Tag: automation

We cannot emphasize enough the impact that artificial intelligence (AI) and automation (specifically Robotic Process Automation) has had, and will continue to have, on our industry. In fact, most advisors have grown so accustomed to their benefits, that they may not even realize the daily impact to their practices and clients. Consider your custodial platform and the way a client’s information seamlessly prepopulates in the system if he/she/they already has an account there. Or think about quarterly performance reporting; with the push a few buttons, you can generate reports for every single household in just a few minutes. AI and automation help reduce costs, increase accuracy in processes (like account opening) and ultimately create capacity for advisors, conceivably leading to increased revenue and profits.

There are challenges, however, that individual advisors face as it relates to embracing this new age of technology and fully automating their operations. First of all, some advisors are not yet reaping the full benefits; advisors within larger institutions are oftentimes limited to the systems and tools available at their home firm, many of which are siloed, fragmented, and outdated. 

Advisors who CAN build their own tech stack often struggle with “technology overload” and feel paralyzed by the many options and customizations.  In addition, training staff can be challenging. Even with access to the best operational tools, many advisory teams still use excel spreadsheets to manage and analyze data about their practices.  Finally, redeploying human capital towards revenue-generating activities is no easy feat. Work expands to fill the time we have to complete it, so ironically, just because capacity has been created, does not necessarily mean the time will be filled with productive work.

While digital transformation has recently become a key priority for the financial services sector, last year was a landmark period in this journey. Nearly half (49%) of firms have accelerated their initiatives, finds Deloitte, and the financial services sector has far outpaced other industries in their digital investments (arguably,  because our industry was so far behind others).

Over the years I’ve been part of several C-suite management teams and corporate boards for leading organizations at the intersection of financial services and tech. One first-hand observation I have made is that automation not only achieves short-term benefits like headcount of expense reduction, but it also creates a ripple effect that permeates across the entire company’s ecosystem. Strategic automation at the backend allows advisors to be more efficient in their work, and in turn, drives a far superior experience for the end customer. To achieve such holistic impacts, it is vital that we relook at our understanding of automation in financial services and the future roadmap.

Financial Services institutions have been primarily focused on building out an integrated infrastructure with interoperability between systems that enable a unified rendering of data for advisors. But this is only step one: It is when effective automation of front, mid, and back-office processes meets 360-degree business objectives, only then, advisors are free to build more capacity in their day and devote their time to more meaningful work, and eventually drive long-term business growth through lasting relationships with customers.

With COVID-19 causing risks to human health and disruption to our way of life in general, especially the way we work, companies have been forced to pursue alternate ways of making progress. Many of them are striving to use intelligent automation and AI to innovate their way forward while working safely from home.

This shift does not mean that we do not value human work, or the role people play in the enterprise. Think about the agricultural revolution. In the 18th century, people transitioned from hard laboring stationary farming to original inventions that altered the farming process. The new patterns of crop rotation and livestock utilization paved the way for better crop yields and the ability to support more animals. It was an opportunity to produce more, not a judgment of the reduced value of human work.

These agricultural changes impacted societies as there was a decline in both the intensity of the work and the number of farming laborers needed. Nevertheless, the positive effects of this disruption gave life to new technologies and opportunities as people migrated to the city to work in industrial jobs. As humans, it’s in our nature to innovate and create new solutions that become paramount to organizations and the people that work within them. We believe that as intelligent automation, Artificial Intelligence, and Machine Learning continue to evolve, we have an opportunity to harness this energy of innovation in a whole new way.

Our mission is to enable organizations to cross the human machine divide that has existed since the introduction of machines and enable them to co-exist seamlessly. We aim to reduce the friction between the two in a natural, human-friendly way. Eliminating the need for expensive translation mechanisms in the form of data entry, data synchronization and mundane activities allows organizations to become extremely efficient and resilient. Enabling innovation within the enterprise using natural language instructions, we bring out the innovator in the everyday business user. By letting the machines understand human language to achieve automation we drive speed in business transformation previously not possible. This is the core of our perspective on automation.

For too long, enterprises have placed contradictory expectations on their most talented thought leaders and employees. We have expected people to be innovative while also weighing them down with administrative tasks. Research shows “task switching” disrupts flow of thought and creativity. Ultimately, we launched JIFFY.ai to reduce this phenomenon and to allow creativity to flourish and innovation to be unleashed in its most uninterrupted form. Our relentless commitment is to see a change in how organizations redesign their work, supporting them through the power that automation and AI offers to maximize strength, resiliency and scale.

