For more than 150 years, Greene Tweed has developed materials and engineered high-performance solutions for critical applications in the automotive, aerospace, energy, semiconductor, oil and gas, life sciences, defense and other industries. Headquartered in Lansdale, Pennsylvania and active across the world, its products include O-rings, gaskets, other sealing products, coatings and connectors that are designed to cope with extreme temperature and are used in 90{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} of commercial aircraft. Greene Tweed has been using SAP for more than 20 years and the data it holds is critical to running the whole organization. However, the many different extraction methods used for business reporting were slow, increased system overhead and delivered inconsistent data. As a result, data-driven initiatives they wanted to implement in the future such as AI-enabled operations, drives for efficiency and predictive analytics projects looked doubtful.

There was a need to standardize their data and find extraction methods that ensured those data was always accurate, consistent and trustworthy. “SAP is our single source of truth on almost everything and we only have one instance that runs our environment worldwide. Every time we reach into SAP and pull data we are putting stress on the system,” says David Hufnagle, Manager of Enterprise Data and Analytics, Greene Tweed.

Quick delivery of analytics-ready data

Greene Tweed moved to cloud on Microsoft Azure with Synapse analytics services. Having used Qlik analytics solutions since 2016, the company decided that Qlik Data Integration (QDI) was the best way to replicate their data from SAP to Azure. The QDI platform uses Change Data Capture (CDC) to efficiently analyze source systems like SAP to identify any new changes in the data, then captures only the changes, conforms the data and delivers it to target cloud systems like Azure Synapse. This CDC functionality delivers analytics-ready data from a wide range of sources to data warehouses and lakes, streaming and cloud platforms.

“The big benefit of QDI was the ability to pull data not just from transparent tables in SAP but also from other entities like cluster tables which are really hard to extract out of SAP,” says Hufnagle. “The fact that QDI had the dynamic drive overlay (DDO) and the metadata available to navigate those objects was a big plus.”

Low latency for huge data volumes

Utilizing CDC automation, change data is pulled from SAP to Azure Synapse and loaded every into Greene Tweed’s Enterprise Data Warehouse (EDW) environment. Seventy-seven million records in more than a hundred tables are replicated using QDI and the longest replication latency is 2.5 minutes.

“The biggest advantage we have seen so far is the times to develop analytics on the data from SAP have been cut to 70{aa282f308afcc222aaa21b0478c79e01a8fedd01972e2180867097bd93930f22} of previous because we do not have to write extracts anymore,” says Hufnagle. “We don’t have to write a logical layer because we have already incorporated that. It’s just a matter of going and grabbing the data. We’re quicker at getting things done because using data extracts from the cloud is faster than from SAP. “As we are rolling into this cloud environment using Qlik Data Integration, it’s all about the ability to use data to drive change through our organization. Qlik and Azure Synapse gives us the tools to do that.”

This article is sponsored by Qlik

The post How Greene Tweed replicated SAP data to Microsoft Azure appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

In this report, you’ll learn:

• The information, analytics and enabling technology capabilities of AP top performers
• The skills, training and automation technology that best enable workers at top-performing companies
• How top performing companies use technology to enable organization and governance, service partnering and service design
• A checklist of service delivery objectives for maturing as an AP organization

Approaching the future with flexibility and maintaining a competitive edge requires a comprehensive approach to AP-focused P2P automation. Use this report to develop your future-proof strategy.

Not what you were looking for? Try The Outperformer’s Guide to Total Financial Process Domination!

The post A Checklist for Developing a Future-Proof AP Organization appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

SAP Silver Partner RSC has rebranded its flagship product Rev-Trac to Rev-Trac Platinum with the release of version 8.0 mid-2018. Taking into account the changing demands of the digital age, new features and enhancements were added to the software making it the most potent and effective way to automate SAP change control. The new software also expedites changes from development to production more than ever. 

The Australian innovation software company RSC develops automation technology that massively reduces the time, effort, and cost to deliver SAP change across an application’s lifecycle. Since it’s conception in 1997, the company has been helping organisations simplify SAP change management processes while increasing their agility to respond quickly to business demands and changes in the market.

Today, organisations running SAP are constantly searching for technology that would help them achieve DevOps goals, move to continuous delivery, and accelerate the transition to S/4HANA with lower risk. With the market demanding for a faster and safer solution, Rev-Trac Platinum was developed.

