The Covid-19 pandemic will go down as a tipping point event in the technology modernization evolution. Almost overnight, companies have had to adjust to the demands of a newly remote workforce. Organizations that have lagged in their adoption of technologies to facilitate remote collaboration and business automation are discovering that they can wait no more. On top of that, these companies may be feeling pressure to reduce costs and gain efficiency when contemplating the risks of an impending recession.
So what is a company to do? My recommendation – take an agile approach. The same techniques that have revolutionized the way software is developed and delivered can be applied to how you add intelligent automation to your business. Don’t allow yourself to become paralyzed by massive overhauls to your IT infrastructure or large scale implementation projects. Instead, automate specific business processes with measurable results by selectively adding technologies to your ecosystem that work with what is already in place. Rinse and repeat.
While that is great advice in general (well, I think it is at any rate!), I’d like to offer you one better. Let’s identify a specific business problem that you tackle FIRST, and a specific technology to solve said problem.
The problem: Accounts Payable (AP) Invoice Processing
The solution: Semantik Invoice
So what is Semantik Invoice and why might you care? Let me start by painting a picture that starts with a simple question: What If?
What if you could reduce manual data entry tasks? Nearly every company out there has a need for Accounts Payable Invoice processing. And if you don’t – if nobody sends you invoices ever – then I guess you can skip this article and you will have to wait until my next post with the 2nd process to automate. But seriously, the fact that we are still asking our back office staff to do things that truly can be automated is just silly and a waste of resources. We should be freeing up these people – these loyal, hardworking people that know so much about your business – to do things that are uniquely human and an efficient use of their time.
What if your people could spend their time following up with your customers to track down late payments, or better yet, to just make sure your customers are having a phenomenal experience? How much would your business improve if you could “get to” all those things that don’t get done just because your people don’t have enough time?
What if you could implement technology that automates invoice data entry with 97% accuracy that required minutes to set up. Instead of weeks or months of configuration and training for the system, leverage a fully pre-trained system that uses Artificial Intelligence (AI) models to extract the information you need and provides automated invoice processing on day one. In hour one? That’s true intelligent automation.
What if that technology was fully cloud based, hosted, and managed? And was iteratively updated with no-down time and no impact to your team to guarantee that accuracy continued to improve?
What if that technology could integrate with your existing systems – your ERP, your financial software – so that your invoice data was correct and accurate in ALL the places you need it?
What if you could take that first step on a journey in a real and meaningful way that could be measured with results like:
- Average cost of invoice processing reduced from $14.38 to $2.52, resulting in 82% savings.
- The average time to process an invoice down from 10.6 days to 3.1 days (Now you can start taking advantage of those early pay discounts!)
What if?
I have to admit, it is a little embarrassing that I’m nearly giddy that we have found a solution in Semantik Invoice that really and truly does provide all of those things (does that make me a data geek?). And I’d be happy to show it to you. Want to get together for a demo? Bring your invoices. We’ll start processing them. In minutes. And you can be a data geek with me too.
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Connect with ArgonDigital to learn how to bring automation to Accounts Payable.
