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Table of contents

1 From 10 to 1000 03

2 Getting a grasp on larger fleets 03

3 Acquiring new customers 06

4 The need for deeper analytics 09

5 Future enterprise expansion 14

From 10 to 1,000:

How to sustainably

scale your robotics fleet

You’ve just closed a contract with your next client. 

You’re no stranger to deploying a fleet, but this deal will

take your company to the next stage of scaling and
passing early deployments, requiring extra effort from
the team to grow. It’s an exciting time, but then the
realization dawns on you: How will you support this
expansion while preparing for inevitable future growth?

 10 to 1,000 04

Scaling a robot fleet extends beyond

merely dispatching additional hardware;

the process inherently demands more

from your internal team, intensifying both

support requirements and costs. This is

particularly pronounced for robotics-as-

a-service (RaaS) companies, where

customer engagement continues post

sale, as subscribers rely on ongoing

assistance. While scaling will inevitably

impact customer-facing teams, the lack

of prior scaling experience can make it

difficult to prepare for the unknown.

It’s vital to start preparing

for issues even before your

fleet deploys to avoid

needing reactive solutions.

 10 to 1,000 05

At Formant, we work with scaling RaaS

companies every day across a multitude of
industries. We’ve weathered the stumbling
blocks that our customers have faced
during growth and gained an understanding
of how to sustainably overcome them
versus using band-aid solutions as you
grow. Whether you’re scaling by 10 or
1,000, it’s vital to start preparing for issues
even before your fleet deploys to avoid
reactive solutions. We’ve compiled a list of
the hurdles you can expect to encounter,
based on our experience scaling alongside
companies like Naïo and RoboTire, as well
as our recommendations on how to handle
them effectively.
Getting a grasp on
larger fleets
More deployed robots means more revenue, but it
also opens the floodgates for a litany of issues ranging
from potential bugs, outages, and compliance or
security concerns. At this stage, Customer Experience
(CX) is your key to further expansion and growth. Yet
often, the current internal team infrastructure cannot
support the growing demand for customer support
without the proper software backend.
 Getting a grasp on larger fleets 07

More data engineers and tech support roles will be needed immediately to
help take on the wave of customer support tickets. While growing the team
like this can seem like just a sign of maturing, scaling a fleet quickly can lead
to a never-ending race to hire another support person in pursuit of catching
up on support backlogs and bloated timelines for other projects. However,
your team isn’t the only thing that could be burdened by the need for rapid
growth: expanding robot fleets also means greater bandwidth costs.

Scaling a fleet quickly can lead

to a never-ending race to hire
another support person in
pursuit of catching up on
support backlogs and bloated
timelines for other projects
 Getting a grasp on larger fleets 08

Plenty of data is ingested by robots

and their sensors. All of this data is

critical and needs to be captured

and prioritized correctly. However,

if your tech stack isn’t built to

handle the influx of data now or

present it in a concise way to your

team and customers, the cost of

deciding how massive amounts of

data are prioritized will skyrocket.

 Getting a grasp on larger fleets 09

Scaling your backend is especially important for

tooling that impacts current customers: any resulting

congestion in resolving support tickets will have

detrimental effects on your customer base. The adage

“time is money” also holds, and the longer a customer

(especially those with larger fleets) has to wait for a

bug fix, the more likely they are to churn. For RaaS

companies, subscription-based sales rely on strong

backend support; customer retention is just as

valuable of a driver of ARR as new sales are. Churn

will lessen the better you become at identifying and

responding to issues – but that relies entirely upon

your teams' bandwidth to divide their focus between

developing your product and responding to

customers. But an increasing burden on your team

doesn't need to be inevitable.

The adage “time is money” also

holds, and the longer a customer
has to wait for a bug fix, the more
likely they are to churn.
 Getting a grasp on larger fleets 10

Enlisting the help of a robot operations platform like

Formant can cut costs and team burden, especially

when it comes to support. Formant can help you

centralize all operations, providing a robot command

center that improves time to resolution. A robot

operations platform will provide a team behind yours

so that your staff can focus on customer expansion

and new projects while that of your platform assists

with resolving software issues. 

