architect of Sydney Managed Service Provider TribeTech, which is behind the new AI-connected business automation business and product World of Workflows.
Beaugeard sees an opportunity to remove automation pain points he’s often seen organisations encounter.
This message is getting noticed. Beaugeard has been showing World of Workflows to large banks, a high-profile federal government agency, a large broadcaster, schools, an accounting practice, a media company and a manufacturer, among others.
Removing “annoying roadblocks”
World of Workflows was built to fix “annoying little automation roadblocks”.
One roadblock was limitations on where data could be stored. “A lot of people have gone out and built SaaS RPA and low code solutions, which is super nice, until you talk to someone who's really strict about where they keep their data,” Beaugeard said.
“We wanted something where we owned the whole stack. And as we started building it, we realised it's not just about RPA and it's not just about process, it's actually about data and where you store your data.”
TribeTech also saw a need for human interaction with automation processes.
“There's very few processes you can 100 percent automate,” Beaugeard said. “And so we've been very careful to build a really smart task interface back to the team which allows the workflow developer to actually get human interaction, rather than stopping a process and breaking out and going to something else.”
Also on TribeTech’s agenda is monetisation – enabling organisations to build and monetise the solutions they build with World of Workflows for such activities as complaints management or onboarding employees.
“We were talking to an accounting firm recently and they're adopting it because they see a way of solving problems in their firm, publishing those solutions in our store and actually making ongoing revenue from using it,” Beaugeard said.
Non-coders can use World of Workflows to draw business processes and automate them. The product can “dive out to people and give them tasks and measure whether they're doing them and allow them to do them or not do them.” It also plugs in to ChatGPT and other tools.
The result is an RPA, database, API, reporting and task management platform, with “rich extensibility” and a mechanism for customers to monetise automation solutions.
“Put it all together, and I think you have something bigger than the sum of the parts,” Beaugeard said.
Manual processing “everywhere”
TribeTech’s understanding of the automation needs of one profession in particular – accounting – ties to its purchase in 2020 of accounting software company HubOne, which Beaugeard founded.
“About 10 years ago, you’d find every suburban accountant was trying to automate what they were doing, and that kind of stopped,” he said.
Since then, Beaugeard has seen small to medium size accounting practices focus on moving to the cloud and to monthly billing.
“Now they’re revisiting [automation], but revisiting it with a different set of tools. They’re revisiting it with things like Xero and Xero Practice Manager and all these other SaaS applications and going, ‘Oh god, how do I pull these together and automate what my practice does?’”
In schools, Beaugeard saw manual processing of “everything from concussion management to health care, to who's allowed to go on an excursion, to getting notes to parents.”
He envisaged ChatGPT and automation helping teachers “move away from a whole bunch of busy work…everything from lesson planning and grading and assessment scoring.” He also sees a place for training ChatGPT to give students pointers on their draft essays.
The legal sector could also benefit from World of Workflows, Beaugeard said – “anything which has either financial or professional services, or indeed any area where you're copying data from one app to another, I think really, really works for this,” he said.
“The whole point of computers is to automate what you do,” Beaugeard pointed out. “And yet, if you walk into any airport lounge, you primarily see people copying data from one application to another – we kind of missed the boat, which is why I'm really excited about this.”
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