Historically, automation was seen as a point solution for mundane actions. You gave it a specific function or set of functions, and it performed. Now, technology allows us to elevate and redefine the process and achieve progress through automation. This change is necessary in the ever-evolving landscape in which we live.

As we wrap up the first half of 2021, several parts of the world are still reeling under the impact of the successive waves of the pandemic. Maintaining business continuity and building resilience for predictable growth is an imperative for businesses across the world.  With industries gearing up for bullish economic weather, business leaders are leaving no stone unturned to remove all process bottlenecks that could pose hurdles in their resurgence strategies. Your Accounts Payable team plays a central role here, maintaining transactional integrity, ensuring sustainable cash flow, and powering your core business, often with limited and restricted resources.

Process modernization and optimization are key priorities for Accounts Payable teams that have already embarked on this transformational journey. According to the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic survey by the Association for Financial Professionals (AFP), 65% of businesses will move from paper payments to electronic formats, while 38% will rewire their internal procedures. Digitization will pave the way for smarter, more efficient processes, where employees need to spend far fewer person-hours to complete routine tasks, thus unlocking savings as well as ushering in an overall culture shift.

If your Accounts Payable team is already on this superfast transformation highway, here are five key takeaways for you:

1. Consolidate the digital forays of the previous year

The first step towards building a futuristic invoice processing strategy should be consolidating the fragmented digital transformation initiatives undertaken last year. In 2020, businesses had to adopt remote-friendly processes and support Accounts Payable teams as they started to work from home almost overnight. In some cases, this added to process complexity as simple in-person tasks (e.g., paper-based approvals) were no longer possible. Supplier/vendor network management also went digital, which has its own risks in the long term. At this point, it is vital to consolidate any point solutions you might have in place, take stock of vendor sentiment and any user experience bottlenecks they might be facing, and evaluate the projected total cost of ownership of your Accounts Payable systems beyond the pandemic.

2. Optimize cash flow to prepare for unexpected challenges

The pandemic left very little room for error in cash flow management, and this trend will continue in the second half of 2021 as economies recover and businesses return to their growth trajectory. A report by the International Labor Organization found that cash flow was the #1 problem faced by 4500+ companies in 45 countries worldwide. Improving Accounts Payable efficiency and modernizing your invoice processing strategy could help optimize cash flow. For instance, recommendations generated by cognitive technologies could suggest changes in the order of supplier payments that would maximize your cash on hand. These technologies can assign risk scores to every vendor and make sure that you gain from early payment discounts.

3. Upskill your AP team to perform and innovate

The year 2020 marked a tectonic shift in how we work, and this will have a lasting impact on workplace culture, how employees approach routine tasks, and their aspirations for the future. In the absence of a physical office and the physical presence of a professional community, inefficiencies in business processes became starker. Your employees are now less likely to be satisfied with repetitive, high-volume tasks in this ‘work from home’ season. There are two major action points for businesses through the year 2021. Eliminate mundane, iterative and non-fulfilling work wherever possible (this has typically been a chronic challenge for the Accounts Payable team). Employees who are freed up can be up-skilled to focus on more innovative work, such as in decision-making, the use of advanced technology systems, and discretionary problem-solving: essentially, tasks that machines cannot perform.

4. Adopt agile workflows to gain from dynamic economic weather

Through the rest of this year, businesses can look forward to a largely optimistic economic forecast, albeit with occasional regional curveballs on the way. In the last couple of quarters, we saw the International Monetary Fund revise its predictions several times, underscoring the need to stay agile and adaptive. In this context, rigid Accounts Payable workflows and monolithic processes will make it difficult to keep pace with fluctuating conditions. Instead, businesses must establish processes that are easy to configure – onboarding new suppliers with minimal risk or delays to support renewed demand, reconciling invoice exceptions and corrections seamlessly, and scaling up without adding complex approval red tape.

5. Leverage intelligent invoice processing automation to scale sustainably as you grow

The best-case scenario to look forward to this year is a rapid return to the original growth trajectories, aided by a resurging economy in 2021-2022. Businesses cannot afford to let speed-breakers such as inefficient processes, errors arising from human fatigue, and the risk of non-compliance, slow down this journey. The Accounts Payable function as a whole — and invoice processing, specifically — is part of the core of any organization. As the throughput of your Accounts Payable team increases, its invoice processing capability must focus on increasing straight through processing capacity. That way, it can scale in tandem to make profitability truly sustainable and mitigate the impacts of any further unprecedented disruptions. Strengthening this function using cutting-edge technology, helping your AP team and the supplier network, and the business as a whole should be a key agenda item in your strategy.