In most cases, smart scaling can be accomplished

while decreasing per-device operating costs. Learn

how Formant helped a large indoor retail and logistics

company cut its support costs in half by streamlining

its tech support and improving customer satisfaction.

Acquiring

new customers

Understanding your ideal customer profile is only the

first step; the journey toward acquisition requires a

strong argument for your robot’s ROI.

 Acquiring new customers 12

Acquiring new customers

To truly understand your robot’s value, data should be

central to the conversation. Virtually every potential
customer will expect to see the data harnessed by
your robot before making a final decision; proving the
value and potential uses of the data from the robot is
just as vital as experiencing its performance.
 Acquiring new customers 13

The potential uses of data will vary by prospect. Prioritizing and

displaying data that is important to specific customers is key to

conveying ROI and proving to decision-makers that you can give

them access to vital data in an organized way after closing the

deal. Most prospects will have end-users who will also need easy

access to data, presented in a way that anyone can interpret the

data to see how well the robots perform against traditional

methods. If you cannot provide the necessary data to the proper

groups, you risk being at an automatic disadvantage to other

options your prospects are considering. Data can also be used

beyond proving ROI to help iterate new builds of the robot or

prove that a device can have a greater impact beyond its

measured tasks. For example, data can demonstrate how a farm

robot greatly impacts crop output and indirectly improves field

health for future harvests. Bottom line: however you plan to use

your data, you need the right backbone to do so.

 Acquiring new customers 14

At Formant, we empower our

customers by surfacing relevant
data to their team and end-users
via customer-facing portals.

A reliable data platform is instrumental in bringing data

to the forefront of your customer’s robot operations.

At Formant, we empower our customers by surfacing

relevant data to their team and end-users via

customer-facing portals. Thanks to real-time

monitoring, customers can monitor and track the

performance and safety of their fleet from a single

pane of glass. With multiple users, any issues must be

resolved immediately; our portals include the ability to

alert teams if any critical problems or performance

degradation occurs. By putting transparency and

connectivity at the forefront, our customer portals

help you to easily prove the value of our robots, and

bring a front-seat view of efficiency to all end-users.

The need for

deeper analytics
With an increasing amount of robots active in the
field, sifting through all of the data to unearth the
most valuable insights becomes an overwhelming

and costly task.

Acquiring new customers
We discussed the importance of capturing the right data to prove

ROI to prospects, but the ongoing health of the fleet can also be
optimized by analyzing the data it produces. To scale your fleet, you
need the right lens that will help you view its operations from both
high-level and granular views. During deployment, it’s easy to focus
simply on getting the robots to work and out into their environment;
although this can be valuable in the early stages, operating at scale
requires a larger fleet view.
 Acquiring new customers 17

Acquiring new customers

Fleet-wide trends are just as important, if

not even more so, as they provide the
ability to triage issues and understand the
potential cost of a bug. This allows teams
to be less reactive and instead get a wider
view of how impactful each problem is so
that it can be properly prioritized.  

No deployment will be one hundred

percent smooth – you will encounter
issues such as varied battery health,
random connectivity problems, and
robots discovering physical obstacles in
the field. In preparation for scaling, you’ll
want to have the infrastructure in place to
organize all the incoming data and be
proactive with it. There are many
unknowns when scaling a fleet and
establishing baselines for performance
across environments is crucial. Tracking
specific metrics over time and forming
objectives provides a huge advantage to
DevOps and support teams as they work
to ensure customer satisfaction and
perform root cause analysis when needed.
 The need for deeper analytics 18

For example, let’s say you notice a robot has an incident in the southwest corner of the
warehouse where an operator has to step in for correction. With the proper analytics
infrastructure, you can go beyond purely anecdotal evidence and take a fleet-wide view
to note there are five areas of the warehouse where this occurs. With the knowledge of
the number of incidents per day and which areas require the most operator intervention,
you can determine which problem areas of the route need to be prioritized. Without a way
to analyze this, a plethora of issues could greatly harm the effectiveness of your fleet,
with little data to support resolution actions.

