Tag: Machine Learning

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.

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!

Implementing and managing an intelligent automation platform, which includes Machine Learning and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) powered by Artificial Intelligence (AI), can be a complex endeavor, depending on where an organization is in their automation journey. Customers prefer vendors that offer strong service and support enabled by help desk AI technology, especially early in the process. It can make a big difference in the outcomes of a complete, end-to-end business process automation project. Here, JIFFY.ai AUTOMATE users on IT Central Station discuss the importance of support, as well as their use cases and the benefits they’ve seen with the technology.

Process automation use cases

IT Central Station members are finding a variety of uses for JIFFY.ai AUTOMATE in process automation. For example, John G., a VP Engineering at a computer software company, uses the tool in production for driving a Windows application. It extracts content from the Windows app, using JIFFY.ai’s OCR features in the process, and submits images into the application. The actual images are being extracted and returned to them as a document.

For Johnson M., a National Professional Officer at an international affairs institute with more than 5,000 employees, JIFFY.ai AUTOMATE is primarily used for processing documents in procurement and payroll. In one case, the tool creates an attestation letter for Human Resources (HR) for people who are leaving the organization. An IT Manager at a smaller tech services company has two use cases: Bank conflation and a Wage Protection System (WPS), which is a way to calculate and manage salaries per person.

Benefits of process automation

“The system in production completely eliminated the need for human intervention,” explained John G. “From time to time, we need to check the user interface and results, but that is very rare. It can be done once a week, or even less frequently.” A Managing Director, Business Transformation at an airline with over 10,000 employees similarly noted, “We’ve seen really good productivity gains. For the areas where we’ve chosen to automate, it’s not that we have freed up 30 heads in one area with one project. It’s more an aggregation of 20 heads across all of the different bots that have been developed. But we’ve seen tremendous value, especially in the pandemic.”

This user provided additional context, sharing, “As an airline, we have had to cut costs and we were able to go through some pretty strong voluntary separation efforts and redistribute resources and cover things because of the automation work that we’ve been doing.” For the tech services IT Manager, “[JIFFY.ai AUTOMATE] makes the developer’s work easy. With the customization option, we can write custom expressions using its compatibility with Python or other programming languages. Their web automation is good.”

Johnson M acknowledged the tool’s accuracy. He said, “For staff, it is common when doing repetitive work that there tend to be mistakes. There will be a missing digit or letter here and there, but JIFFY.ai AUTOMATE never does that. It is accurate to a ‘t’. It encompasses errors only if the input is poorly done, so it does not commit errors when it does this process. JIFFY.ai AUTOMATE has reduced manual processing for the 25 percent of the processes that it has automated.”

How great service fits into the user experience

Process automation can get complicated, so it’s useful to be able to draw on healthy vendor support. The airline’s Managing Director provided an example, saying, “Our cybersecurity positioning and stance on what we expect and what we allow and don’t allow, are pretty advanced. It was a pretty tall order to meet a lot of our cybersecurity constraints, so that’s an area where we had to do quite a bit of work. The very first bot we put into production fell into the PCI realm. We actually have two environments, one that has to be PCI-compliant, and a regular environment, and JIFFY.ai has been fantastic from a partnership perspective.”

They further noted, “A lot of the challenges that we uncover are really internal to our environment, as opposed to the platform. There’s a little bit of both, and that’s where it really comes back to the partnership with JIFFY.ai. They are always super-responsive in addressing any challenges with the product or the platform and supporting us as we work through how to integrate or automate a certain homegrown application of ours that is probably an outdated legacy application.”

“They have good support,” observed the tech services IT Manager. “There is a team who is ready to build whatever we ask. That is why we are still using this solution. When we are stuck on issues, there should be a team to back us up. We needed somebody like JIFFY.ai because we found we could go into the code level and make changes. Their team was there for support. They never complained whenever we threw non-standard practices at them; they never tried to correct us.”