Your top strategic priority for the emerging future should be to remove the bottlenecks in the invoice processing function, and intelligent automation can play a key role here. Here are a few points to ponder:

• An intelligent automation solution can centralize the steps taken to digitize invoice processing in specific business units, regions, and teams amid the rushed switch to remote operations.
• It can equip your AP function with customizable supplier portals, AI/ML insights, and suggestions for decision-making based on your business rules, thus optimizing cash flow.
• It can ingest invoicing data from EDI file formats, XML/JSON files, mailbox attachments, and scanned images, making life simpler for your AP team working remotely; automated data extraction, validation, and exception handling further reduces repetitive manual work and probable errors.
• An end-to-end intelligent automation platform makes touchless processing a reality by supporting highly configurable workflows, where you can specify thresholds for manual approval, fraud signals, vendor prioritization and more, depending on changing market conditions.
• Invoice processing costs can be optimized as your business operations scale (thanks to a scalable solution architecture and volume-friendly pricing model), making the investment in digitalizing your Accounts Payable function truly sustainable for the long term.

Learn how JIFFY.ai’s intelligent Invoice Processing HyperApp has been enabling customers from various industries to prioritize these five capabilities. In fact, these are a part of our central value proposition to future-proof the Accounts Payable function. Drop an email to marketing@jiffy.ai today.

Even with all your enterprise-level digital adoption, accounts payable can still be one of the most paper-intensive departments in your organization. The team’s primary function, invoice processing, costs the company resources due to time-consuming and repetitive tasks, slow processing cycles and human-introduced errors. The longer you ignore the cost of manually processing invoices, the deeper the dents it tends to cause in your organization’s bottom line. Learn how the benefits of accounts payable automation can reverse that trend.

The True Cost of Your Invoice Processing Flow

The U.S. Institute of Finance & Management (IOFM) suggests that the cost of processing a single invoice can be anywhere between $1 and $21. Putting this into perspective, think of a mid-sized company that has approximately 1,000 invoices to process per month. They would lose significant money through the gaps caused by process inefficiency. AP automation benefits can help to solve those inefficiencies and reduce your invoice processing costs.

What Makes Invoice Processing Expensive?

Wondering how best to calculate the expense of processing invoices in your organization? The simplest way is to equate it with the costs of associated human effort. Typically, a member of your accounts payable team would take at least 30 minutes to process a single invoice. Considering the average salary of an accounts payable clerk in the U.S. is $43,917 (approximately $21 per hour), processing one invoice could cost $10.50.  For the mid-sized company mentioned earlier, this would add up to more than $10,000 every month.

And that’s not all! At this point, we’ve only discussed the base costs involved. But there’s more to it, such as:

• Cost of fixing manual errors: Invoice processing is highly susceptible to errors due to daily variances, volume-based pressure or sometimes even sheer human fatigue. To fix such errors on a paper invoice, you might have to spend a significant $53.50 to create a new document, communicate with different stakeholders and redact payments already made.
• Lost opportunity costs, such as discounts: Most vendors offer discounts for early payments, which can be as much as 2% to 5%. Manual invoice processing can create delays, causing the payment to miss the discount window.
• Strained vendor relationships: The inefficiencies related to manual invoice processing, such as delayed payments, payment redactions and multiple requests for the same information, can seriously damage your brand’s reputation in today’s vendor and supplier landscape. More severe mistakes could even harm long-term relationships, adding to your overall invoice processing costs.
• Physical costs, like storage and paper: Manual invoice processing goes together with paper-based processes, involving costs for physical file storage, stationery, etc. Unstructured hybrid systems can be even more expensive as the accounts payable team might have to switch between digital and paper formats, spawning duplication.
• Cost of efforts diverted from core functions: Finally, complex approval processes coupled with frequent exceptions call for measures by personnel outside the invoice processing team. Business leaders might have to intervene in invoice processing, and their valuable person-hours (which would otherwise be spent on higher-value functions) must be factored in.

What is Invoice Workflow Automation & STP?

Invoice automation and the benefits of accounts payable automation go beyond barebones e-invoicing, which only recreates paper processes in a digital format and replicates its inefficiencies. The intelligent automation of invoice processing leverages technology in a meaningful way to remove the bottlenecks in your accounts payable workflow, bringing human intervention down to near-zero. This enables straight-through processing, or STP, where automated technology manages the end-to-end invoice lifecycle, and the average handling time by humans is dramatically reduced.