Beyond bugs and fleet

trends, it’s essential to
also use data to collect
customer insights and
better understand how
they use your robots.
 The need for deeper analytics 19

Beyond bugs and fleet trends, it’s essential to also use data to
collect customer insights and better understand how they use
your robots. Obtaining a better grasp of how your fleets are used
for each use case will help you better retain and acquire new
customers through continuous optimization. Of course, analytics
infrastructure can be built internally, but scaling will burden your
team with the continuous and costly expansion of systems. With a
robot platform like Formant, you’re prepared. Our platform comes
with a suite of tools specifically for ingesting, managing, and
analyzing all data that comes off your robots. We understand the
need to go from granular data to fleet-wide trends fast, and we
give you the ability to visualize data on a sliding scale, from
individual sensors to fleet-wide trends.
Future

enterprise expansion
The dream for most robotics companies is to eventually
expand their fleet to serve enterprise customers.

If you’re planning for potential enterprise expansion, it’s

vital to set up a framework that can support it.
 Future enterprise expansion 21

Making plans for scaling systems internally is

possible, but an enterprise-level fleet will
demand a large increase in support staff. Any
bug or technical issues will have even greater
consequences (exacerbating current issues as
well) at the enterprise level; putting systems and

designated teams in place to handle issues

pertaining to data, security permissions, and

customizability, is crucial.
 Future enterprise expansion 22

Often during development, very few companies focus on the infrastructure

needed to support enterprise deployments. With a platform like Formant,
robotics companies can provide an enterprise-ready solution without

the need to stop innovating their existing product to refactor internal

tooling – allowing earlier entrance to the enterprise space with lower cost. 

Our robot operations platform has plenty of

solutions to tackle potential stumbling blocks
that come with serving enterprise customers.
Enterprise fleets may encounter data and
security issues, such as HIPAA, that restrict the
use of cloud-based platforms. To manage this,
Formant utilizes local deployments run on a
self-hosted server to store the data wherever
robots are working and skirting painful internal
work to build systems that meet these
requirements. Speaking of data, the amount
that is ingested off large fleets is enormous;
enterprise customers will have tools to store
data, but they’re likely siloed and won’t move
data as efficiently as needed. Formant allows
data to be piped anywhere it needs for analysis,
eliminating silos and allowing data to seamlessly
move from one tool to the other.
 Future enterprise expansion 23

Larger fleets also mean more users accessing

robots, including end-users. To address issues
about user security and roles, Formant offers
Identity Access Management that enforces

rules based on groups and individual

parameters, allowing enterprise teams to create
as many custom roles as they need and
providing flexibility. Various types of users will
want differing views of data depending on their
role – consider an executive looking to see a
decrease in time to resolution versus a
developer working to determine how well a new
path fix affects productivity in the field. By
utilizing APIs and toolkits to build on top of the
Formant platform, you can quickly build a
platform for each use case faster than building
one from scratch.


Bottom line, a third-party robot platform is a

great choice to invest in as you prepare for the
potential to bring in enterprise customers. Your
team won’t need to scale to the extent it would
without it, and you’ll have backup support for
any technical issues – ensuring other customers
don't feel the pain of expansion.

It is important not to get

lost in the excitement of
it all and lose sight of the
potential consequences if
not executed without the
proper robot platform.

When scaling your robot fleet, it’s important not

to get lost in the excitement of it all and lose sight

of the potential consequences if not executed

without the proper robot platform. Preparing for

the expansion in front of you is just as important as

building infrastructure for those down the road.
Formant is designed to grow with robotics companies
as they do, offering customizable solutions for their
ever-changing needs. We’ve helped notable
companies including Burro, BP, Canvas Construction,
and RoboTire centralize their robot operations and
scale their business sustainably. If you’re at the

crossroads of scaling, get a tailored demo of

Formant to learn how we can help.