The concept of using human labor as a lever of BPO is coming to its end, leaving the door open for automation. There is no future discussion about which country is going to be the “next India”.
The fact of the matter is that business process outsourcing once was the winning strategy, but today the costs have reached the peak point where dealing with time-zone difference doesn’t equal the hardships.
It’s next to impossible to sustain a low-cost labor even with the trickiest workforce management. The cost escalation is inevitable and the performance increase is not likely to happen. In fact, traditional outsourced back office processes are a perfect fit for robotic process automation.
Actually, any human low-end, repeatable and rule-based work is counting its days because switching to back-office automation has an enormous payoff. Digital workers will work 24/7, are 100% accurate and will improve thanks to artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Here are two main things to keep in mind for the future digital workforce adoption for back-office automation.
Re-think your business model
Applying RPA to your back-office processes is not only about reducing operating cost, it is more about creating and maintaining Your competitive advantage by eliminating manual activities.
Redeploy your human resource
RPA will eliminate a lot of manual activities and will free-up your labor. The thing to consider is – transferring your employees to higher value roles to work on tasks, technology is not capable of.
Back-office process automation example
To display the proof of Robotic Process Automation value, let’s have a look at some processes that could be greatly automated with back office automation tools:
WIP Analysis
Typical tools that are used are Excel spreadsheets, Email, and Enterprise Resource Planning system. Each case takes up approximately from 10 to 15 minutes to process. Shared Service organizations need to keep a significant amount of Full-Time Employees to keep up with the constant requests .
Typical WIP analysis consists of 6 steps:
- Request for work in progress analysis is received via email
- User logs into the ERP system
- The user runs ERP reports. In case no data is found follows up to understand why
- Manually cuts/pastes data into Excel template
- Creates pivot tables based upon request
- Sends back analysis to the requestor
This whole process can be completely replicated by robots but with greater accuracy and take approximately 1/3 of a humans time. The shared mailbox will be monitored automatically. If any requested data is missing a robot will process a request and notify a human team about the problem.
Procure-to-Pay
Automating Procure-to-Pay process with Cudato’s intelligent RPA software can provide huge gains in performance of Your Account Payable department.
Most common problems that RPA solves in are:
No Standardization
Different vendors have different invoice formats. Some of them are still handwritten, some are sent by fax, some are emailed in PDF format. This makes processing of the invoices that match to Purchase Orders more difficult and requires using the optical to character recognition software.
Unstructured data
Handling large volumes of inconsistent data ranging from purchase order generation to approval leaves the Account Payables departments with huge amounts of repetitive tasks of transferring data to a structured format which raises up the risk of occurring errors.
Non-PO Invoices data discrepancies
Correct vendor payments depend on GL code and cost center approval. Robots are very efficient iт invoice reconciliation automation.
Typical Procure-to-pay process consists of these steps:
- Requisitioning
- PO Generation
- Goods/Service received
- Invoice received, entered and match
- Payment is issued
The adoption of RPA of PO processing allows procurement staff to be more efficient and productive. Cudato’s automated solutions can support all of the steps of the procurement process.
- Requisitioning
The software can be trained to trigger the issuance of a purchase requisition from the appropriate department. Robots have the ability to interface with vendor systems to verify the availability of the inventory items that are needed.
- PO Generation
After the availability and prices has been verified. Finally, purchase orders can be automatically generated and sent out by the robots.
- Incoming invoice management
The shared mailbox is automatically monitored. When the robots detect the invoice file the data is entered automatically into the ERP system from the received invoice and matched with the purchase order and receipt. Vendor error is a common thing, so a three-way check good for:
- preventing fraudulent invoice payments
- preventing inaccurate invoice payments
- preventing dublicate invoice payments