CategoriesAutomation Challenges Document Digitization Invoice Automation RPA

Manual vs Automated Accounts Payable Process

According to Business Insider Report, 44% of businesses are looking to add automation to their payables processes as a way to capitalize on the efficiency and cost-cutting benefits it brings in, while also cutting fraud and increasing access to payment data.

Let us first understand what is Accounts Payable process, how it works presently, and its challenges:

Accounts Payable means the purchase of raw materials/goods on credit for a certain period of time and are considered as Current Liabilities in Accounting terms. 

The accounts payable process starts with receiving an invoice from the supplier via email, in physical form, or uploaded to a supplier portal; which is then sent to a person who may be an accountant or handling the accounts payable. Subsequently, details from invoices are extracted manually and entered into spreadsheets. After this, every invoice is subjected to a review and approval process. In an enterprise, the approval process includes verification steps which constitute the three way matching process which is done by matching the details in the Purchase Order(PO), Invoice, and the GRN(Goods Receipt Note).

Well, the approval process typically includes the steps of verification to ensure that the supplier is not giving any false information and has followed up on their part of an agreement before getting paid. The first step is to check if what is seen amounts to what is paid for and that it adheres to the stated criteria. Upon receipt, checking is done to see if there are any duplicates of invoices (which might have been fabricated) or missing products. Followed by checking, if the right payment amount has been settled. Once these checks confirm everything, the financial personnel proceeds with payments.  

The above-explained process is presently carried out manually in most enterprises today, thus, with the expansion of business at every stage it becomes more time-consuming, error-prone, and tedious activity that on average would take at least 25 days to complete.

Account Payable Automation

Let us see by adopting Account payable automation, how it reduces fraud-related payments and saves time and cost. 

Automated Accounts Payable processing involves automatically fetching/downloading multiple documents like Invoices, Credit Notes, Debit Notes, Purchase Orders(PO), etc. from different sources like emails, supplier portals, designated folders on desktops, etc. The information is extracted from these documents and validated using rules to check the currency, total amount, tax rate, tax amount, etc kind of factors to prevent fraud. Post initial validation automated reconciliation is carried out between PO and Invoice (2 Way) or between PO, Invoice & Goods Received Note (3 Way )depending upon the enterprise requirement on the digitized data. The exceptions are handled using automated workflows and alerts & notifications are sent to the stakeholders post-processing. These extracted fields and other information are automatically injected into Accounting/ERP/ other downstream systems for further processing. Role-based operational key analytics and dashboards are provided based on advanced technologies like AI, ML, OCRi, NLP, etc, to drive effective decision making.

 Accounts Payable Automation Solution processes PO & Non-PO invoices 10X faster, with error-free accounts payable data entries, automated matching  & reconciliation, thus providing a significant reduction in costs per transaction, better visibility into business operations, reducing overall turnaround time with automated workflows, along with touchless invoice processing, and scalability with cloud-based technology.

 For making your AP Processing faster, simpler, and more accurate with automation, get in touch with us at info@AIQoD.com.

CategoriesAutomation Document Digitization Invoice Automation RPA

Is Touchless Invoice a Myth?

According to research, last year, most of the AP Leaders suffered a miserable state, a majority of 60% still face lengthy invoice and payment approval times.  Invoice processing is the most important part of the accounts payable process, which is mostly performed manually. This blog will discuss how to use automation in invoice processing and make the process easier.

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CategoriesAutomation Document Digitization RPA Video KYC

Five Senses & Hyper-Automation

Hyper-Automation is the automation of activities that were done by humans and exactly the way we would expect humans to do it. When we look at automation of activities it is primarily driven by the 5 human senses and humans have tried to mimic those in the real world and to elevate human life. 

From driverless cars to smart virtual assistants, from biometric sensors to connected devices, from smart cities to connected homes; the use of technology has become widespread. Many activities that we used to do physically are already automated, it has become a new norm for all of us and the future would be even more interesting with some amazing technologies shaping our lives in the coming years.

Similarly Automation has become one of the biggest needs for enterprises to improve efficiency, save cost, and also to speed up their operations. Automation empowers organizations by helping them embrace these new technologies with ease and reap the benefits of the technology through different platforms which gives that edge to the enterprises.

