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Today and with accelerating speed companies use more and more SaaS solutions to manage and run their businesses. SaaS solutions started years ago to focus on very niche areas to provide greater value to their customers. Today customers are faced with thousands of SaaS choices, and the specialization in features rather then workflow process solutions require companies to stitch together SaaS offerings from different vendors. In many cases, these SaaS solutions are siloed and segregated in each department in an organization.
The problems companies face while trying to automate their businesses with today’s SaaS offerings are:
- SaaS Overload
- Different, unconnected software
- Manual data export/import
- Integration efforts
As consequence companies have many disconnected software solutions that require database synchronization of various records:
- Customers
- Invoices
- Subscriptions
- Employees
Here is an example of a possible composition for a technology company and their SaaS solutions used in the Customer Success department:
Now thanks to solutions like Zapier or PieSync many departments and organizations can somewhat overcome these challenges of disconnected systems. The problem is that once you start building true workflow automation and processes that require access to a database of truth and ensure records are only modified based on data integrity, this stitched SaaS hairball becomes problematic.
Armatic has recognized this problem and built a SaaS suite where features do not become standalone products or companies, but instead, collectively are native features as part of the Armatic software and fully integrated into a business process automation (BPA) solution that sits between the customers CRM and accounting software.
Q: First and foremost, can you please share with us a brief overview of your company? When was Armatic established and what are your goals? Who are the brains behind the company?
A: Two of our founders met originally in 2008 at Adility Inc. when Max Golovnia was hired at the company to iron out online to offline attribution. Still, a problem that is not 100% solved today. In 2012 Adility was acquired and Max and Team had the time of their life developing innovative new products for the changing retail space and fulfilling their quest to solve the online to offline attribution, now fully integrated into 400,000 retail locations including Walmart, Target and BestBuy.
Only a few years later after the acquisition of Adility, the team started three new service businesses, which quickly grew to nearly 1000 employees in the US, Europe, and Asia and helped its clients with software development and customer experience services.
One of the big headaches these service businesses faced was the unpredictability of customer payments and outstanding accounts receivables. Max shared the problem with Casey Griswold a good friend, who had just left Connectifier after Linkedin acquired the company and together they realized this headache was an opportunity that they could solve with technology and process frameworks.
The team started Armatic in 2016 focusing on solving the accounts receivable problems, and they quickly reduced the time to get paid in less than half. Today Armatic expanded the platform to help companies to apply best practices, remove department barriers with a suite of features that include every team member in an organization in a streamlined and controlled workflow for all types of activities in Sales, Customer Success, Finance and Operations.
Q: What industries do you serve and who are your current customers?
A: We see customers from a variety of industries with a heavy focus on services, SaaS and technology businesses. Our customers include SMB’s, Mid-Market and Enterprise clients, and they helped us realize that the problem of disconnected work applications for standard operations like AR, Billing, employee engagement, contract management, and contract signing is a massive problem in organizations of every size.
Q: What kind of impact can customers expect once they use Armatic?
A: The Armatic system impacts every department in an organization in various ways, but the main consistent result is providing those knowledge workers using the Armatic software to leap from a digitized enabled workflow to true automation with analytics focused outcome. Armatic provides increased efficiency and helps to streamline processes while eliminating human error.
As an example, finance departments, not only stop using spreadsheets and manual workflows to follow up on late payers, Armatic automates the whole billing process from quote to invoice generation to collections. Usually, the knowledge worker acts on a signal like an invoice is 30 days past due. With Armatic the system reaches out to the customer before the invoice due date, sends an email, text or even regular letters and collects automatically the balance from customers pre-approved payment methods.
Instead of handling the tedious and labor-intensive micro tasks across the different departments in this workflow chain, Armatic handles every aspect in this workflow (quote, contract, signature, invoice creation, payments) once sales initiated a quote to the customer.
This automation process goes way beyond a digital transformation like an eSignature capability on a contract. Armatic truly automates the process, supporting the knowledge worker by handling these tasks and approvals without the worker present, but based on clearly defined best practices and frameworks the company and knowledge worker have set.
Q: Ok this sounds great, but what are some actual results your clients have seen?
A: Sure, let’s stick with the example of the quote to cash workflow described above. We have customers who have moved from various existing software applications to this all-in-one workflow process who see usually a 50% faster payment cycle from their clients. If it takes 50 days to get paid, Armatic has cut that in half for many of our customers with our automation software.
