New Age Hyper Automation Platform
Black Basil Technologies built a new age hyper automation platform resulting in scalable, cost efficient and and faster roll out of new workflows in one third of implementation time
About Element5
The company was founded in 2019 by four post-acute care industry veterans distressed by the sheer amount of time spent on manual tasks. This company is working to eliminate 200,000 manual hours a year spent on administrative work.
Challenge
The company built platform 1.0 and started with with UiPath and after couple years they found that they cannot scale and achieve its ambitious goals with the current platform as it lacks some important features. Some of the limitations were:
- Primarily UIPath was used and some if the key features were difficult to implement. The overall cost for a workflow was turning out to be very high.
- Scalability was not baked into the platform. Tech Leads and Architects have to think about scale for each workflow implementation
- Workflow were not resilient. If fails in between, they could not recover automatically and needed to be restarted from scratch resulting in more time taken to complete tasks end to end.
- Reusability was not there and team had to rebuilt workflows for different use case and clients resulting in higher implementation cost.
- Developer experience is not good and Vendor partnership model is hard to achieve resulting in slower growth
Solution
Black Basil Technologies built a new-age platform for creating prebuilt workflows, deployments, and operationalization of workflows for multiple clients. It was critical in shaping the new-age automation platform’s architecture. It collaborated well with the architects, product managers, technical leads, and developers, ensuring the platform was designed and delivered well with good engineering practices.
- Used event-driven architecture and any tool and technology can be easily plugged in resulting in cost effective workflow automation.
- It will accelerate the development of new workflows and allow the reuse of process components for multiple workflows, thereby saving costs and quicker rollouts.
- The platform comprises SDK, CLI, APIs, workflow repository management, and Prebuilt Workflows Governance.
- Architecture designed for a better development experience will foster a better vendor ecosystem.
The Platform
- Used Kafka for communication
- Build Platform API’s
- Built connectors for actual worker using any RPA tool
- Clear domain boundaries
Technologies Used
Key Results
- Faster rollout of new workflows. From 3-4 months to <1 month
- Better reusability by building Prebuilt workflows resulting in reduction in overall cost per workflow
- Better reusability by building prebuilt workflow steps resulting in reduction in overall cost per workflow
- Lesser manual interventions and support need as workflow recovers from failures automatically resulting in reduction in overall support cost per workflow
- Reliable workflow execution resulting in more customer retention and more opportunities (better feedback from customers)
- More trust built up with clients. Few big customers tried to automate workflows with their own IT team, but we were able to automate their workflows on our new platform successfully. Which ultimately built trust in organization
"Black Basil played a key strategic role in shaping up our new age automation platform's architecture and collaborated well with our architects, product manager, technical leads and developers ensuring the platform is designed and delivered well with the right engineering practices. They provided thought leadership in DevOps, QA Automation and Agile delivery to ensure that Element5 emerges as an 'Elite DevOps performer' based on DORA metrics. They also provided the right guidance on building our long-term data strategy by following the Data Lakehouse architecture. Their tech leadership is never hesitant even in having code pairing sessions with our developers and are always ready to roll up their sleeves whenever required."