To learn more about what IT Central Station members think about process automation and JIFFY.ai AUTOMATE, visit JIFFY.ai on IT Central Station.

JIFFY.ai—a company that officially launched less than a year ago—is already a top-scoring disruptor in the Hyper Intelligent Automation (HIA) Breakout Zone, according to global management consulting and strategic advisory firm, Zinnov.

Zinnov regularly performs a comprehensive assessment of Hyper Intelligent Automation platforms as part of Zinnov Zones, an industry-leading annual rating of global technology service providers of cutting-edge technologies. For its 2021 report, Zinnov evaluated over 70 companies, including JIFFY.ai.

Zinnov closely examined JIFFY.ai technology for its technical prowess and scalability across multiple categories, including HIA, Use Case Discovery, Intelligent Document Processing, IT Automation, Intelligent Virtual Agent, F&A Automation, Customer Success Automation, and Talent Management Automation.

JIFFY.ai came out top-ranked in the Breakout Zone because our AI and ML-based platforms bring high-performance automation solutions to companies worldwide.

JIFFY.ai has come far in a short amount of time because we were founded to do things differently. We’re a newcomer in the marketplace, driven to disrupt the terrain of business automation with new ideas.

How HyperApps Leapfrog Other Automation Tech

The JIFFY.ai HyperApp approach leapfrogs past automation solutions such as RPA and SaaS-based point solutions for Business Process Management. (For a detailed rundown on how HyperApps excel in areas where RPA, SaaS-based point solutions, and hyperautomation don’t—read our post, From RPA to Hyperautomation to HyperApps: Level Up Automation Deployments in 2021.)

Zinnov looked at us closely and put JIFFY.ai at the top of its Breakout Zone because our unique approach allows businesses to combine the simplicity of low code with the power of intelligent automation, and the cost convenience of SaaS. Our HyperApps encapsulate all the various capabilities required to achieve successful business process automation—including designing, building, deploying, monitoring, and analyzing.

Our Invoice Processing HyperApp, for example, eliminates the roadblocks to maintaining frictionless cash flow by minimizing the risks and costs associated with inefficient processes. This HyperApp meets the complex technical and business requirements for seamless invoice processing—and then puts it in an easy-to-use, self-service application for business users, with no development team required.

Because our platform makes automation app development easier, we help businesses to avoid a common pitfall: With only technical users and data science professionals involved in automation development and deployment, there is a risk that real business requirements will get overlooked. HyperApps help to demystify the automation of complex business processes, simplifying deployment for business and technical users alike.

Most businesses silo their employees, which allows them to use and develop their specific expertise for the business’s success. This division is especially evident in software and technology areas: One employee may conceive a new idea but must rely on yet another employee to implement it due to a lack of specialized expertise.

While there’s nothing inherently wrong with this breakdown, it can lead to frustration for the idea’s creator. Creators of new ideas must spend a great deal of time and effort translating their thoughts to another group. Some things may get lost in translation, and often, this uphill climb means new concepts don’t come to fruition because the idea is too hard to enact, or too expensive, or too time-consuming.

With JIFFY.ai technology, it’s different: Ideas can be put into development more efficiently. Innovative power is easier to enact. Ideas come to fruition, and innovation moves forward.

When businesses use HyperApps developed on a single platform—rather than stitching together multiple technologies and vendors on their own—they’re able to structure their automation with reusable building blocks. These extensible and scalable building blocks allow them to stay on track through inevitable changes, such as workforce restructuring or application and process changes.

JIFFY.ai is proud to be a leader in the Zinnov Zones Breakout Zone. But we’re just getting started. Society is heading into the Great Reset, and process automation and reliance on digital channels will be a crucial ingredient to our recovery. JIFFY.ai HyperApps technologies will enable predictable wins in the short term, low effort overheads and greater democratization in the mid-term, and radical advantages in the long term. It’s time to disrupt business automation with HyperApps.