The benefit is the decrease in the time it takes to get paid, but we have seen other important results; the contract cycle from the initial quote to signature is shortened and the time to receive the first payment is drastically reduced as well.
Other benefits include the ability for a full-featured system like Armatic to take into account various branch scenarios in the business process management (BPM). For example, your contract is signed, and now needs to get paid, but the signer is not the same as your billing contact. This is a typical issue in the sales and onboarding process for new customers.
Now usually at that point, the customer involves the sales rep, the sales rep involves the finance team to set up a new billing contact and finance is sending out the payment request to the correct billing contact. This happens while sales and finance are constantly having the need to coordinate and communicate.
Armatic solves this with a simple workflow automation branch, as soon as the customer indicates that there is a different billing contact, Armatic adds that contact to the process and modifies the remaining steps accordingly. This all happens automatically without any required involvement from any members of the finance, sales or operations department. This process does not require artificial intelligence, but the resulting data elements are used and taken into account for our machine learning optimization.
Q: The improvement and automation in billing and accounts receivables makes sense, but are there other workflows that Armatic can automate that are maybe not that obvious?
A: On the other side of payments and finance, we see your human resource pool and your customer satisfaction as one of the most critical assets. Today before an employee joins your organization they check your reputation online before a customer buys your product or services they usually had seven different touch points and checked various resources before they even engage with you.
So reviews and your online reputation are critical elements in a thriving company. The Armatic platform with access to all of your customer data and all of your employee data has automated the process as well for your HR managers and Success Teams to “set it and forget it”.
Once enabled Armatic is reaching out to your customers and employees, and Armatic provides them with information to the right review sites at the right time. Once a customer’s sentiment turns negative, Armatic modifies automatically the health score of that customer. Success Teams can then reach out to customers and dive into more details, analyzing the issue that Armatic surfaced.
Q: How does this kind of automation change the structure of work?
A: The beauty of automation is not that we gain more time, we simply gain more insights and turn into workers who become much more analytically focused thanks to these automation tools with an insight driven work output, rather than being focused on finishing rote tasks.
Before true automation, workers usually spend the majority of their time with repetitive (rote) work, about one-quarter of their time with decision making and the other time is spent with creative work and thinking. After automation, we flip this on its head with 80% spend in analytical and creative work and only 20% with repetitive or rote work.
Before Automation
After Automation
Q: Tell us more about Armatic. What are its key features and capabilities?
A: The Armatic platform is addressing the needs and automates workflows across multiple departments in an organization:
For finance teams we provide a full suite of tools to manage accounts receivable, accounts payables, payments, and billing and set up robotic process automation for repetitive tasks.
For sales managers and sales teams we ensure they are connected with every department in the organization. Streamlining the contract signing process and reducing the time to get paid on closed deals.
Customer success and customer support teams improve NPS and CSAT scores with Armatic while connecting them with every department in the organization for improved customer insights and automated health scores.
HR teams improve employee onboarding, employee satisfaction and employee advocacy with Armatic, leveraging employee insights with NPS surveys, employee feedback, advocacy, and employee documents and contract creation and storing.
Executives improve their team’s performance with Armatic, leveraging the best practice framework within Armatic to support their team and increase team efficiencies and turning team members from rote focused to analytics focused knowledge workers.
Q: Looking into the future, what are some automation trends or technologies you see on the rise and what are the challenges we will face?
A: There are different market and product requirements that are needed to provide true automation and a change from task-focused knowledge workers to analytics focused knowledge workers.
Jad Naous from the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz provides a great overview of the opportunities and challenges and needed changes in this video. I do think Jad is underestimating the current Role Focused Operational Analytics requirements and makes a similar mistake as prior SaaS trends we saw developing – where Saas companies focused on features as niche players rather than process.
Jad implies that narrow focus is going to be the only way to drive more relevant automation for this knowledge worker class. This will only be feasible once the other layers, especially the ETL (extract, transform, load) layer for seamless data exchange are solved and provide fluid data exchange with data integrity. So our opinion is that for the next five years, we will need a more cohesive process focused automation methodology that we have accomplished with our one system approach for all required integrated features.
About Armatic
Armatic is a SaaS workflow automation platform that sits between our customers’ accounting systems and CRM systems. We make groundbreaking, outcome focused products that enable our users to simply get more things done. Armatic serves thousands of customers around the world and we are still 100% founder-owned. We are headquartered in Irvine, California – with an additional office in Europe.