5 Senses Hyper intelligence

Hyper Intelligence

Let’s try to draw an analogy between our senses and  Automation :

  1. Sense of Touch: Touch refers to the human ability to use our fingers/surface of the skin in ways that allow us to identify our surroundings. In organizations, there are a lot and lots of people who are actually doing touch-based activities that help them to make appropriate decisions.  For example, Invoice Data-Entry is such a process, wherein an organization that receives vendors’ invoices on the generation of purchase orders while purchasing/ordering some equipment/service. These invoices are actually punched into Accounting/ERP systems by individuals in the accounts department. This task is time-consuming, prone to manual errors, and a cumbersome task to deal with.

Technology like Intelligent information management has been there in this segment, a few examples of those would be Accounts Payable Automation, Accounts Receivable Automation, etc.  These technologies help to make the whole process automated by fetching documents from multiple sources, sorting them, and extracting details of required fields; these details are then reconciled/matched with other documents and finally punched into Accounting/ERP systems without much human intervention except in the case of exceptions.

  1. Sense of Hearing: Sense of Hearing helps us to communicate with our surroundings by experiencing the vibrations created by sound. Let’s take an example, we are all familiar with Call centers, you need to call the helpline number of a firm, in case you need to reach out to them. Someone would pick up the call and answer your queries.

Now, this physical process is automated using Chatbots, IVRs, etc. So as soon as you open the website a chatbot appears welcoming you and straightaway asking you for your queries, you just need to type your question, and most of the time you get responses from the chatbot itself, in a faster and aligned response equivalent to your expectation.

  1. Sense of Sight: One of the most powerful senses of humans that makes us see the world as it is, guides us and helps us in clear processing and understanding of things around us through proper visualization and interpretation.

Let’s understand the technology equivalent for the same:

A. OCR(Optical Character Recognition) 

OCR is an older technology that is in existence for the past but over time has been advanced using modern technologies like artificial intelligence, machine learning, etc to enhance the processing capability similar to lenses and spectacles we use to improve our eye’s visibility.

From the organization’s perspective, if we talk about document processing of invoices, usually the accounting personnel looks at the invoice, reads it and interprets the data, and then punches it into the ERP system. This process of manual processing under workload conditions is prone to issues like manual typing errors, skipping of fields, misplacing of documents, wrong entries,etc

This has been replaced with the OCR technology which actually scans through the documents and extracts the information corresponding to different fields and accurately copies the data to the ERP/Accounting system without any errors and that also in a quick and efficient manner.

B. Face Detection:

This is one of the peculiar features of our eyes which helps us in recognizing individuals, places, and things to interpret, visualize and process information related to them.

Similarly, in the organizations this activity was usually done by the security guard standing at a gate where the person is actually verifying his/her ID card, verifying the person who’s actually getting into a building for security checks. 

This manual process now gets replaced by the technology of Face Detection & Recognition, the software recognizes faces and then lets the individual in through the security checks. This technology is employed for multiple scenarios like attendance management, fraud management in insurance organizations, and video KYC in Banking & Insurance, surveillance & threat management at airports and other such locations, etc.

  1. Sense of Speech:

The power to converse between individuals is also a key differentiator between humans and machines that helps them to express their feelings, share their thoughts and speak out their views.

We are all aware of modern technologies which all of us might have used or encountered like Alexa, Siri, Google Home, etc. in our day-to-day lives. Now we believe that in the future this technology is going to get into our professional lives as well where most of the operations could be executed using the power of speech, where instructions taken by machines will help us get things done.

  1. Sense of Smell :

The sense of smell is another important sense that humans possess to help us detect desirable foods, hazards, etc in our surroundings.

On the technology side, there are bots that are built to smell odors. For example, E-nose, these bots are used in very hazardous environments like chemical factories to detect the smell and identify leakages, etc,. These can also be employed at places where human lives cannot be risked and after-effects of the leak, explosion, bombing, etc have to be sensed for the viability of existence. 

 So in a nutshell, for activities that are manual and repetitive in nature, Hyper-automation can be used to bridge the gap to help grow in a more efficient and faster manner. Technology and its innovation are for the empowerment of humans and not for their replacement, they will help us to excel, innovate and focus on more strategic activities.