Rev-Trac Platinum combines a suite of features and capabilities that allows SAP IT teams to deliver rapid, continuous, and safe change. It is a user-friendly software that can automate and enforce all SAP change management processes for faster, safer, and more frequent releases that are always ready for production. When functionality is deployed as soon as it is ready, it cuts the time to deliver new SAP applications and unlocks business value resulting in faster ROI on SAP systems.

The fully integrated change management platform Rev-Trac Platinum enables organisations to effectively adopt SAP agile and DevOps to improve productivity and accelerate innovation. Aside from providing improved parallel development, the new RSC solution has safety features that fulfill SAP IT teams’ requirements to manage and control rapid deployments while avoiding massive disruption to the production system.

RSC recognises that a company’s ability to spur SAP change as well as maintain production system stability with minimal resources make them agile to keep pace with the speed of business.

For a fast and reliable transition to S/4HANA, automation is key. Aside from a faster journey to S/4HANA, eliminating manual SAP change management processes significantly reduces costs and interruptions to daily operations while orgnasinations’ build their new system.

To know more about how Rev-Trac can help you to migrate to S/4HANA without interruption to your business click here.

About RSC

David Drake who was among the leaders who first predicted the role automation would play in the future founded RSC. The software company developed the original version of Rev-Trac to cater to the growing need for an automation software that streamlines change development. Rev-Trac is a groundbreaking automation technology that has helped organisations eliminate error-prone manual tasks and enforced consistent, trackable processes at considerably lower costs.

Rev-Trac has continued to evolve and meet the challenges that come with delivering SAP applications quickly and reliably as SAP adoption increases globally. 

RSC is also known for its other solutions CodeSafe Solutions and BrilliantFIT.

The post Rev-Trac Platinum for a Faster, Safer SAP Change appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

Download this comprehensive whitepaper – Managing an S/4HANA migration with Rev-Trac – to discover:

• Why automating your SAP change management processes is crucial
• How Rev-Trac Platinum can help you to successfully manage dual SAP environments
• What key Rev-Trac Platinum features help to minimize unscheduled downtime

Run without interruption during your S/4HANA migration –

Download the report below.

By completing this form, you will be sending your details to RSC in accordance with their privacy policy

Summary of Rev-Trac 

A Revelation Software Concepts (RSC) technology that automates SAP change management processes to massively reduce the time, effort, and cost to deliver change. Automate SAP change management for faster, more frequent, and low-risk change and respond to business demands quickly. Rev-Trac Platinum eliminates error-prone manual SAP change processes and provides the control and governance to achieve agile, DevOps, and continuous delivery objectives.

This page is sponsored by RSC

The post Rev-Trac Platinum appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

Nintex Announces Partnership

Nintex, the global standard for process management and automation, announces a strategic partnership with Adobe to bring new native electronic signature capabilities, called Nintex Sign powered by Adobe Sign, to Nintex partners and customers.

Nintex Sign powered by Adobe Sign, the leading e-signature solution used by over half the Fortune 100, meets the growing worldwide demand of Nintex customers and partners for affordably priced, trusted and fully integrated e-signatures within the Nintex Process Platform to securely complete transactions. Thousands of partners, public, private, and government organisations leverage the powerful, easy-to-use Nintex platform daily to quickly build process apps, automate their most sophisticated workflows, and generate all kinds of documents from disclosures, to orders, to closing contracts leveraging responsive Nintex digital forms and templates.

Reactions from Senior Leadership

“The new offering produced by this partnership powerfully extends the native capabilities of our Nintex Platform, trusted as the global standard for process and document automation, to now include industry-leading Adobe-backed eSignatures,” said Nintex CEO Eric Johnson. “Nintex Sign, powered by our strategic partnership with Adobe, will bring tremendous value to our thriving Nintex process management and automation community.”

Ashley Still, Vice President and General Manager, Adobe Document Cloud, added, “We believe great experiences for customers and employees start where the document does. With Nintex Sign powered by Adobe Sign, we’re excited to bring these two best-in-class solutions together, making it easier for Nintex’s global partner network and customers to transform digital document workflows.”

Aragon Research CEO Jim Lundy commented, “This strategic partnership brings together two of the leading providers in Documents, eSignatures, Process Management, Workflow and Content Automation.”

To learn more about Nintex Sign powered by Adobe Sign, click here.

