"If only you could take them inside your head and show them, 'You can do all this with that software!'"

At Nubix, Yarado will initially be deployed on system administration, Laarveld reports. Nubix manages machines at customer sites, and managing these machines has been done by hand until now. "That first case we had Yarado set up is for a customer of ours, but in the meantime tasks have been added," Laarveld said. "I see very much the potential of Yarado and want to try to pay a lot of attention to it internally at our company. After all, I see plenty of opportunities. I see those internally, but also with customers."

He does immediately admit, however, that such an internal process optimization must of course first pass through the proverbial balloting committee. "The tricky thing is to convince a customer of what the possibilities are all about. If only you could take them inside your head and show them, 'This is all possible with that software!', and even then you still don't have all the possibilities. I am incredibly excited about all that is possible. So we try to add tasks step by step. There are a number of things we want to work out internally, also to demonstrate to colleagues exactly what the package entails and what you can do with it."

What Nubix looks at internally 

"I have currently worked out a business case for emptying our support inbox," Laarveld dives into the process Nubix is currently focusing on internally. "A lot of emails come in to us from backup notifications. We are an IT company so we do a lot of backup management for customers. We want to start automating that. We use a CRM system where we keep track of tickets for customers, and so we do the system management ourselves. If we get a report of a backup that failed, that has to be documented, the customers have to be notified, and things have to be scheduled internally."

"We have processes in place for that, and some of those processes, including emptying that inbox, are done manually right now. We're now going to see if we can automate that with Yarado to ensure that our support staff has time left over for things that are more valuable than administrative work." So time is the key word in this operation, and exactly that is what Yarado provides Nubix. It was only left to Laarveld to convince his colleagues of the gains to be made. "I asked internally of: gosh, come up with some ideas what we can use Yarado for. One of those ideas was processing those backup notifications."

"This idea also turned out to be good right away, as the process takes us a lot of time. We were able to attach a business case to this process, because with the Yarado software it was quite quickly clear what the payback period was," he explains. This also brings up an advantage of Yarado: no initial investment is required. There is only monthly billing when the software robot is running. As a result, processes can quickly be cost-effectively taken away from people, who can then focus on other, more important tasks.

How Nubix's customers can also benefit from Yarado

Nubix's management saw the possibilities at a Yarado meeting and was immediately excited. Laarveld could explore internally, while Nubix could also use the software to broaden its portfolio. Indeed, in addition to internal activities, Nubix's customers are also feeling the effects of the collaboration with Yarado. The software will be used to gather data from the system administration that Nubix does at its customers: "The biggest idea is to start putting away the system administration that we now do on about thirty or forty Linux machines at customers. We log into those Linux machines remotely on a web client. That opens up a local tool that allows us to set up a remote session with that machine."

"Those machines are in a fairly dynamic production environment. In that production environment, they are not always wired, but with a Wi-Fi connection. That can cause problems when we take over system management from an organization. Sometimes we can access those machines, sometimes not. It takes a lot of time to still be able to do system administration properly. We'll see if the software robot can solve that." So Nubix customers will find that machines that currently sometimes lose connectivity will be straightened out faster. Largely, Yarado supported Nubix in setting up this process, but Laarveld is now putting the same dots on the i, which the software so simply can. After all, Yarado's technical team is always ready to help.

Why is using Yarado going to add value to Nubix's operations towards customers? In factories, operators see screens that tell them what to do. So when an update is made, it should not bother them, and Nubix can make such an update without shutting down the customer's operations. From the implementation of those updates, they then create a report with a split between which ones succeeded, and which ones didn't. "We ultimately want to gain insight into which machines we cannot reach at all, and whether we can take measures for those machines, and measure that properly." Is the connection lost too often? If so, an AP (Access Point) can in fact be placed, or the Wi-Fi range can be strengthened. Yarado's software identifies where this is needed.

Getting Nubix to automate

Laarveld rightly calls himself the standard-bearer for Yarado within Nubix. Despite the numerous processes in which Yarado can play a role, he sometimes encounters resistance. "That's the case everywhere," he thinks. "If you want to pick something up, it takes a lot of time first. You have to start investing. If you want to put down a sustainable solution, the first thing is always about that it takes a lot of time on the front end, and that it will pay for itself later. That's always the biggest barrier to overcome, but that's true of any IT implementation. You run into problems you didn't think about, you have to tackle them again. That goes like a wave, and those waves get smaller and smaller until you stabilize. Then you find that you really start to benefit from what you've put in place."

By deploying Yarado internally, Nubix is already keeping time. The business case was right, and immediately it could be built. "That case we have now worked out for the internal project saves us thirty to forty hours a month. With the estimate that we need about fifty hours to set things up, the payback period was within three months. That's pretty nice, I think. You can easily convert that to cost. I think the benefit is greater, but we keep the estimate lower."

"We're really looking purely at docking reports now, but around that there's a lot more time involved that we didn't include in that calculation. In the end, management also has to see that the savings are higher than you initially estimated. That is only positive," he concludes. So that savings of thirty to forty hours is a conservative assumption, but when you realize that this is an estimate for just one process, it only highlights the huge gains to be made at Nubix, at its customers and really at all companies that have repetitive work in their processes.