For more insights on how to ” Enable the Digital Enterprise of the Future using Intelligent information management” view our webinar.

CategoriesAutomation RPA

Intelligent Automation- Driving your competitive advantage through RPA and Beyond

A lot of people have asked me about my vision for AIQoD. Let me start by giving the basic definition of (IIM)Intelligent information Management which is the cornerstone of what we are doing today.

Any process which is definable and repeatable can be automated using a software robot and is referred to as IIM (Intelligent information management) In recent times IIM has taken a centre stage due to the demand for bringing efficiency, reducing human errors and in turn eliminating many jobs from the market. According to Harvard business review, human error costs almost $3 trillion per year in the US alone. According to NASSCOM domestic businesses can cut costs by 65% using IIM with an ROI of 30% to 200% in the first year itself. With cut-throat competition in the market, the only way is to automate and save the huge price that we are paying for human errors.

Believe it or not, we are entering into an era where machines are going to take most of our work and we will have to find ways and means to evolve and still be relevant. This itself is a big topic of discussion on its own so for this blog, I will confine myself to IIM and AIQoD vision.

IIM market is growing at a rate of 36% and it is expected to grow to $8.75 B by 2024. Slowly IIM will grow beyond automation of repeated tasks to take shape of cognitive automation where machines will be doing intelligent operations. These cognitive tasks are done through constant learning by machines using AI technology. Next stage of automation would be the combination of predictive analysis and cognitive automation which will eliminate the need of human analysis for most of the known problems we are handling, tasks that we are doing in today’s world. The best example is the recently launched google assistant by Google CEO, “Mr Sundar Pichai” machines taking over human work is a reality and as every year passes by this capability is leapfrogging us into the future, beyond what our imagination can take us today.

Although its still a long way to go but in a distant future, I believe machines are going to develop human intelligence and will start existing and expanding on its own and I too dread for that day.

Coming back to the vision, AIQoD as an organization was built to implement exactly what was described above and we are building software bots that perform specific activities. In one of the recent products which we have released for Beta testing we have used a combination of OCR, NLP and AI to read Invoices and extract the contents and make it available for accounting or compliance systems which eliminates the need of human capital being used to enter all these invoices into the system manually and we can proudly say that we are among a couple of organizations to achieve this feet and the first one in India.

We will keep exploring newer areas where automation can take shape in the form of bots and make the overall process effective and efficient.

Keep watching this space for what future has in store for all of us as we are building exactly that.

Are you using automation in your business processes today? Discover how you can make the most of the latest technology. Contact us on +91 8888500068 or info@AIQoD.com

CategoriesAutomation Robotics

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) Myths Busted

Intelligent information management (IIM) Platfrom is being widely used by organizations in order to offload routine and repetitive tasks from employee to software bots. Though IIM is seeing widespread adoption in business verticals like Banking, Human Resources, IT, Resource Procurement, etc.; there are certain myths about Intelligent information management that needs to be debunked. Many organizations are ready to accept automation & IIM but are unable to take the decision to deploy IIM due to these myths. In this article, we have a look at the top nine myths about Intelligent information management.  

1. Physical Robots are involved in the ‘automation’

As IIM means Intelligent information management, it gives an indication that hardware robots are involved in the automation process. However, that understanding is completely wrong as there are no humanoid robots involved in IIM. On the other hand, IIM involves ‘software robots’ that are deployed on computers within the organization where you want the automation to be performed. IIM Platform consists of algorithms written/coded by IIM developers that are intended to automate mundane tasks. These tasks are labor intensive and have to be executed in a linear fashion; hence they are ideal to be executed by IIM platform. Let’s consider an example about ‘Processing Loan application of a customer’ – The customer submits varieties of documents that outline his employment status, salary details, credit score, details about other loans, etc. In a nutshell, there is a significant amount of paperwork that is submitted by the customer to the loan officer. In order to verify these documents, the loan officer would take a significant amount of time and since the process is manual, there are chances of an error being performed on behalf of the loan officer. Due to some error, if the loan officer rejects the loan application, it would result in loss of business. The customer might share his experience on social media channels which might cause significant damage to the brand image of the bank. The ideal way to avoid such kind of mishaps is by deploying IIM in banking systems. AIQoD, an Enterprise Intelligent information Management Platform has the most advanced AI bots that can ‘process data’ by using Handwriting Recognition, Optical Character Recognition (OCR), and other advanced technologies and report any discrepancy in the data. Those bots can also ‘capture’ the data from forms e.g. personal details about the customer like Name, Age, Address, etc. and match with relevant data about the customer from the back-end that might be stored in spreadsheets/databases. This makes the entire process seamless since there is no/minimal manual intervention involved in the entire activity. Once the loan application is approved, the IIM Platform can also update the details at the backend; thereby freeing up the resources in the bank for other business-critical activities.