Product or service names mentioned herein may be the trademarks of their respective owners.

The post Nintex Announces Nintex Sign Powered by Adobe Sign appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

Through the strategic partnership, Wipro will offer Dallas-based Trintech’s portfolio of financial solutions to its clients worldwide. Solutions include high-volume transaction matching, balance sheet and intercompany reconciliations, journal entries, financial close task management, disclosure and fiduciary reporting, and compliance management.

Wipro will complement Trintech’s portfolio by providing its own AI and automation platform, HOLMES, to extend the footprint of Trintech’s enterprise-class Risk Intelligent Robotic Process Automation financial solution. Wipro will also plan and deliver world-class financial transformation, while providing integration services and post-implementation support.

“The demand for record to report technology solutions continues to grow as finance organisations around the world seek to increase not only the efficiency, but also the effectiveness of their overall financial close processes,” said Robert Michlewicz, chief revenue officer, Trintech.

“Wipro’s deep advisory expertise in finance and IT transformation makes them a perfect partner to deliver successful digital transformations for finance functions, using Trintech’s portfolio of solutions.”

Trintech’s Cadency solution provides financial executives with a financial governance solution that weaves all R2R activities into a single, seamless process, delivering an effective and efficient financial close cycle that minimises risk and costs, maximises resource utilisation, and gives stakeholders full visibility into the close cycle at all times.

“We are confident that organisations committed to digitally enabling their financial processes will benefit immensely from the combination of Trintech’s financial solutions portfolio and Wipro’s expertise in helping businesses simplify and automate their processes,” said Phil Dunmore, vice president and global head of consulting, Wipro Limited.

The post Trintech and Wipro partner to automate enterprise finance functions appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

If you have a credit card, you probably don’t question whether or not you have to pay your bill. Or you know not paying will inevitably result in late fees, incessant phone calls from your credit card company’s swarms of collections agents and bad marks on your credit report. This, in turn, could lead to possible feelings of regret about splashing out on that carbon fibre road bike you haven’t actually ridden yet but that looks cool propped up in your garage.

Now it’s just you and your carbon fibre bicycle against THEM. All of them.

Suppliers also offer credit arrangements to the businesses that order from them. But in the business world, the balance is often flipped from that of a consumer/creditor. The supplier is always “the little guy”. In this scenario, they’re the ones who have extended the credit and are asking to be paid. And they run the risk of losing accounts if they push too hard.

For them, optimising working capital and receiving timely payments is key. But it’s so much more painful than just sending a late notice or sticking a credit collector on a delinquent account.

Back-breaking payment practices in the spotlight

Receiving timely payments means suppliers can meet critical business commitments, particularly in busy periods, when taxes, salaries, bonuses and more must be paid – sometimes all at once. Late payments often push them into funding working capital through overdrafts or loan facilities. These means are expensive, and, if you’re a small business or one that’s trying to expand and grow without over-trading, they can be crippling.

But the negative effects of late payments don’t stop there. Small- to medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are the backbone of world economies. That’s why it’s surprising that governments have just recently begun to spotlight this problem and look for solutions.

According to an article from The Guardian, “A staggering £26bn is owed by larger businesses to small firms in the private sector. Late payments cause 50,000 businesses to go bust every year, at an annual cost to the economy of roughly £2.5bn.” This economic drain is what spurred the UK government to back The Prompt Payment Code, an effort to set payment practice standards to protect SMBs and create a cultural shift in business norms. Businesses make a voluntary commitment to pay according to the terms set in the code.

The US took a different route in its efforts to stem the ill effects of late payments to SMBs that feed the economy. According to the US Small Business Administration (SMA), “the 28 million small businesses in America account for 54 per cent of all US sales.” Under the Obama administration, the federal government required large businesses with government procurement contracts to pay small suppliers within 10 days, says The Guardian. It also leveraged the SMA to “promote prompt payment through the federal procurement supply chain”.

Similar to the UK’s efforts, the Australian state of Victoria has recently introduced ‘The Victorian Fair Payment Code’, which asks businesses to pledge that they’ll pay suppliers within 30 days. An article from Fast Company notes that the initiative, which takes effect on July 1, 2017, has the potential to become mandatory “for all businesses in the state if the government does not see an improvement on the times it takes to clear invoices”.

