Automation in the workplace has seen a sharp rise in the last two years. According to Gartner, global revenues from automation software will reach $1.89 billion in 2021, up by 19.5% since 2020, and this double-digit growth rate is expected to continue through 2024. This is due to several key benefits of automation such as error reduction, improved productivity, cost savings, and reduced risk. Yet, if implemented haphazardly, workplace automation could end in significant sunk costs and companies could struggle to scale beyond the first few pilots. Studies by McKinsey found that just 15% of companies were able to set up a comprehensive and scalable automation program in 2020.
In other words, despite the clear benefits of automation in the workplace, companies must look beyond the traditional siloed approach and adopt an integrated platform model to achieve their evolving growth needs. To understand this further, let us explore the meaning of process automation in more detail.
What is Process Automation?
Process automation can be defined as a collection of technologies that help to remove or reduce the manual efforts needed in front, middle, and back-office tasks to unlock efficiency gains.
The more sophisticated your process automation is, the more complex tasks it can optimize. For example, a highly advanced intelligent automation solution like JIFFY.ai can reduce thousands of person-hours spent on manually processing invoices, while learning and adapting to various invoice templates, rules, supplier types, and other exceptions. Typically, process automation uses cognitive technologies like artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and optical character recognition (OCR) to unlock outsized benefits.
Benefits of Automation in the Workplace
Workplace automation can help you:
- Drive accuracy – There are fewer chances of human bias, subjectivity, negligence, or fatigue impacting your process outcomes. 67% of companies felt this is a top benefit, as per IDC.
- Boost productivity – You can complete a higher volume of tasks per employee, as manual effort per task is reduced. 64% agreed on this benefit.
- Save costs – Reduced errors and more productivity mean that your expenditure per task will shrink. 60% of companies gained from this benefit.
- Reduce risk – As processes become more consistent and less error-prone, you can strengthen compliance and risk management. 54% experienced a reduction in operational risk due to workplace automation.
- Empower employees – As mundane and repetitive mid- and back-office tasks are automated, your employees can focus on customer experience, product innovation, business strategy, and achieve better work-life balance. This was a key benefit for 51% of companies.
Pros and Cons of Automation in the Workplace
Automation’s biggest advantage is that you can make tasks and processes significantly more efficient. This lets you utilize your human talent to scale faster and innovate better. However, there are a few challenges it brings along:
- It can take time to deploy – Writing complex automation scripts from scratch and maintaining them is extremely time and effort-intensive. A wiser approach is to invest in a low-code platform approach, like the JIFFY.ai AUTOMATE platform with its HyperApps that can be configured and run by business users.
- Traditional RPA is rigid – Robotic process automation (RPA) uses fixed business rules to automate workflows, which makes it difficult to adapt to complex or variable processes. You need a flexible platform that can learn using ML and loop in a human being when necessary.
- It can cause silos and fragmentation – If just one, standalone process is automated, there will be fragmentation in data flow and workflow across the enterprise. That’s why your automation platform needs to be integrated with business systems like ERPs and CRMs to reap the full benefits of digital transformation.
Companies including the Fortune and Global 500, and the Big4 consulting have worked with JIFFY.ai to address automation challenges and modernize their workplaces for the future. Email us at marketing@jiffy.ai to learn more.
Today, CFOs and Finance & Accounting (F&A) leaders are uniquely qualified and empowered to drive changes in how their companies experiment with new technologies, and execute transformation. If you’re transforming the F&A function, you probably already know Accounts Payable (AP) can be a valuable area to help drive your organization’s growth.
Typically, the invoice processing workflow of an AP function involves iterative tasks and template-based document management, which makes it a prime candidate for automation. Based on our continuous engagements with clients who are innovators in their own industries, we know that automated invoice processing can improve the AP team’s efficiency by 85% and reduce the time-to-process one invoice from around 24 hours to just three minutes. Yet, just 5% of organizations use a fully automated AP approach, and over one-third are still limited to paper invoices.
It is vital to understand the benefits of automated invoice processing and leverage middle office automation better – so you can eliminate inefficiency, save costs, and utilize your precious human resources for strategic and innovative activities.
What is Automated Invoice Processing?
Automated invoice processing can be defined as a technology-enabled invoice processing workflow where different types of invoices can be submitted by suppliers electronically, data can be extracted, invoices can be approved, and payments can be disbursed with minimal intervention from human AP teams. It uses technologies like machine learning (ML) for invoice recognition, optical character recognition (OCR) for data conversion into a structured format, and a human-in-the-loop approach to seamlessly handle exceptions.
5 Reasons to Automate Invoice Processing
By automating this key AP process, you can:
- Reduce errors – Invoice documents can be detailed and highly complex. A human AP employee could make mistakes due to negligence, lack of training or sheer fatigue. This can be completely avoided using an end-to-end intelligent automation solution like JIFFY.ai’s Invoice Processing HyperApp.
- Drive reusability – You don’t need to create a different workflow every time there is a new supplier, a regulatory change, or a new invoice template. The intelligent automation solution uses ML to learn from a single human-executed change and replicate it across similar future processes.
- Improve relationships – The automation solution includes a supplier portal through which invoices can be submitted directly to your ERP. Also, faster invoice processing means faster payments with nearly zero bottlenecks. This makes life easier for your vendor and supplier network.
- Scale easily – When you automate invoice processing, you also make AP workflows consistent across different business units, departments, and operational regions. This allows you to scale easily whenever you need to without having to recreate processes from scratch.
- Speed up ROI – If you have already digitized invoice processing without aiming for automation or straight-through processing (STP), your AP team might still be spending time on manual effort – the only difference could be that they are struggling with PDFs instead of paper invoices now. Intelligent automation lets you accrue returns much faster from your AP digitization investments.
Over time, you will see a significant improvement in cost savings, compliance, and employee satisfaction when you automate invoice processing.
How Does the Automation Flowchart Work? A Case Study
To understand the flowchart for invoice processing automation better, let’s look at a real-world case study.
A leading automobile manufacturer wanted to automate AP and invoice-related processes, covering 150,000 invoices a month for 5000+ suppliers. Their AP team typically needed one whole working day to process an invoice, which meant they needed a massive FTE team dedicated to invoice processing. JIFFY.ai deployed a low-code, AI-powered invoice processing automation HyperApp following this flowchart:
- Created automation training data from 12 months of historical invoices
- Created ML model to automatically tune parameters and choose the right algorithm
- Applied the ML model through the JIFFY.ai HyperApp
- Set up exception, validation and error handling through human-in-the-loop and self-learning systems
JIFFY.ai’s Invoice Processing HyperApp enabled 90% straight-through-processing (STP), improved efficiency by 85%, and enabled the automaker to achieve ROI in 6 months instead of a year.
Achieve STP for Invoices Using the HyperApp
JIFFY.ai’s Invoice Processing HyperApp augments the benefits of automated invoice processing. The best part is, you don’t need to write code from scratch to get it working in your organization because it is a pre-built, no-code/low-code tool. And it is hosted on the cloud, saving you the costs of installation, configuration, or server management.
As companies try to modernize their AP functions, our intelligent automation HyperApp can enable 100% straight through processing for your invoices and help you to unlock exponential cost and control benefits.
Companies including the Fortune and Global 500, andBig4 consulting firms have worked with JIFFY.ai to address automation challenges and modernize their workplaces for the future. Email us at marketing@jiffy.ai to learn more.