2. Intelligent information Management ( IIM ) would take away the jobs of humans (as it involves automation)

When someone mentions about ‘automation’, the first thought that comes to mind is cost-cutting and job-cuts. The same misconception also holds true when there is a discussion on IIM. There are a number of frontline jobs in any organization that deals with data entry, customer support, IT, etc. and most of these jobs are ‘repetitive’ in nature and involve a number of business processes. Over a period of time, there is a significant fall in the productivity of any employee working in these departments since they tend to get bored with the same kind of work and are always on the lookout for other challenging roles within the organization. Take the case of a business development executive, along with pitching clients for business prospects; an executive working in ‘Business Development’ & ‘Sales’ department would also be involved in updating sales software, sending status reports to the management team, etc. These jobs could hamper their productivity since that is not their core-skills and they might be spending a significant amount of effort in compiling & sending reports. Intelligent information management platform can automate these boring front-line jobs, thereby reducing the load from these executives so that they can utilize their ‘core skills’ for the bringing business to the organization. They can utilize that free-time in order to hone their skills which can help them to moveup the ladder at their workplace. As far as the discussion about losing jobs to IIM is concerned, IIM will only replace humans in frontline jobs that are of linear approach and require less/no intelligence to complete the jobs. To cite some examples, IIM can be instrumental in automating invoice generation, customer service, validating the authenticity of forms [loan processing, account opening, etc.]. Adoption of IIM would result in the creation of ‘new jobs’ in existing areas like customer development/customer support, IT support, etc. and these new jobs could be a game-changer in these respective areas. As mentioned earlier, a majority of the resources working in these departments are highly de-motivated in their jobs and IIM simply opens the ‘gates’ for them, so that they can work on jobs that are important in this era of knowledge economy.

3. IIM is only about Automation & cost-cutting

How would you feel if you have to perform the same nature of the job in your office for your entire life? We are sure that you would be having a disgruntled feeling even when you imagine such a scenario. Cost-cutting is definitely attributed to automation, but that is definitely not one of the driving factors why organizations opt for Intelligent information management. Deployment of an IIM solution has a significant amount of impact on accelerating process-driven tasks, freeing up resources to take challenging roles, reduction of risks in business operations, achieving 100% error-free & business compliance across various departments (where IIM is deployed), etc. Unlike humans, robots are more productive & consistent when it comes to processing repetitive jobs. Irrespective of the size of the organization, there is always a push for achieving 100% compliance in business & process. One manner in which this task can be achieved is by looking at software logs which have detailed information about various activities being performed to execute the job. As IIM Platform are a piece of software that is installed in machines where you intend to automate tasks, they leave a good amount of footprint in the form of logs. These logs can be analyzed in cases where cases of non-compliance are reported within the organization. Apart from automation, these are some of the significant benefits that come along with an IIM deployment and these benefits have far-fetched benefits than ‘cost-cutting’.