For a few, late payments pay off

But the US didn’t seem to create any lasting change amongst the largest corporations with its efforts. Bloomberg View Columnist Justin Fox covered the topic of late payments in a May, 2017 article. “Only 10.8 per cent of publicly traded corporations in the US pay suppliers on time or early, according to new data from Dun & Bradstreet,” writes Fox. “If almost everybody in your peer group is delinquent, there’s unlikely to be much of a stigma attached to delinquency.”

The reason for this widespread bad behavior? According to Dun & Bradstreet insights quoted in Fox’s article, late-paying corporations have higher stock returns than those who pay on time. If the goal is to make a lot of money, and large companies are rewarded with more of it for being delinquent … well, you see the problem.

But paying late doesn’t always work out in the business’s best interest. Example: this Silicon Valley tech firm is the subject of a $10 million dollar lawsuit. Of course, most suppliers in the SMB space don’t have the funds to pay the legal fees associated with suing a huge company for non-payment.

One compelling argument for more ethical treatment of the supply chain revolves around choice. Say a large company has an account with a supplier to order a large amount of goods, amounting to tens of thousands of dollars. If that company withholds payment for the goods they’ve ordered, they put the supplier in the position of not being able to pay their suppliers.

As a result, the entire supply chain suffers. If this happens over and over again, businesses fail. In the end, big firms have less choice available within the market, and they end up paying higher prices.

It takes more than good intentions

While there are many big businesses that fit in with the crowd above, there are still many more of all sizes that want to pay their bills on time but are challenged by invoice processing complexity. With growing invoice volumes come greater numbers of exceptions, and when manual processing is still part of the equation, errors and lost documentation follow closely behind.

Lacking the right technology, many companies simply cannot get their payments submitted fast enough. And they lose out on early payment discounts offered by suppliers who hope to incentivise companies to pay faster.

The average number of days it takes for companies that “run the gamut of AP performance in 2017” to process a single invoice is 10.3 days, according to a report from Ardent Partners. The best-in-class make up the top 20 per cent of these AP departments and have a cycle time that averages out to 3.5 days.

Eighty-eight per cent of these top AP performers have standardised their processes across their organisations. “Adoption of technology is another area where the best-in-class clearly differentiate themselves from the rest of the market,” explains the report. Advanced automation technologies that integrate with ERP systems, including capture, workflow and RPA solutions, don’t just help companies achieve shorter cycle times and major cost savings. They allow them to make continuous performance improvements a way of life.

But companies face pressure to pay many different entities, including governments. For some, choosing to pay a supplier may mean not complying with tax laws. A recent many different entities, including governments. For some, choosing to pay a supplier may mean not complying with tax laws. A recent article from Forbes discusses tax evasion charges brought against the CFO of Soupman, Inc., the restaurant chain that inspired Seinfeld’s famous Soup Nazi episode on the television series.

While it’s not clear in this case whether Soupman CFO, Robert N. Bertrand, paid suppliers instead of taxes, the article makes an important point: “Any failure to pay – even late payment – is serious, regardless of how or why the employer or its principals use the money. Using the money to pay suppliers and keep the business open isn’t a good reason in the IRS view.”

E-invoicing is one technology that’s helping companies increase the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of their invoice management while also creating transparency into documentation and audit trails to ensure regulatory compliance. Though it hasn’t completely caught on in the United States, countries in Europe, Latin America and Asia Pacific are using e-invoicing to successfully streamline and standardise the sending and receiving of invoices.

The tide is shifting

In today’s uncertain business environment, more and more governments are shining the watch light on the fact that SMBs are the backbone of their economies. And backing measures to encourage more ethical payments is certainly a first step in a giving visibility to this widespread crisis.

But real change will come from organisations that believe in the potential of technology to begin a transformation that encourages both profit and ethical practices – one that ripples out from accounts payable to purchase-to-pay to end-to-end financial operations to the company as a whole and then infinitely outwards in the supply chain.

The benefits of operating ethically towards your suppliers are real. Trust, better relationships and the certainty of order delivery and fulfilment will be new sustaining forces for companies of all sizes that choose to be part of the payment practice sea change that is already starting to take place.

If you’re interested in how technology can boost your company’s ability to shorten payment cycles and optimise processes, download our P2P automation whitepaper.

This article is sponsored by Kofax. KK Tung is director, FPA Solutions. KK Tung has close to 30 years of extensive experience in project management, business consultancy, and sales in the region. For the past 10 years, KK has focused on the delivery of Financial Process Automation solutions; helping many large enterprises achieve desired business goals through automation.

