The end of 2018 was a crazy time for travel and trade shows for the Artsyl team. While the holidays gave us all a few moments to catch up with friends and family, January kicked off again with a bang, leading with Acumatica Summit 19.
For those of you who attended the show and were overwhelmed by all the info and spectacle, or for those who couldn’t attend, we’ll pulled together our top takeaways.
Following up on our road trips with Acumatica to showcase Acumatica 2018 R2, Artsy was a proud sponsor of Acumatica Summit, in partnership with Fujitsu. Both events cemented some key these into our minds about where Acumatica partners and customers and looking as they head into the new year and close out the second decade of the new millennium
.“IPA” isn’t just a trendy beer. Robotic Process Automation (RPA) was hot and topical in 2017. Tools that can quickly and easily automate routine processes can generate huge cost savings and dramatically reduce wasted time and effort for the dullest of tasks. But without any intelligence applied to it, robots can only handle the most routine tasks, leaving exceptions to the humans.
While that thankfully leaves plenty for humans to do, it still leaves lots of thankless work. Which is why intelligent process automation has stolen the spotlight. By applying machine learning to routine tasks, process automation solutions can interact with human process owners and learn from them to adapt their algorithms and take on a broader range of tasks without any re-coding or reconfiguration.
IPA technologies like Artsyl’s docAlpha allow companies to get up to speed quickly to automate handling of documents like invoices or sales orders, along with extraction and validation of information from those documents. IPA allows companies to flag exceptions to processes like invoice coding and approval, route them to human operators and monitor/record their actions. As a result, process owners can teach robots to do more, rather than relying on programmers to rewrite their instructions.
AP Automation comes in many flavors. AP automation remains highly visible on exhibit hall floors, and the glut of options can be confusing to partners and customers alike. ERP vendors, document management vendors and BPO solution providers all put their own spin on their solutions. Often, solutions like Artsyl’s docAlpha happen to be working behind the scenes, handling document handling and data capture. Other solutions DON’T automate this critical component, leaving the manual labor to your staff, rather than to the robots. For prospective customers, it’s worth asking how these systems deal with document handling and data capture.
IPA isn’t Just for AP. While automation solutions for accounts payable and vendor invoices have matured and advanced significantly over the years, today they’re the tip of the iceberg in terms of the document-burdened processes companies have to deal with. That said, there is a surprising lack of out-of-the-box solutions for other processes like sales order automation and other back office processes. Even fewer vendors offer a single platform/, integrated with ERP and ECM systems, to deliver truly enterprise-wide innovation.
While many companies choose solutions that essentially outsource the labor and technology to handle AP invoices, they potentially miss out on the ability to kill two (or three or four) birds with one stone. Looking for a solution that can tackle the hardest part of any business process in a way that generates an ROI in less than a year and then can tackle other processes, is where the rubber really hits the road then it comes to process automation.
Integration is Getting Easier. Really. ERP partners and customers have come to accept maintaining integrations among their various systems as business as usual. Statistics show that the majority of legacy ERP system users stay on the same version for more than a decade—in part because it’s such a pain to deal with integrations. Today, new, more flexible integrations are available that, combined with cloud adoption, will lead users to the promised land of more flexible, stable and innovative platforms.
To explore how to automate and accelerate operations for your back office and throughout your enterprise, contact your Artsyl Technologies account executive.