6 AP Automation Benefits That Achieve STP and Help Reduce Invoice Processing Costs

According to McKinsey, intelligent automation can streamline 93% of tasks in payment processing. The stages of accounts payable automation include:

1. Extract Invoice Data Using Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

AI/ML-based technology such as object recognition and optical character recognition (OCR) can extract data from scanned images, PDF snapshots, etc. and automatically populate the fields in your accounts payable system. Intelligent invoice extraction is compatible with country-specific EDI formats, XML/JSON files, scanned images and even mailbox attachments.

2. Set up A Custom Supplier Portal

The worst long-term issue caused by inefficient invoice processing is probably the erosion of trust in vendor relationships. The smart UX of an automated solution allows you to set up a digital portal where vendors and suppliers can choose their relevant forms, make data entries and enjoy seamless interactions with your invoice processing team.

3. Configure Workflows to Handle Exceptions

Among the many benefits of accounts payable automation, automated exception handling lets your accounts payable staff tackle complex invoice scenarios without claiming the time of multiple business stakeholders. For example, they can set up workflows to handle exceptions such as potential signs of fraud, invalid vendor data, invalid file formats and specific PO detail mismatches. Configurable rules like these for invoice validation reduce an agent’s time to manually process an invoice by 80%.

4. Integrate with Your ERP

An AP automation workflow can connect with your existing systems like SAP, Oracle, Pegasus, Microsoft Dynamics, Salesforce, Infor, Sage or homegrown applications to enable bi-directional data flow. Your ERP can act as the reference for validating extracted invoice data (which otherwise needs to be performed by an AP staff member) and document the workflow information.

5. Gain from Analytics and Data Insights

Over and above AP automation benefits like lower invoice processing costs, automation becomes a true value generator here. First, it uses validation rules to assign a risk assessment score to every invoice. It also prioritizes tasks automatically based on load, productivity or your unique segmentation rules. Next, it uncovers vital data from your invoice processes to highlight productivity trends, KPIs and improvement areas, creating real-time visibility into invoices pending approval.

6. Consider Hosting on the Cloud

Cloud-based workflow automation software significantly lowers your upfront costs and ongoing maintenance overhead, while reducing your overall TCO. On-premises partly managed hosting is also an option in areas where there are critical regulatory requirements.

Save More as You Grow. Make Accounts Payable a Profit Center.

While traditional invoice processing methods become more expensive with scale (as volume and costs are directly related), intelligent automation and STP allow you to reduce costs as you grow. As the solution architecture is inherently scalable, your automation partner can offer volume-based efficiencies — for example, incrementally reduced pricing for volume tiers above 5,000 invoices per month.

JIFFY.ai delivers invoice processing and accounts payable automation benefits for small businesses, large finance and accounting teams and every organization in between. We can help them achieve 80% STP and reduce the human efforts needed to process invoices from a new supplier to 0%. Sophisticated AI and ML-based workflows allow you to look beyond just replicating age-old manual processes in a digital wireframe. Leveraging our intelligent and scalable automation HyperApps, we are committed to helping future-oriented enterprises derive business value across critical functions like accounts payable.

Get the Benefits of Accounts Payable Automation with JIFFY.ai

If you want to iron out bottlenecks or inefficiencies in your business processes through sustainable, intelligent invoice processing automation, please email us at marketing@jiffy.ai. Our HyperApps experts will be happy to help you accelerate!

2020 was a landmark year for digital transformation. In the face of an unprecedented global crisis, technology emerged as the key enabler for resilience for all types of businesses —small teams or multinational enterprises, consumer-oriented or B2B vendors alike. Now, as we work through the road to recovery, many face the slightly uncomfortable question: How much of this change is scalable and operationally sustainable for the long term, including in terms of ROI?

The question becomes more pertinent as we look at these facts from McKinsey & Company’s recent report on the sheer pace of digital transformation last year:

• The digitalization of customer interactions accelerated by 3 years globally.
• Companies started to digitally reimagine their products/services 7 years ahead of schedule.
• Over 6 in 10 executives believe customer expectations have changed forever.

Yet, most companies are not positioned to sustain their digital transformation projects for the long haul. Only half of them believe that the rapid surge in adoption of technology for their operations will continue after the pandemic – which could potentially stall progress or set the other half back by several years and tens of thousands of dollars of hurried sunk costs. Of course, there is always this risk when the shift is due to a black-swan moment and not organic, evolutionary change.

Moving beyond the pandemic, organizations will have to take hard-won learnings about the need for flexibility and responsiveness of AI digital transformation initiatives and determine ways to build real and lasting resilience that can ensure growth and the capability to weather future storms. A prime example of this is the accelerating trend of using intelligent automation digital transformation roadmaps, and automating more complex end-to-end business processes in a scalable, more sustainable way.

