Build a Digital Enterprise and reduce technical debt in F&A operations with BPM

Businesses tend to expand through mergers and acquisitions so does the sprawl of their IT estate and the scope of the resulting swivel chair operations. The resultant operations on the sun setting, siloed systems also tend to increase the enterprise’s technical debt. This scenario also leads to an increase in the direct and indirect cost of operations or OpEx.

Enterprises usually have multiple legacy systems, which they cannot sunset due to different business obligations. In hindsight, they look at all those watershed moments, when they chose to invest in them without realizing that they are going to become obsolete sooner or later. If they look at their future investments through technology overhauls and upgrades, they face a similar dilemma of putting in hefty monies with no idea whatsoever of when the new systems will soon become legacy.

The changing business landscape and requirements mandate adopting different technologies and business paradigms. However, rest assured that once you onboard the Digital bandwagon, the whole process becomes simpler. With Digital, you can always leverage your existing IT investments and continue to co-exist with your digital-born counterparts.

 The top of the list Digital technologies also referred to sometimes as Business Process Management (BPM) software are:

1.       Robotic Process Automation (RPA)
2.       Intelligent Data Capture or Intelligent Optical Character Recognition (OCR)
3.       Workflow elements
4.       Embedded Analytics
5.       Artificial Intelligence (AI) / Machine Learning (ML) layer
6.       Mobility layer
7.       Integrated Payment Gateways

Let us see how these technologies pave your way towards a Digital enterprise. They make end-to-end automation of Accounts Payables (AP), Travel & Expenses (T&E), Accounts Receivables (AR), Order to Cash (O2C), Procure to Pay (P2P), and the overall Finance and Accounting Services (FAS) a business reality. These technologies synergize the FAS operations to offer you a Digital Capability Platform (DCP). The cost-efficient integration of these F&A operations, however, depends on the skill of the system integrator.

1.       RPA: It helps you to bridge the gap between multiple legacy and bespoke systems, enables you to collate and transport data between them as well as auto-validate and auto-match.
2.       Intelligent Data Capture: It enables you to go digital even in a predominantly paper-environment. It converts unstructured data on paper documents to digital that helps you to scale up the performance of RPA.
3.       Workflow elements: They impart agility to exception handling and electronic approvals and thus reduce cycle time and improve business productivity. They move beyond the surface level integration offered by RPA towards deep integration between all the legacy and bespoke systems.
4.       Embedded Analytics: It enables you to retrieve at-a-glance visual reports and helps you analyze cash flow statements, spends analytics, and accrual reports, anytime anywhere.
5.       AI/ML layer: It helps you with pattern detection and data mining. It helps you derive intelligence from multiple layers of structured and unstructured data with high precision. AI algorithms along with workflow elements enable you to expedite processes through continuous learning or machine learning.
6.       Mobility layer: It is developed using the Mobile Application Development Platform and helps to access and use existing business applications, anytime anywhere, on handheld devices.
7.       Integrated payment gateways: They help streamline F&A processes to make digital payment and receipt of monies a business reality.

The IT estate sprawls on as the business expands. However, moving towards a digital platform or more specifically DCP helps you to utilize your existing IT investments and yet compete with your digital-born counterparts. Next-generation technologies or BPM software, such as RPA, Intelligent OCR, AI/ML, Embedded Analytics, workflow, mobility, and integrated payment gateways, not only help you expedite processes and improve productivity but also scale up business operations by manifolds.