Innovating Accounts payable? The mundane & repetitive steps were avoided for this FIRtech client
30,000 Travel Invoices per month – checked, verified and entered into SAP without lifting a finger…The Challenge
In 2019 our client (a major logistics provider) came to FIRtech with this challenge:
“We need 30,000 travel invoices we receive per month; checked as good or better than what the human clerks do today and we need them entered into SAP”.
As it turns out, the human clerks have much more value to add when they are not being used as PDF reading, keyboard entering machines… just copying values from invoices into SAP.
How Software Robots can help your Accounts Payable
Software Robots (Robotic Process Automation) or RPA for short is a software technology that can perform most repetitive, rule-based actions that humans can.
This includes reading thousands of PDFs (just like a human would) and entering the values into a system like SAP (just like a human would, however without any errors).
In addition, the software robots can (and don’t mind) checking for each and every value if the correct amount, General Ledger Account and reference was used.
What FIRtech did
We used the class-leading UiPath RPA software to train software robots on the process that humans are following today in loading values from PDF invoices into SAP.
In addition we could train the robots to perform even more checks and internal audit controls on each invoice as they work 24/7/365 and don’t mind the repetitive checks on each and every value
In less than two weeks we had an MVP running and in just 3 months we had a product that could be taken into production
The Result
With an RPA solution such as this taking care of the repetitive work, the human clerks just have to log into SAP, check all the loaded invoices and click approve.
This leaves the human employees with much more free time to perform things like advanced payment analytics and more time to really investigate anomalies and exceptions.
There is even to find areas of improvement or tighter controls in the Procure-to-Pay process