The post To pay or not to pay: why it shouldn’t be a question appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

Leading accounting and finance organisations are transitioning into a more analytical function and partnership role by building their business plan around three pillars: Close Process Transformation, Process Automation Transformation, and Integrity and Risk Transformation.

Executing each one of these pillars is vital to maximising the reduction in transactional processing in accounting, which Accenture predicts can be reduced by 40 per cent – with the right combination of people, process, and technology (1).

Close Process Transformation

Too often, the close process is run by gut, instinct, and collective knowledge, versus a defined, centralised, and orchestrated workflow and process. With so many people involved and mounds of spreadsheets constantly accumulating, roughly defined processes are often different, from geography to subsidiary. Collaboration remains stubbornly stuck in email and conference calls, with limited visibility into the process.

When you take a look inside top performing organisations, it’s immediately evident that they do things differently – and it’s time to take a page from their playbook.

The key to their success is clarity. Each stakeholder in their organisation has a clear perspective of what must happen at each step, when it must happen, and what it depends on. They’ve created a clear set of roles and responsibilities and have management-level reports that give visibility into the global close calendar.

Milestone tasks are in place to guarantee the correct sequence, flow, and rollup of related activities. Automatic notifications are set to warn stakeholders of pending tasks and to give management a heads-up of overdue tasks and bottlenecks. And a set of internal controls is established to reduce material risk while eliminating unnecessary controls that stand in the way of a fast close.

As a result, they can close and report, on average, twice as fast as their peer group.

Process Automation Transformation

It’s no secret that manual tasks drain accounting and finance efficiency, and those tasks continue to top most accounting surveys as the biggest challenge to achieving a lean close.  The issue often causes associated frustrations among accountants ― frequently the most talented ones who aren’t using their skills appropriately, and are instead performing repetitive work.

Typically, accounting organisations have significant manual overhead in several areas. This includes the operational areas of accounting, such as billing and collections and accounts receivable, and within the close and general accounting areas, such as journal entries, account and transactional reconciliations, and intercompany transactions.

Best-in-class organisations are, however, substantially leaner than their peers and able to reallocate their costs towards strategy. A key enabler for them is leveraging process automation at various levels within the accounting team.

Indeed, the Continuous Accounting model takes a process-first approach. By making more efficient and productive use of accountants’ time and valued work, CFOs, Controllers, Internal Audit and the accountants themselves are better able to achieve the company’s strategic objectives at less cost, with the added bonus of more meaningful work.

Integrity and Risk Transformation

Creating trust and continually keeping pace to minimise reporting, regulatory and strategic risk  the final pillar of finance transformation. Through strong automation, organisations can achieve better integrity, both in their balance sheets and in their controls. And those that invest accordingly have significantly more accurate financial reports and less resources devoted to trying to root out errors in the balance sheet.

While task management and automation improve speed and efficiency, data integrity perhaps provides the largest benefit, avoiding the organisational and professional exposure from an inaccurate filing or restatement.

Automation can also highlight transactions and balances that exceed control thresholds, while ensuring all reports can be reconciled back to the original data. Reconciliations, journal management, and revenue processes, like revenue recognition, can also be upgraded to become rule-based and as consistent as possible, backed by a strong record of corrections or adjustments and post-audit review processes.

The Foundation for Finance Transformation

Successfully navigating the path to finance transformation is dependent on building all three of these pillars, and your organisation can only be as strong as the weakest one.

First, optimise your processes to reduce risk, improve accuracy, and increase efficiency in a way that benefits the entire accounting and finance function. Then, establish a solid foundation for each by investing in the right technology that will result in the biggest boost of overall productivity. Finally, through automation, free your people to be more productive and help guide the business through planning, strategy, and analysis.

[i]Accenture: http://ww2.cfo.com/analytics/2015/10/death-digital-good-bye-finance-know/

Ann Furlong is APAC director at financial automation software provider, BlackLine. This article is sponsored by BlackLine.

The post The three pillars of finance transformation appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

As a visionary leader in finance or shared services, you’re committed to continuous improvement, driving best practices, and digitally transforming internal processes with innovative technology.

