Listen to this articleBelow is our recent interview with Henry Xie, the Founder and CEO at Simple Fractal:
Q: Henry, can you tell us something more about the company and your software?
A: Simple Fractal creates custom software to help businesses in the healthcare and financial services industries solve their most pressing problems. Our team of engineers and business consultants collaborates with clients to identify key challenges to their growth–whether operational bottlenecks, or missed revenue opportunities, or data-entry errors. We then design software to improve their processes, helping them unlock revenue, cut costs, and improve their speed and accuracy.
Our primary area of expertise is robotic process automation (RPA). Many companies out there rely on legacy software systems (like EHRs for healthcare companies, or ERPs for retailers) that haven’t been upgraded in a long time, and aren’t customizable enough for their needs. However, these systems have become core to how businesses operate, so replacing them outright would be too expensive, risky, and time-consuming. Companies end up throwing people at the problem, wasting time and energy on processes that could be automated with software.
Robotic process automation allows businesses to build software to run on top of their legacy systems–effectively upgrading them without needing to replace them. We create software “bots” to follow rules and operate within these legacy systems. This can greatly increase speed and accuracy for our clients, and frees up their employees for less routine work that requires human judgment.
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Q: How exactly do you improve businesses?
A: We follow a five-step process to identify high-ROI areas of improvement and create software to deliver that ROI:
1. ASSESS. We work closely with stakeholders in the C-suite and employees on the ground to gain a nuanced understanding of the business and its pain points.
2. IDENTIFY. After uncovering bottlenecks, we identify both the highest priorities and a long-term roadmap to success—and ensure stakeholder buy-in.
3. IMPLEMENT. We start by tackling the simplest solution that will deliver the most value—then measure the results.
4. ENHANCE. With an eye on the KPIs, we make adjustments along the way to drive optimization and success.
5. EXPAND. With proven results, we help our partners take the next step—with a focus on long-term partnerships.
Our team is agile and responsive to our clients’ needs, so we can often deliver working software within just a few months of beginning a project.
Q: What’s the best thing about your company that people might not know about?
A: We have built an amazing culture around meritocracy, growth, transparency, teamwork and trust that allows us to attract and retain the most talented engineers. Our processes reflect our ideals, with individual feedback sessions with the CEO every 3 weeks, an opportunity for a raise every three months, and team-wide retrospectives every month. We set up these processes to ensure that each team member and the company as a whole continue to improve at a rapid pace.
Q: Can you share a few success stories with us?
A: One of our clients is a national healthcare provider with 2,800 clinical staff and more than $100 million in annual revenue. They use an imperfect technology platform for patient accounting and insurance payment reconciliation, and relied on human labor to plug the many gaps this system. They even had to hire an outsourced team to take on this extra work, and the combined costs of their labor and missed revenue due to human error was well into the millions of dollars.
We met with key stakeholders at this company and discovered that almost all of the payment reconciliation work they’d hired this outsourced team for was repetitive and rules-based. This meant that we could build a meta layer of custom software bots to operate on the underlying system in the same way, reconciling payments more quickly and accurately.
After just 2 months of work, we rolled out the first bots, correcting several thousand entries in a retroactive run and on pace to save our client $1 million per year in unlocked revenue and lowered operational costs. Since we delivered such immediate ROI, this client expanded our engagement to other parts of the business as well. Over the next few months, we anticipate being able to save them an additional $2 million in costs.
Another client, S’well, was unable to meet demand for its custom-branded water bottles. Their team was drowning in client inquiries, leading to delays, mistakes, and dissatisfied customers.
After consulting with management and the ops team, we architected, designed, and built an order management system tailored to S’well’s needs. This system led to 3x faster order fulfillment, 60% fewer cancellations, and a 9x increase in revenue. Our technology enabled S’well to capitalize on tens of millions of dollars of demand, establishing a meaningful sales channel during a critical period of growth. S’well now has $100MM+ in annual revenues, and we’ve been working with them for over three years.
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Q: What are your plans for the future?
A: We intend to become a key player in the ongoing RPA revolution. According to Researchers at Hadoop, RPA has the potential to save companies $5-7 trillion by 2025. At this point, we’ve merely scratched the surface of what RPA can accomplish. Where other software vendors like BluePrism, AutomationAnywhere and UIPath offer general RPA product solutions across multiple industries, our approach is to establish expertise in the healthcare and financial services verticals with custom-tailored software bots.
In providing verticalized digital workforces, we hope to emancipate human workers to focus on higher-level tasks that require creativity and judgment–and create massive value in the process.
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