Two leading forces in their respective fields have entered into a strategic alliance to help South African organisations embark on their journey to digital transformation. Noscotek’s decade of experience in both the local and international market resulted in a strong technical team. The business prides itself on providing cutting-edge software solutions for document management, business process management and optimisation. Automate Now, on the other hand, is able to complement this offering with decades of expertise in automating processes and digitising documents.
Werner Engelbrecht, a director at Automate Now, joined Kyocera 16.5 years ago and left at the end of June this year. He was the CFO for four of those years and the CEO of the organisation for another four years.
During that time, Kyocera, which was a printing company, was transformed into a paperless environment, using business process management and business process optimisation tools. Seven years down the line, more than 120 electronic forms and processes had been implemented across the business.
Engelbrecht decided to start his own business to help other companies on their digital transformation journey, Automate Now.
“We embarked on this strategic alliance with Noscotek to collaborate on sourcing the best technology available so that we can bring it to market and help organisations to digitally transform. While the majority of companies want to start this journey, most of them don’t know where to begin. And that creates an opportunity for us to offer them the technology and skills required to help them on their digital transformation journey.”
With a background as a chartered accountant, Engelbrecht has a strong understanding of the back office and the ERP systems around it. “There are a lot of manual processes with little or no integration into those systems in most organisations. And therein lies the opportunity for our partnership to guide people in digitising their manual processes into a workflow.”
Once this is in place, it opens up the ability to start monitoring performance of those processes and seeing where the bottlenecks are within the organisation. It’s difficult to determine inefficiencies or bottlenecks in manual processes.
Another key observation from Engelbrecht is that people are very much creatures of habit when it comes to how they perform tasks or processes. “Often when asked why they do a task or process in a specific way, they’ll say that it’s always been done like that. This provides us with an opportunity to come in and gain an understanding of the current processes from the people who are carrying them out."
He believes the customer always knows their business and its processes better than anyone else and that the knowledge they are able to share is key to enable Automate Now to look at existing processes and see how they can be improved by using technology or even streamlining some of them.
Recent developments around process mining software enables a platform for new innovation. Using the data from a business’s primary systems, either ERP or CRM, process mining software provides complete visibility into your processes.
Bianca Sheppard, Head of Customer Relations at Noscotek, says: “We’re extremely excited about this alliance, bringing together our extensive software offering and Automate Now’s experience to provide digital transformation solutions that are specific to each customer journey.”
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