If your organization has engaged in an accounts payable automation project, congratulations! AP automation is often the first opportunity that companies identify for process automation in SAP. It’s the low-hanging fruit, delivering a rapid return on investment and solving painful points in manual processes like invoice receiving, information matching, and exceptions and delays in processing.

Going beyond the low-hanging fruit

AP automation is an easy starting point that immediately adds direct value to your SAP system and has indirect effects like happier staff (freed from rote, manual, mind-numbing tasks to do more meaningful work) and reduced errors that help protect against compliance issues.

But AP automation is just the first step in harnessing maximum value from your SAP system. Going beyond a point solution to automate the bulk of your ERP-related processes has major rewards, driving what Ardent Partners calls a “sizable performance advantage” for best-in-class enterprises. Not only can you capitalize on a single point of entry solution for all financial processes, but automating upstream and downstream from AP creates a holistic continuous improvement revolution throughout the financial cycle.

9 essential areas to automate in financial processes

Financial processes flow through vendors and suppliers to and from your company, and through clients and customers to and from your company. Throughout these workflows, process automation will result in significant productivity and ROI gains. Here are eight areas beyond AP you should consider automating next:

1. Procurement and purchase requisition: How much of your organization’s purchasing is contracted? Experts estimate that 30-45 percent of indirect purchasing is not contracted, which results in much higher prices—around 35 percent—than contracted prices. Automating purchase requisition processing not only simplifies the process for those purchases currently being made under contract, but it can also improve user adoption and compliance to reduce those expensive non-contracted purchases.
2. Order confirmations: This manual process usually takes place in the procurement department, where an incoming order confirmation indicates that the P.O. will be filled as requested. Later, the delivery note is manually compared to the purchase order and variances entered as credit notes into SAP, then manually approved. With automation, the order confirmation is automatically captured and matched against the PO and existing master data in SAP. Only confirmations with discrepancies are flagged for manual approval, and both automated and manually approved order confirmations have a complete audit trail.
3. Delivery note processing: Like order confirmations, delivery notes, which arrive with shipments, are matched against purchase orders and used to create a goods receipt note (GRN). Imagine if you could digitally capture the delivery note information, transfer it to SAP and automatically compare with the warehouse delivery. Discrepancy? No problem. Workflows for resolution are automatically initiated before the GRN is posted.
4. Invoice processing: Matching vendor invoices against purchase orders is often an incredibly manual process. An Institute of Financial Operations study shows that about half of all invoices are still paper-based. Automating the capture, extraction, matching and verification process of invoices—even paper-based—against the PO, master data and goods received information in SAP could save up to 80 percent in processing costs.
5. Payment approval: In a manual process, invoices are typically gathered in a document and circulated for approval. Information from this approval process is manually transferred to the payment proposal, then executed as a payment run in SAP. With automation, a workflow notifies approvers, then automatically transfers the information to the payment proposal. A history of the entire process is stored within SAP.
6. Sales order processing: Within the order-to-cash cycle, the manual nature of sales order processing can create big risks for transcription errors. In an automated process, orders are automatically captured, regardless of format, and information such as stock availability, pricing, discounts and master data is checked and validated against SAP data. Discrepancies are moved into an automated workflow for resolution, and validated data is transferred to create a sales order and an order confirmation for the customer.
7. Payment advice / remittance advice: Manually keying each invoice from the remittance advice into SAP is a time-consuming, labor-intensive process that results in high amounts of unallocated cash left on account, waiting to be posted to the appropriate invoice. With automation, the conversion of receivables to cash is more efficient, with automated data matched line by line in order to clear open invoices quickly and update the accounts receivable ledger daily.
8. Master data management: Maintaining accurate master data records for vendors, customers, general ledger accounts, cost centers and profit centers is critical for continuous process improvement and customer satisfaction. Automating a master data management workflow for collecting and approving change requests not only makes the process simpler, but improves records accuracy and the downstream effect of starting with the right information.
9. Financial close: At the end of each month, quarter, and year, accounting and finance teams must complete hundreds or even thousands of simple tasks that require a high level of manual interaction. Those error-prone and time-consuming reconciliation tasks can be automated with robotic process automation, a digital robotic workforce that can perform administrative work essential for financial reporting in less time with no mistakes, freeing your staff to perform the higher-value work of interpreting financial results.

How will your organization go beyond AP automation? Learn more about essential areas to automate in ‘The Outperformer’s Guide to Total Financial Process Domination: Automating P2P Processes and beyond in SAP.’ Download your copy now.

