In a recent article on Live Mint, Jaspreet Bindra discussed the Ten Commandments of Digital Transformation that can help companies to shortcut a “long, painful and convoluted” path to embrace use of technology to radically improve the performance or reach of their business. While 90% of the Commandments are focused on the customer-facing aspects of digital transformation, Commandment #4 struck home for clients of Artsyl Technologies: “Make the Front End and Back End Talk.”
As Bindra explains, “[Back office integration] is the ‘uncool’ part of the equation, the most common point of failure of your digital story. It is also where most hard work has to happen. While digital is not IT, IT is the backbone of all digital execution.”
How critical is obeying this commandment for companies seeking to remain competitive in a digital age?
Two years ago, Gartner predicted that by 2017, 20% of all market leaders would lose their number one position to a company founded after the year 2000 because of a lack of digital business advantage.
Take companies like Airbnb as an example. In late 2015, Airbnb had 1.5 million rooms available for rent. Soon, Airbnb will have more rooms than the three largest hotel chains combined, without the overhead of maintaining those facilities. While it is the customer experience that makes Airbnb’s business model possible, it is no secret that back-end processes to support coordinating millions of reservations and transactions among renters and homeowners needs to be flawless.
Accounts Payable and the Back Office Digital Revolution
For most organizations, maintaining strong relationships with customers and suppliers and maximizing the efficiency of back-end operations like accounts payable remains an untapped source of innovation and competitive advantage.
In many cases, companies today already have the right systems in place to support the kinds of business models described by Gartner. What’s often missing is the ‘connective tissue’ to turn existing enterprise resource systems (ERPs) and Enterprise Content Management Systems (ECMs) into the engines of a business revolution.
Smart Process Automation Platforms, like Artsyl’s docAlpha, integrate with existing back end business systems to transform the unstructured data in documents stored in ECM systems into structured data that can be stored and managed in ERP systems — automatically, with minimal human intervention.
For AP staff members, this translates into the elimination of routine tasks like invoice/order matching, manual approval routing and G/L coding, transaction data entry and document filing. For executives, it means that data and documents are transformed into information instantly, resulting in greater visibility to critical business KPIs, including cash flow. For customers, this can translate into greater responsiveness and better service at a lower cost.
For explore how Smart Process Applications and Business Process Transformation can help automate and accelerate operations for your organization, contact your Artsyl Technologies representative.