How the Pandemic Revealed Crucial Gaps in Digital Transformation plans

Many businesses learned vital lessons through the last year — involving crucial gaps that otherwise would have gone unnoticed — when they tried to push the pedal to the metal on their digital transformation plans.

1. Technology sprawl: In a bid to speed up digital adoption, business units and individual users were ready to adopt their favorite applications and enablers ‘under the radar’.  This contributed to the ever-sprawling shadow IT landscape without organizational visibility, coordination or leverage. Only an integrated enterprise automation solution can put the power of technology enablement back in the hands of business users while keeping it within the realm of the organization’s overarching digital transformation framework and technology strategy.

2. Higher propensity for technical debt: If shadow IT was one side of the coin, the other was retro-fitted automation often requiring many code changes that aren’t always reconciled. In the pre-pandemic world, organizations were already struggling with technical debt as a multitude of non-integrated automation technologies were applied to legacy systems. In the emerging normal, they will look for ways to implement technology capabilities faster, without dramatic overhauls and inflexibility that results in technical debt. Adopting a HyperApps approach is a more viable way to achieve scalable, sustainable automation.

3. Culture woes: Cultural dissonance blocks digital transformation like no other variable. If business users, leaders, and decision makers aren’t on the same page, both strategically and in terms of execution, the dissonance will bring digital transformation to a standstill sooner than later. To prevent this, technology enablers must intersect larger strategic goals with short-term business outcomes and democratized use, and adopt platforms that enable this.

The first step to overcoming these challenges is to place sustainable automation at the core — of course, leaning into the best practical way of doing it — and to leverage the convergence of all its powerful capabilities.  These include AI, Machine Learning, cognitive capabilities, cloud computing, no-code/low-code application development, and end-to-end integration, combined with a human-in-the-loop approach, where enterprises can achieve maximum advantages.

Can Digital Transformation Happen Without Automation?

Automation in many forms, including robotic process automation (RPA), has quickly become one of the integral pillars for digital transformation. An RPA digital transformation brings about incremental improvements in process efficiency, and step-level improvements in enterprise capability when applied strategically. It builds resilience to crises, like a pandemic or economic slowdown, where labor shortage and market volatility would disrupt traditional production systems. Automation also makes room and provides for further innovation by freeing up budgets and resources and ensuring that digital transformation works in an ongoing, iterative cycle. Digital transformation without automation is like a car with a limited engine: it simply cannot go the distance with the power to transform and accelerate, and can consume more effort to maintain than the value it generates.

So, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that 81% of IT organizations will automate more tasks to allow team members to focus on innovation over the next 12 months to 18 months, which according to Salesforce, will drive true digital transformation.

What should come as a surprise is that problems such as integration, script maintenance, control, compliance and scalability continue to plague traditional RPA deployments. This is a worrying fact, given that 84% of decision-makers plan to increase their investments in automation – without the assurance of sustained ROI or an uncomplicated implementation roadmap.

The HyperApps approach: Evolve beyond your existing RPA implementations

While traditional RPA relies on rule-based engines and technical configurations to automate workflows at the task level, HyperApps take a more democratized, business user-oriented approach for achieving end-to-end business process automation, and optimizing machine-human collaboration. They have a GUI platform where business users, data scientists, and IT professionals – stakeholders across the digital spectrum – can participate in setting up and operating meaningful business process automation.

This approach enables teams across the organization to implement, iterate, scale and grow, and addresses many of the challenges organizations currently face when preparing transformation projects for long-term sustainability. It also facilitates optimum teamwork and a culture of innovation.

• HyperApps can automate business processes across the board, shrinking the technology sprawl.
• The no-code interface empowers teams, reduces maintenance needs and technical debt.
• HyperApp components are reusable and scalable, which lowers total cost of ownership (TCO), and accelerates time to value and ROI.
• Compliance is baked-in, without requiring further investment.

Ultimately, automation will be central to long-term digital transformation as organizations look beyond short-term responses and adopt SaaS strategically to address new omnichannel opportunities. By opting for HyperApps, they can address the foundational challenges of their RPA investments and take enterprise automation to the next level.

Making Digital Transformation Scalable, Sustainable and Future-oriented

The pandemic brought about a rapid global paradigm shift, wherein businesses focused more than ever on delivering against digital-first customer expectations. It heralded a new normal of empowered employees who seek more autonomy, and of organizational resilience without taking success/market leadership for granted. For this emerging future, your investments in digital transformation shouldn’t be only considered as ‘crisis response’, but must hold their own and continue to evolve with the same urgency going forward, generating value beyond the pandemic.

