Finding the Right Automation Options for Finance Teams with Conexiom

Finance teams are under more pressure than ever in 2024. The global financial landscape is unpredictable and organizations need advanced solutions to keep pace with the rate of chance, deliver actionable insights, and maximize efficiency. Many SAP organizations are turning to automation solutions to help fill the gaps in their capabilities, but there is always a need for more. In SAPinsider’s recent SAP S/4HANA State of the Market 2024 benchmark research report, respondents said that insufficient automation leading to manual work and manual processes was one of the top drivers affecting their companies’ financial strategies.

Companies must find ways to infuse automation into their essential financial workflows. However, it is not a catch all solution to magically and immediately improve any issues. Finance departments must make strategic, targeted decisions on which types of automation to implement that make the most impact. This is often easier said than done.

Implementing Automation

To help companies understand their options, the finance automation experts at Conexiom highlighted some of the most common automation strategies that businesses utilize to cut down on manual work.

• Document Automation: Creating documents is one of the most important yet tedious processes companies have to deal with. Document automation platforms can create, format, and distribute documents much more quickly than a human, while also scanning for potential errors.
• Invoice Automation: Companies can automatically extract and verify data from invoices before placing the information into SAP or other systems. This not only streamlines the invoice-to-cash workflow, but also gives all parties to an agreement an end-to-end view of the process.
• Sales Order Automation: Similar to invoice automation, companies can automatically process sales orders. This option is ideal for organizations aiming to improve their customer experience, as automated sales orders typically offer a reduced cost per order and a lower rate of error.
• Vendor Order Acknowledgment Automation: Another way that companies can improve customer relations is to instantly create and send order acknowledgments to customers. This keeps them in the loop and quickens the order fulfillment process.
• Workflow Automation: Workflow automation is used when organizations have repetitive tasks that require if/then rules to complete.
• Robotic Process Automation (RPA): RPA is a wide-ranging solution that is designed to behave like humans. It can be trained to complete a multitude of different tasks automatically.
• Character and document processing: One of the most exciting emerging capabilities revolves around document recognition. Optical Character Recognition (OCR) uses AI to detect characters on paper document and convert them into electronic text. Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) takes things a step further to process documents on a large scale and integrate unstructured data.

What This Means for SAPinsiders

As companies look to streamline their workflows and improve productivity, organizations must find a partner that can evaluate their situation and help determine not only which types of automation can be the most impactful, but also develop strategies for implementation and long-term use. Many SAP organizations are turning to Conexiom because of its many automation options as well as its experience in deploying them for many different users across a multitude of situations.