Santa Marta AB: Making Digitization and Automation a Simpler Affair for Dedicated Businesses

For a company to thrive in this tech world and become successful, the mantra is digitization. Digital transformation will help companies get a competitive edge and sustain in the industry with rapid innovations that will benefit its users and the company, in generating greater ROI. Santa Marta AB is a company that does just that. For effective automation for real businesses, Santa Marta AB works for various industries.  

With a Solid Purpose

Santa Marta AB is a Swedish company created in 2020 with the purpose of providing business process automation from the cloud. Its main product is Laura, a platform able to digitalize any process by flexibly communicating with other applications as well as with human beings.  

Merits of a Good Foresight

Santa Marta’s mission is to help companies automate their processes in a short time and at a reduced cost. During his years as a consultant and IT manager, the company’s Founder, Eduardo Valdelomar, realized that many companies oriented their digitalization as a long and complex project, frequently too ambitious to be successful. In 2020, the COVID pandemic showed the importance of a flexible and quick reaction, and many companies were not prepared for that, so he decided to create a platform that is able to provide that flexibility in the very short term. In April 2021, Laura was already prepared to be productive.  

Achieving the Targets

Two of the most significant projects valuable as foundations for Santa Marta AB were the automation of intercompany invoices in a worldwide organization and the complete automation of the recruiting process in a European organization. In the first case, 40 companies exchange approximately 300 invoices involving roughly 8500 postings per month, applying about 5700 calculation rules. In the second case, the automation platform leads the entire recruiting process managing the flow-through of 5 different applications; the process involves approximately 200 candidates per day in 16 countries.  

Charged with Real-World Experience

Eduardo, the Founder, and CEO of Santa Marta AB are a Spanish Electrical Engineer specialized in automation, with a strong background in machine learning and data science and 25 years of experience in the digitalization of business processes for international companies, both as a consultant and occupying internal management positions. Based on his background in artificial intelligence and his understanding of the real needs of the companies, Eduardo decided to create a business process automation platform, Laura, that’s able to implement smooth and user-friendly workflows, integrating different systems and applying intelligent algorithms wherever they can be useful.  

Using Technology for the Better

Santa Marta AB gives its clients the opportunity to digitalize their business processes in a quick, inexpensive, and rational way. The company’s motto “Effective Automation for Real Business” summarizes its mission and vision: Santa Marta AB grants profitable digitalization for its clients and to make that possible, the company ensures results in a reduced timeframe and cost. Being realistic with regards to the process design is absolutely necessary to get maximum advantage of the project. From a wider perspective, Santa Marta AB is in the process of becoming a partner of AI Sweden, the Swedish National Center for applied artificial intelligence. Within that scenario, the company expects to help in accelerating applied AI in Sweden, strengthening Swedish competitiveness and welfare.  

Overcoming Obstacles for a Clear Vision

We live in a challenging time when some technologies are becoming popular but are still immature or not well understood. And there is a risk of discredit if some initiatives, due to excessive ambition or insufficient preparation, don’t give the expected results. From Santa Marta AB’s perspective, the success key of a digitalization project is the process design and the technology is just a means to achieve the end. It is not rare to hear companies willing to use machine learning or RPA, but maybe they just need some improvements in the ERP or in their web portal. The company’s advice to its clients is to describe what they do as realistically as possible and to picture what they would like to do with an open mind, without pre-assumptions. Once that is clear, it will be easy to know what technologies should be used to reach the objective.  

Innovating for a Purpose

Laura includes several innovative elements. A very relevant one is the architecture itself, based on several bots that are autonomous and interconnected, each one optimized to execute a specific mission. This architecture ensures an unlimited capacity to grow without disturbing the existing functionalities. Another key element in Laura is the graph data model, Yggdrasil, which is compatible with many different databases, like Cassandra or SAP HANA. Yggdrasil allows Laura to learn dynamically and to automatically establish links between data from different sources. Additionally, Laura has an ad-hoc NLP algorithm that is able to understand people in many different languages. Eduardo’s experience in international companies made it clear to him that Laura should be natively multilingual, and so she is at any level of interaction.  

Key Partnerships that Drive Innovation

Santa Marta AB is proud of its partners, who share its commitment to integration and digitalization. A partnership is essential to prepare native integrations with different solutions, as well as to ensure a quick reaction to the requirements of the clients. The company is an official member of the SAP® PartnerEdge® open ecosystem, being part of the Build specialization. Also related to the SAP world, Novis Euforia cooperates closely with Santa Marta in the cybersecurity agenda, and their bot Eugenie is empowered by Laura. Another example of a close collaborator is Scrive, a leader in document management and electronic signature, who strongly supported some of its best video demos and use cases.  

The Toughest Nut to Crack

According to Eduardo, automatic translation is probably the most challenging functionality to implement and some local specific issues required a relevant effort in the ad-hoc NLP algorithm, in order to ensure good quality in dialogs, especially when using chatbots.  

The Future of the Industry

There is a clear agenda for digitalization in all sectors. Therefore, Eduardo believes that process automation will require flexible and powerful platforms able to integrate multiple pieces while keeping the information under control, as well as ensuring a good user experience. Laura is a pioneer in this area and has been created with a huge potential to grow and extend her capabilities, so we are very optimistic about the future.