Contact Us Today to Learn More About Intelligent Automation Digital Transformation

If you are looking to iron out bottlenecks or inefficiencies in your business processes through sustainable, intelligent automation, please contact us and our HyperApps experts will be happy to help you accelerate!

Learn more about our HyperApps approach >

Globally, the automation industry has seen a sharp uptick in the last few years. Between 2018 and 2019, it grew by a whopping 63.1%¹, making it the fastest-growing category in enterprise software! If that wasn’t enough, Gartner expects RPA to be a $7 billion market by 2022². So, the (literally) billion-dollar question that needs to be asked is this: What percentage of this investment will achieve sustainable automation and the competitive advantage it produces?

Sustainable automation in beginner vs. mature organizations: what leaders do differently

Companies frequently rush into implementation, motivated by quick wins – but this is not a sustainable automation strategy. While initial investments might be driven by cost savings (which in itself can be valuable), a mature enterprise, or automation “leader,” will take a mid- to longer-term view, with a different set of objectives and priorities. For example, just 1% of automation leaders prioritize cost savings, compared to 8% of beginners. 

In our experience, companies that answer key questions around extensibility, cost-efficient maintenance, visibility without black-boxing, and sustainable investments will be on the right track towards using automation as a driver of business transformation – making automation the gift that keeps on giving. So, how sustainable is automation when design and implementation tick all of these essential boxes?

Making efficiency and scale intersect for a sustainable roadmap

It all begins with re-envisioning the automation lifecycle for economic maintenance, going beyond the simple design-build-deploy structure. We find a more holistic, 7-step approach to attaining sustainable automation, covering exhaustive testing, post-deployment monitoring, management of new opportunities, and culture realignment.

Companies must also ensure with clear accountability and ownership to support business transformation. Nearly half of automation leaders (46%) have a dedicated team/committee tasked with identifying and approving automation projects. For beginners, this number is an underwhelming 7%. Aligning automations to newly conceived processes calls for centralized governance, so you might want to consider a dedicated center of excellence (COE) to manage planned and ongoing automations. 

Finally, you need a three-pronged strategy to reap the benefits of sustainable automation:

1. Plan early – Start off on the right foot. Take the projected gains from automation to plan long-term and super long-term, sustainable automation deployments, building a continuous cycle of returns and investments.

2. Implement efficiently – Leverage an app-based approach for implementation. An automation platform powered by HyperApps will give you better visibility into your IT footprint, business processes, and the needs of various stakeholders, without any “black-boxing”. It also makes the implementation more democratic by applying a good information layer to ease comprehension, testing, and validation, by technical and business users alike. 

3. Re-direct into growth- Position your automations as the bedrock for business innovation. Regularly testing new automation ideas using HyperApps, in line with your evolving business model and new processes, will help maintain the benefits of sustainable automation.

Gartner suggests that automation could save you around 25,000 hours of work annually³, and that’s just in finance. Sustainable automation isn’t just possible – it is an actioned reality for our many customers out there. To know more about JIFFY.ai’s pathway to sustainable automation using HyperApps, with a detailed 7-step life cycle, download the e-book here.

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Gartner, Market Share Analysis: Robotic Process Automation, Worldwide, 2018

In an ideal world, invoice processing would look like this: 

But this is rarely the case. Straight-through-processing or STP of invoices remains out of reach for most businesses, despite advancements in automation over the last decade. Legacy processes, complex workflows, and a chronic lack of agility are commonplace for Account Processing (AP) teams, leading to seven accounts payable challenges: 

1. High manual dependency – Research reveals that 51% of companies use manual efforts for something as simple as data entry. You could be losing out on thousands of dollars in efficiency gains, not to mention added efforts in correcting the 3.6% error rate.

2. Convoluted routes for invoice approval – As 37% of companies still route their invoices manually, unexpected delays prevent timely payments to vendors. In drastic scenarios, the invoice could hit a brick wall and require a fresh billing cycle from scratch. 

3. Mounting liabilities – In the face of delayed approvals and manual errors, invoices could sit unactioned for months. This is a challenge for 27% of companies, leading to accumulated liabilities over time, mounting pressure at EOM/EOQ, and the risk of non-compliance. 

4. Difficulties in handling exceptions – The cause for an exception could range from incorrect price, quantity, or volume, to missing taxation details, PO number, or other information. They derail invoices from a straightforward path, requiring even more manual interventions. 