KK Tung is director, FPA Solutions. KK Tung has close to 30 years of extensive experience in project management, business consultancy, and sales in the region. For the past 10 years, KK has focused on the delivery of Financial Process Automation solutions; helping many large enterprises achieve desired business goals through automation. This article is sponsored by Kofax.

The post AP automation: Check. What’s next for SAP AP leaders? appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.

If you’ve ever visited a large candy production facility like Mars or Hershey’s, you can appreciate more than just the chocolaty scent and taste. It’s an incredible experience to watch millions of candy bars being made, coated, wrapped, packed, stacked and shipped. The process is automated, scalable and transparent with integrated quality control. Employees spot-check, but don’t pack boxes; they operate machines, but don’t hand-dip candy bars.

Now compare those highly optimized candy factory operations to the current automation state of your finance operations.

It’s likely that some of your financial processes are automated. The Cognizant Center for the Future of Work estimates that organizations automate 25 to 40 percent of their workflow today. Perhaps you’ve automated accounts payable (AP) functions such as scanning invoices and routing information through an approval workflow, and integrating with your ERP.

With all the advances around automating invoice processing, sales orders, financial posting, payment approval, purchase requisition approval and more, one would think enterprises have these processes fully addressed with no manual work being performed. Unfortunately, that is not the case.

Many of our customers share stories about their investments in technologies like capture (OCR) and business process management. While their investments have achieved great success with automating core financial operations, they still struggle closing the last remaining gaps.

Every business will have some automation gaps in their financial processes. I have yet to meet a customer who says “We have all of our financial processes automated.” Employees may be logging into many different portals for access to customer and supplier information or to upload documents. Sales orders and quotes may be mostly automated, but often still require human intervention with third-party systems to configure, price and validate sales order information.

There are three basic options for dealing with highly manual processes that can’t be automated with traditional financial process automation solutions:

1. Increase staff, whether in-house, outsource or offshore
2. Invest in custom development to work around your legacy ERP technology
3. Deploy robotic process automation (RPA) to bridge your automation gaps

How top companies achieve financial operations automation

An Ardent Partners report on The State of ePayables 2017 observed that “Best-in-class businesses are 2.6 times more likely than others to harness the power of robotic process automation as part of their greater AP strategy and programs.”

Here are 6 reasons RPA is the right choice for bridging those automation gaps.

1. Deploys ultra-fast

Custom integrations require a developer and often get prioritized to the bottom of the pile, leaving your employees to serve as “human APIs,” logging into several applications and portals to retrieve information to and from systems that are not integrated. An RPA solution that automates those integrations can be launched in days or weeks instead of months, in many cases without the need for a developer.

2. Interfaces with other systems

The heartbeat of your financial operations is your ERP, but much data resides outside in multiple, disparate internal and external sources. RPA complements your ERP by accessing that data and integrating it without requiring a re-engineering of proven processes.

3. Flexes and stretches with your organization

Whether you deploy RPA for a specific use case like retrieving invoices from portals or as an enterprise-wide initiative from your Center of Excellence, the technology is well-suited to fill in one or all of your financial process automation gaps.

4. Frees your employees from rote, manual work

Would your staff be happier and more productive logging into hundreds of portals to pull invoice information…or in reviewing that information and sending it out sooner to receive early pay discounts and transform AP into a value center within the company? Are they more productive copying and pasting Excel data into your ERP, or reviewing the financial close documents from a strategic viewpoint?

5. Works 24/7

With a workday that never ends, a digital workforce of robots can increase capacity and decrease processing times, which is critical in time-sensitive financial processes like quoting, order fulfillment and accounting close.

6. Eliminates human errors

A small cut-and-paste or accounting error can result in a disproportionate numbers scandal—not to mention a compliance nightmare. Automated technology eliminates human error and completes processes the same way, every time.

Bridge the gaps in your financial process automation with Complete the Productivity Picture in Finance: A Guide to Robotic Process Automation. Download your copy today.

KK Tung, director, FPA Solutions, has close to 30 years of extensive experience in project management, business consultancy, and sales in the region. For the past 10 years, KK has focused on the delivery of Financial Process Automation solutions; helping many large enterprises achieve desired business goals through automation.

The post The 6 ways RPA adds up for finance appeared first on InsideSAP Asia.