It's a question we've been asked a few times over the last 18 months, and the answer is pretty simple, says Hannes Bantjes, a cofounder of Autopilot.
Our previous company pilotfish was to all intents and purposes a success story. Over the 13 years in business we assembled what was arguably one of the best software development teams in South Africa, and built an enviable blue-chip client base by producing some really amazing BPM systems. Some of these systems are still effective today - in fact the solution we built for the national Taxi Scrapping Administrator has helped them to take unroadworthy minibus taxis off our roads while solving some serious admin and financial challenges in a completely controlled, transparent and audited environment.
But even though we were doing well, making money and ticking all the boxes required to be deemed a successful company, we were still struggling with the day to day running of our own business. Despite implementing some extremely complex BPM systems for our clients, these large and bespoke systems were simply not accessible to small businesses such as ours and, ironically, we didn't have the time to implement systems for ourselves. You know what they say about the cobbler's children...
Over the years we experienced every up and down a small business owner can have. But none of the successes came without massive effort, to say the least. The time required to keep things running smoothly didn't get any less as our staff numbers increased. Instead we found the exact opposite. With every staff member we ended up with just a little bit more admin, a little bit more management required, and for two guys winging this "running a business" thing it proved quite a challenge. Late nights and weekend time became the norm for "dealing with the business of running a business", while working hours were dedicated to our clients.
In the end we realised that if we had systems like the ones we were implementing for our clients we would be better equipped to deal with the day-to-day running of our own business, keeping us on top of common issues that kept recurring, like:
* Having a way to easily manage customer requests coming in, whether it was for new quotes or support on existing systems.
* Having a way to know that admin tasks such as generating invoices or following up with debtors had been completed, and automatically get task notifications when something escalated to us.
* Knowing that someone's going to be on leave next week...
The list goes on and on.
And that was it - the opportunity to bring the big benefits of BPM to smaller businesses was too great to ignore. We sold our controlling share of pilotfish and set off to build Autopilot - a system that will allow companies of any size to easily automate internal processes. One application that will quietly run in the background and dictate what should happen today. One application that will ensure that the next person in a process knows when it's their turn to act, while sharing progress with anyone else that needs to know about it.
So here we are a year and a half later - ready to take business process management to everyone that wants to improve the way they run their business, not just the enterprises that can afford the alternatives.
Exciting times to say the least...
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