Auckland-based process automation services provider Quanton is set to continue its steady growth as one of the early players in the RPA space in Aotearoa New Zealand.
Founded in 2016, Quanton was launched to fill a gap in the market for a local company addressing business transformation with automation, managing director and founder Garry Green told CRN.
He said he got in touch with automation provider Blue Prism who said that they were keen for a partner that could service the ANZ market.
“We trained up a team and formed a company around this idea, and we worked with a couple of businesses that we knew,” Green said. “I went back to businesses I'd worked with and one of the major banks became my launch customer, and then we landed one of the second major banks pretty rapidly after that.”
As the company grew, Green saw that the value of RPA was at its best when combined with the business optimisation methodology Lean.
“We've been growing with our clients that marry transformation and Lean with automation,” he said. “What we find is that there's no silver bullet, it is a journey, and so with our clients, we've taken them on a journey of where they want to get to and getting more out of what they do.”
He said that the key to ensuring a successful outcome with clients is in understanding why they want to add automation to their systems and guide them toward those outcomes.
Most commonly, this includes a mixture of improving revenue, efficiency and productivity, creating better customer experiences, while adding that freeing up staff to do more interesting work helped employee retention according to Green.
“No businesses basically got to greatness by cutting costs consistently. You've got to have a differentiator of how you're going to do this. You need to be efficient, but you've got to have the blend of everything.”
Despite the difficulties with staffing that IT companies have faced in recent years, Quanton has grown its staff by ten in the last two years, including key consulting and enterprise engagement appointments.
In June of last year, Ravi Kulutanga was named to lead a new advisory unit, and at the start of this year, Ursula Riemer was appointed as the company’s strategic engagement director.
Green said that he plans to add another five to 10 heads this year, finding that a mixture of local and offshore workers, training graduates, and focusing on those who have transferable skills, rather than directly relevant skills, is helping the company maintain that growth.
Quanton has added several vendors to its portfolio including automation platform vendor UiPath, completed work for the likes of Chorus, OmniHealth and Toyota Financial Services, and landed several large clients in Australia.
“I started with some business partners, and we bought them out probably three years ago,” Green explained. “We've been very organically funded. There's a certain pace that we've gone at to ensure that we can address what we can do because if you have too-rapid growth it puts a lot of risk and stress on the business and cash flow.”
Green said that he aims to continue the path of steady growth, expanding Quanton’s presence in ANZ as well as its technology offerings with the likes of cognitive automation – empowering bots with a greater level of intelligence.
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