4. IIM is not scalable and secure

IIM platform are ideal for automating repetitive tasks across sectors that involve technology and hence their usage is not limited to any particular domain. IIM is already gaining widespread adoption in the fields of banking, finance, retail, insurance, etc. hence; the virtual worker has access to huge amount of data about employees, vendors, clients, etc. To top it all, it also has access to confidential information like passwords, credit card numbers, inventory lists, etc. An organization cannot compromise on quality & security for the sake of improving the productivity of employees and reducing operating costs. Due to the nature of the information being accessed by IIM platform, the solution has multi-fold layers of security that address the concerns of ‘Data Security’ and ‘Access Security’. IIM platform have a role-based security mechanism to address the problem of ‘Data Security’. It segregates the access to data based on the role that is assigned to a member in the IIM  team (Member is a person with whose credentials theIIM platformwould be executed). This hierarchical approach ensures that members have ‘access to information’ according to the roles assigned to them. For example, a user having limited access rights would not be in a position to access critical information and if a fraudulent attempt is made, that activity is captured in the logs. So, how does one assign roles in an IIM system? The solution is Active Directory Integration where the centralizing team (similar to a Superuser in Linux) can assign roles to team members. This ‘role-based approach’ helps in tracking fraudulent activities in the system. Along with security, Active Directory Integration also enhances business efficiency. These two approaches are used to minimize security threats within the organization. For minimizing external security threats,IIM platform are equipped with high-level encryption. IIM Platform are highly scalable and one of the primary reasons for its increasing demand.IIM workforce comprises of Bots that can be deployed whenever there is high workload. Since IIM Platform, you can expect consistency in the performance. An organization can achieve all these benefits, at minimal cost as IIM Platform can be deployed very quickly. IIM Platform are highly scalable and can be used to its efficiency, irrespective of whether it is deployed by an SMB or a large-scale organization.  

5. Need to have programming knowledge or specialized skills to handle the IIM Platform

This can be considered as one of the biggest myths about IIM. Sure, IIM is a tech-based platform to automate ‘mundane tasks’, but it does require minimal user intervention to initiate the execution of those tasks. Once the team members are trained on using the IIM platform, they have to just follow the necessary steps to ensure that the IIM Platform performs their job. There could be a task where invoices are scanned by the IIM Platform, necessary details are extracted from the invoices, and the back-end vendor database is ‘updated’ with those entries. If the vendor invoices are stored at the specified location either on local-storage/file-server, the IIM would then do the needful. Your team members who are handling the IIM platform need not have any ‘programming skills’, though it is suggested to assign people with an inclination towards ‘scripting languages’ for critical IIM modules. These members can be instrumental in training other team members as they have flair for programming.

6. IT infrastructure cost is more to deploy Intelligent information Management(IIM)

Depending on the scale at which IIM Platform is deployed, there would be initial implementation & deployment costs to keep the IIM up & running. This can be setting up virtual machines where the jobs are executed or procuring a new IT infrastructure to get the best of IIM Though there are costs involved in setting up the IT infrastructure for the purpose of IIM, it is comparably low when compared to the costs for enterprise software implementation. It is a myth that setting up IT infrastructure for IIM solution is costly and this is proven when organizations have a look at the Return On Investment (ROI) involved in IIM deployment & implementation.  

7. IIM is only used to digitize your processes

As we have mentioned earlier,IIM Platform can be used with high efficiency when it is applied to automate jobs that are based on certain rules and require minimal/no human intervention. Though IIM  have features like Optical Character Recognition, Handwriting Recognition, etc.; they have the capability to interact with backend systems like Databases, ERP systems. Majority of these tasks are related to data entry, data extraction, and data updation. Hence, IIM solutions go well beyond the digitization of processes and there would be more promising use cases in case IIM is able to handle unstructured activities.  

8. Implementation of RPA will disturb existing IT systems

Though the IT department is involved in setting up the infrastructure required to execute the IIM solution, they do not perform the job in a silo. They interact with multiple departments, particularly the business units since IIM has a positive impact on the business operations of the organization. In order to adhere to the highest level of security, the IT team assigns specific members for different IIM roles based on their experience & expertise. IIM implementations follow a ‘light structure’ hence IIM Platform are also suited for organizations that have distributed or legacy IT systems. Many organizations still follow old rules for IT operations and they are hesitant to change those rules due to high cost and operational impact associated with the change. Most of the use cases where IIM is applicable, the IIM platform co-work with different software modules (for ERP, database, report generation, etc.) hence, IIM work efficiently even when they have to communicate with different IT systems. Whether your organization follows an age-old legacy IT principles or whether it has a robust IT infrastructure; Intelligent information management works perfectly fine in both the scenarios.