Digital Transformation and Accounts Payable:
A Stepping Stone to Innovation

Epicor-Sponsored Research Supports the Notion of AP Automation
as the Best Place to Start a Digital Revolution

When it comes to starting a revolution inside a mid-market company struggling to innovate and embrace change, a recent study sponsored by Epicor suggests that the best place to start may be one of the least sexy parts of the organizations—specifically, back office operations like accounts payable.

The report, researched and written by Levvel Research, is entitled “Tackling AP Automation with a Holistic Document Management Approach: The Scaling Company’s Guide to Using Enterprise Content Management (ECM) for Digital Transformation Success.” While the title doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue, the underlying research and content should be excited and encouraging for any executive inside a typical company trying to overcome internal inertia to innovate and transform their business.

Low Hanging Fruit for Automation and ROI

As the Levvel Research report suggests, back office processes like accounts payable vendor invoice handling poses a great candidates for digital transformation though automation. Automation for these processes can drive efficiency to deliver quick ROI, with a minimal implementation timeframe, providing a blueprint for the automation and transformation of other business processes, within finance or other departments.

According to Levvel Research, the gap between companies that relying on manual processes and those that have transformed their AP processes include:

  • Reduced invoice processing costs: Innovators have an average invoice processing cost of $2.36 compared to $15 for novices
  • Reduced cycle times: Innovators require only 5 days to process an invoice, compared to 45 days for novices
  • Early pay discount capture: Innovators achieve early payment discounts on 75% of invoices compared to just 18% for novices

Those kinds of results make it easy to sell the business case and secure budgets for AP automation based solely on cost savings and ROI. But the REAL value and long term pay-off comes from the potential to deliver more timely data to better manage cash, cut costs and grow revenues. THOSE benefits translate to other processes and other departments that can take their cue from accounts payable.

Solving for Common Process Pain Points with Intelligent Data Capture

According to Levvel Research’s findings, based on a survey of North American companies with companies with $2B-$100B in annual revenue, the main AP process pain points are manual data entry, inefficient processes, and a mixed bag of invoice types including both paper and digital files.

By integrating the capability to intelligently and automatically extract data from digitized paper and native digital documents with the routing and process monitoring capabilities of an enterprise content management system in a way that streamlines document handling and eliminates manual data entry, companies can achieve a quick process win that demonstrates the real world benefits from digital transformation.

Artsyl’s docAlpha transformation platform delivers exactly those capabilities—and with out-of-thebox integration for most leading cloud and on-premise enterprise content management systems—can transform existing ECM’s into the engines of business transformation, or justify the investment in complete solution to fully digitize and automate back office processes.

Put Your Vision Into Action

The reality for today’s finance executive is that focusing on the future can be achieved quickly and cost-effectively by automating and streamlining how their teams manage the day to day.

To get started, visit the Artsyl Web site for more information and resources, then contact your Artsyl solution representative to begin transforming your vision into a plan for action.

www.artsyltech.com/resources/

To download the Levvel Research report, go to: www.docstar.com/tackling-ap-automation-white-paper

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