5. Failure to gain from timebound discounts – A business might negotiate more favorable terms and discounted rates if invoices are processed on time. Unfortunately, nearly 1 in 5 companies cannot realize these benefits due to delayed vendor payments. 

6. Lost invoices and effort duplication – As the saying goes, “too many cooks spoil the broth” – and this is certainly true for AP. In 33% of companies, manual dependencies, ineffective exception handling, approval complexities, and decentralization cause invoices to get lost. 

7. Decentralized AP – With invoices pouring in from multiple business units, and no consistent or cohesive workflow, AP teams’ work can be fragmented. This hinders centralized visibility and governance, which becomes a problem when it is time for the business to scale. 

Automation has long been touted as a silver bullet to these accounts payable challenges, helping companies achieve 100% STP. Research from Ardent Partners suggests that top-performing companies have 2.5 times higher STP rate than their laggard counterparts – clearly, there is a yawning gap to fill. Most companies cite the cost of ownership, a high degree of technical involvement, and a lack of cognitive capabilities as reasons to put off automation. As a result, they fall to the bottom of the pack, lagging far behind industry leaders. 

How HyperApps Can Solve All of Your AP Problems

Instead of a rigid, sweeping automation landscape, a HyperApp offers near-surgical precision when it comes to handling complex processes. A self-contained, ready-to-use, and integration-friendly invoice approval software can transform invoice processing in as little as four weeks. Its architecture is designed from the ground up to give business users the ability to configure a business workflow to their unique needs without any support required from IT.

This can lead to massive effort savings in the long-term, while also making businesses more agile for emerging invoicing needs and handling, or changes to business processes. 

For example, a company with HyperApp-led business process automation software will find it significantly easier to adapt to the touchless needs of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, automatically “learning” new template structures through ML.

Transform Your Invoice Processing With Our Accounts Payable Solution

To learn more about our accounts payable solution and how it answers the most pressing challenges in invoice processing today, download our e-book or request a demo of our HyperApp solution.

As we navigate a time different from the one we would have liked or wanted, we’re bringing to you a series of blogs, writeups, and LinkedIn resources that we call New Now. In today’s New Now blog, we talk about how businesses can begin to recover and mitigate some of the significant disruption with help from automation.

One McKinsey & Company report suggested, well before the pandemic, that over 30% of manual jobs currently could be automated by 2030. The same report also says that this change could actually bring in more jobs into the economy and that people would need to skill themselves accordingly.

But automation isn’t just a good-to-have feature anymore. For their own well-being and those of the people around them, companies and individuals alike will actively look to automate as many processes as possible, thus reducing the need for manual intervention and the close calls that might involve.

We also need to bear in mind that as all-consuming as it seems right now, the pandemic in its current state will change and subside. What this radical shift really does for businesses is it helps them see what costs they can cut, and where they can better utilize their workforces.

For the fiscal quarters that follow, many industries will continue to focus only on the costs they can cut. Three main solutions can help, and the use of technology and automation can make these processes faster and easier.

1.Analytics for real-time information: Everyone in the retail industry is feeling the heat, but the fashion and apparel industry is feeling it the most. In the business of clothing manufacturing, what is essentially a nice-to-have product in a thriving economy likely will not be purchased in current circumstances. The industry is looking at steep reductions in demand, as well as a restricted ability to predict future trends.

The only fallback, then, is real-time analysis. Fashion and apparel retailers have a tremendous opportunity here – to use real-time analytics and data to predict what they should stock up on, and how much. This could be a big welcome breath for brands that continue to struggle with too much inventory and a severely fragmented supply chain.

Another example is the airline industry. Using real-time data on infection rates and noticing which sectors open up first, they can plan their flight rosters and figure out which staff they need to bring back, and in what time frame. By linking powerful analytics with automated flight rosters, complex, data-driven decisions that now need to be made can be made that much faster.

2.Preserving brand value and customer satisfaction: Much has been said about marketing in the current scenario. For some time now, most businesses have been riding the wave of a thriving economy. For about a year, though, we have heard predictions of a possible recession but certainly not on the scale we see now.

Companies around the globe have to rethink not just what they say, but how well they can walk the talk. Consumers of both B2B and B2C brands are navigating some very sensitive times and simply do not take kindly to an undelivered or under-delivered promise.

The next logical step for brands is ensuring that they can deliver on all the promises they make. We are heading into a territory where every individual is trying to find a new job or hold onto the one they have, and to save money while they can. Something as simple as getting a timely refund can put everyone at ease.

