A next-generation, unified intelligent automation platform that bundles analytics and cognitive technologies with RPA to automate more end-to-end processes is fast revolutionizing F&A and HR departments across organisations.
Digital transformation is impacting industries of all sizes and across verticals as customers consume solutions and services more over digitally connected platforms and devices. Technologies like HCI, automation, artificial intelligence, mobile apps are on the agenda for tech and business leaders globally. Besides sales automated with CRM, ERP and other tools, each company is seeking new technologies to automate their F&A department to ensure faster process and swift operations. From back offices across the business landscape, intelligent automation is transforming the finance & accounting and HR functions across organisations.
A global telecommunications provider that received 1,000 pieces of mail every day in AP, mostly invoice-related and relied on inefficient, manual processes. Before process automation, it took 14 days to process an invoice (on average) and there was 2-3% late fees after frequent inability to meet supplier payment terms. Now, dozens of software robots retrieve 9,000 invoices/month from 30 vendor websites and deliver the data to finance systems, ready for processing and payment. After process automation, it took 1-2 days to process an invoice and a 400% increase in productivity.
The Bureau of Labour Statistics predicts that the need for bookkeeping, accounting, and auditing clerks will decline by 1 percent through 2026 due to technological change. The modern-day Chief Financial Officer CFOs are increasingly exploring intelligent automation (IA) to boost productivity and improve executive decision-making.
F&A departments in healthcare too use IA platform to consolidate patient payment data from a wide variety of sources with a comprehensive risk analysis of patients and payers to reduce delinquent debt and total days outstanding. The bot will automatically check for insurance verification, provide a patient financial liability calculation, and, if the patient is noted for possibly needing financial assistance, the program will flag the front desk employee to provide a financial assistance program brochure to the patient upon check-in. This improves the experience for both the patient and the front desk staff.
The key benefits of intelligent automation at F&A are Need for Speed as IA software interfaces with existing systems and navigates user application interfaces just like a human would, but without the need for downtime, and, Importance of Accuracy as F&A departments can automate basic processes and build effective models, resulting in accurate analysis and informed decisions with right IA software. IA platform helps build tomorrows digital finance workforce where collaboration between digital and physical workers results in greater organisational capacity and employee empowerment.
Using artificial intelligence for HR automation
Intelligent Automation has great potential to transform Human Resources (HR) function transitions from a business ‘cost center’ to a ‘profit centre” as technologies like Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, and IA will be crucial to usher the desired change. A KPMG survey informs that HR can play a central role in assessing the scope of IA-led disruption and accordingly design training programs to up skill employees and drive awareness about how IA deployment will affect their jobs.
The largest sheriff’s department in the world and the fourth largest policing agency in the U.S, The Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department (LASD) significantly reduced time to hire from earlier 18 months. With its rigorous background check procedures, the department created jacket files for each recruit, some with over 1,000 pages with security, efficiency, and accuracy all at risk by manual processes. These documents were also manually processed and digitized, taking approximately 10,000 hours annually. Workflow for HR automation was implemented that electronically collects information than previously printed on thousands of pages of paper. Automating key HR processes led to significant reduction in time to hire and elimination of unnecessary, redundant tasks.
Using Image-Parsing AI for Competitive Wage Research is an effective use of IA in HR departments. A leading worldwide retailer used local job postings to research retail wages in the specific geographic areas around its stores. The company switched to image-parsing AI tool to scrape the web for wage data from job postings in the geographic area of the store that gathers the data and a workflow automation sends it to the HR database in real-time. This reduced manual data entry for the HR department, saved time, and kept their competitive wage analysis up to date by reducing the time to process data gathered from local jobs listings. The accurate competitive wage analysis is crucial for employee retention.
HFS Research predicts a workforce decline of 14 percent in the Indian IT and business process outsourcing (BPO) sector by 2021. AI tools can enhance the human power of HR department, allowing employees to make informed decisions, hire right candidates more quickly and efficiently, and scale processes without decreasing quality of employee service and departmental decision-making.
Rise of RPA
Many organisations find their business ops becoming increasingly complex due to large amount of unstructured data in documents and emails, mobile transactions, electronic signatures, exception handling, biometric authentication/validation, case management and customer communications. Addressing these process and data complexities requires next-generation, unified intelligent automation platform that bundles analytics and cognitive technologies with RPA to automate more end-to-end processes.
Travel conglomerate Thomas Cook India Group with tremendous growth wanted consolidation and standardization of processes to deliver a better experience for multiple stakeholders. There were also several front end offices and processes unique to travel domain and customers, resulting in a lot of manual intervention in the finance department. There was need for an operational back end that responds much faster, efficiently and accurately led to robotic process automation (RPA). Post the successful POC, the RPA was extended to more processes in the finance department as a priority as it impacts customers and multiple business stake holders. With RPA the response time for customer refund reduced to a great extent. Thomas Cook India Group went live with three bots within three months of project and by mid-2019 added a dozen more bots. The accuracy received was 100 percent with the response time improvement in certain cases around 30 to 40 percent. The people freed up from the mundane tasks were skilled as they contributed to the business side, shared services or innovations.
Intelligent Automation is transforming IT blueprint for India Inc. of Digital Finance and HR departments. IDC predicts that by 2024, 50% of enterprises in India will embed intelligent automation into technology and process development, using AI-based software to discover operational and experiential insights to guide innovation. But Intelligent Automation journey needs a well-designed strategy to convert boardroom conversations into actual deployment roadmap resulting in cost and operational efficiencies across all major functions of an organisation.
| 4 BASIC STEPS TO DEPLOY AUTOMATION IN YOUR ORGANISATION
1. BUY-IN FROM THE TOP: Gain complete strategic and financial buy-in from the c-suite and leadership teams to ensure a more successful implementation. 2. IDENTIFY PILOT PROGRAMS: Select a few strategic programs for pilot runs that could benefit most from automation in long run, and not create biggest immediate return. 3. START SMALL: It’s far easier to start an automation project at a granular level and, once it’s successful, scale that project up to other areas. 4. GET HELP: Whether using internal programmers, consultants, or vendors, or some combination of the three, realize this challenge is a very complex one. Source : Sutherland Global |
Jobi Thomas is Chief Technology Officer at ASPL Info Services.
A technology enthusiast, Jobi has over 25 years in the techno-commercial space combining business development and solutions consulting in information technology. He has an undeterred focus on leveraging the best technology that’s right for the customer, not letting them be distracted by industry hype.