Serving multiple stakeholders in a shorter time window can be achieved using intelligent automation. For instance, Jiffy.ai has been able to help clients in the airline space accomplish improved turnaround times of 300% on ticket cancellations and refunds, while also significantly reducing errors.

Suggested Reading: Beyond the Pandemic: Give Wings to Your Digital Transformation Goals with Intelligent Automation

3.Preparing for the future: Companies today face a twofold challenge – delivering on an authentic customer experience and managing their cash flows to ride out the storm, and regroup for the next phase.

Generating demand is crucial for the cash registers to start ringing again. Unfortunately, demand forecasting will be a real struggle for many industries in the post-pandemic world. Consumer habits have changed, in some cases forcibly, and  wallets have tightened in a tough economy.

AI solutions can problem-solve in real-time when demand forecasting may seem like a mirage. Inventory management can be integrated with AI, helping retailers sync demand and inventory better. AI can also hook new and returning customers with a personalized experience along with identifying gaps in the offerings. This would certainly help businesses bounce back faster.

Looking ahead and planning for the future

Here are some other ways to optimize costs while also maintaining efficiency:

• Adapt to the new virtual culture such that all non-operations staff continue to work remotely, ensuring their continued safety and well-being
• Use automated cleaning and QC tools for spaces where people are needed physically
• Automate complex processes using intelligent automation to help cut costs and improve efficiency

The fact remains that people need to buy things and consume services. The growth will first be visible across essential and semi-essential commodities. Several businesses will have to display tremendous resilience as the demand curve slowly rises. Investing in intelligent automation now can create a path to more efficient processes being run at lower costs, setting the tone for overcoming the current challenges and a viable recovery.

Almost all business today is being conducted on web-based systems. Collection and collation of data are done on the cloud, form filling, data extractions, website testing and a large number of other repetitive tasks have all become web-based. Most businesses have started moving virtually all their operations on to the cloud in search of greater efficiency at a lower cost.

Organizations are increasingly finding that most infrastructure, software, and processes are now only being offered on web-based platforms. Now, with the emergence of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) as one of the key drivers of efficiency, the cloud and RPA have become closely linked.

Technologies like the cloud and the Internet of Things are helping businesses and individuals become more interconnected. Being able to send, analyze, and interpret data on the go is one of the key drivers of IoT, and the cloud helps facilitate this. With RPA, all of these tasks can be more efficient.

Web-based RPA has changed the way people think of robotics. The strategies used have to be changed to adapt to the cloud. By using a web-based RPA, customers can see quicker results from using robotic automation.

RPA on Cloud– Quicker, more convenient solutions

Developing on-site RPA solutions for businesses can be cumbersome and time-consuming. This is why automation companies are making a move towards pre-built, customizable cloud-based RPA solutions, where a network segment has already been built into the cloud. This way, a client can start using the bots as soon as they start using the cloud.

Web-based RPA also allows for customizable solutions, where customers can choose specific processes to focus on so that bottlenecks can be addressed easily. By maintaining a library of ready-made RPA components, web-based systems can combine a number of automated processes to efficiently automate new processes. This provides a higher degree of personalization without installing an unwieldy system-based RPA solution.

Scalability

As businesses grow over time, there is often a need for new bots to increase efficiency. By adopting a web-based RPA solution, it is possible to put new bots into service when they need it. Businesses often will not need many bots when they start out, and their needs will increase slowly, but surely with time. It is also possible that certain bots will become obsolete and will need to be phased out. For example, if a certain department shuts down, or service is stopped.

Since the process of upgrading and updating cloud-based systems is a lot easier than system-based bots, a web-based RPA system can be a lot more flexible. It also takes away the need to buy a higher capacity than what is needed when you first install an RPA system.

Lowering costs

Easy customization and flexibility mean that companies can pick and choose what they want to automate. This means lower costs of licensing, and operations. By taking some simple steps to understand and identify what they want to automate, where the technology can be used, and the potential savings, a web-based RPA system can help companies save a lot of money. In a system-based RPA, companies will often have to purchase a lot more licenses than necessary to avoid high installation costs, and increased downtime, the cloud-based system can provide extremely cost-efficient.

Safety

The cloud has become ubiquitous. Almost all companies rely heavily on cloud-based solutions for more efficiency. By using robots instead of humans, they can also increase the safety of their operations. The robot’s access rights and scope of work can be clearly defined, so as to minimize any potential problems and minimize human errors.

The ability to scale and replicate cloud services improves the competitiveness of businesses.

For a detailed discussion, write to marketing@jiffy.ai