RPA & AI IN THE CLOUD - THE LATEST IN AS-A-SERVICE SOLUTIONS FOR FINANCE
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Joint webinar in partnership with Fujitsu, looking at the latest product offering from ITESOFT, Capture-as-a-Service (CaaS). Considering not just what the product offers, but why it has been created. The pains and challenges that it can overcome.
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RPA & AI IN THE CLOUD - THE LATEST IN AS-A-SERVICE SOLUTIONS FOR FINANCE
- 1. RPA AND AI IN THE CLOUD; THE LATEST IN AS-A- SERVICE SOLUTIONS FOR FINANCE With John Stovold, Marketing Manager @ ITESOFT UK & Andrew Cowling, Channel Marketing @ FUJITSU 13th September 2018 1
- 2. AGENDA 2 09.30 Who is ITESOFT? The technology behind the buzzwords Leveraging these technologies for Finance Testimonial, Q&A10.00 Driving Invoice Data Extraction - Capture-as-a-Service (CaaS)
- 3. 3 THE KEY NUMBERS Founded 1984 Solutions utilised in 35countries 25,8 Million turnover in 2017 650 Clients = 1million documents processed per year 211 Employees in UK, US, France, Germany, Canada 80 % Coverage of the European market Listed on comp. C Of Euronext PARIS Autoglass, Polyone, Network Rail Capgemini, EDF, Crest Nicholson, AAH, Canal & River Trust, McCarthy & Stone, Société Générale, Mitsubishi Electric, Pepsico, Jaguar Land Rover, Valeo… CA invested in R&D 17 % Australia, Benelux, Brazil, Switzerland & North Africa
- 4. WHY? 4 Is there more than just hype when it comes to technologies such as RPA, AI, Machine Learning, Big Data and Analytics? Yes. The reality is that these technologies can make a difference to our businesses. Technology is helping, not just with the effective management of supplier invoices, but also with mitigating against loss and fraud.
- 5. 5 NEW TECHNOLOGIES BEHIND THE BUZZWORDS
- 6. 6 • No infrastructure management • Agility • Elasticity • Low entry barrier for disruptive technology • Pay as you Go • New services related to mutualisation CLOUD TECHNOLOGIES
- 7. ROBOTIC PROCESS AUTOMATION (RPA) 7 • Low value-added tasks • Digitalisation is a requirement • Technology – BPMS (Business Process Management Suite)) – BRMS (Business Rules) – API (web services) – RPA/RDA (Robotic Process Automation) • Use cases – Mail attachments – Amounts controls – Invoice/order/receipt processing
- 8. 8 • Machine Learning / Symbolic Learning • Statistical Learning • Deep Learning • Most common use cases? – Character recognition – Document recognition and splitting – Automatic reading of documents – Assignment of tasks (invoice approval) – Fraud detection – Voice recognition (portals) ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE (AI)
- 9. 9 HOW DO THESE NEW TECHNOLOGIES FIT INTO FINANCE?
- 10. 10 • On-premise highly configurable solutions – Heavy integration and setup projects and costs – Require external & internal technical resources to obtain decent reading rates. – Heavy costs on time and resources for migration to latest versions. • Packaged cloud solutions – Standardised, unflexible, workflows – Relatively low reading rates at early stages – Limited functionality – Low quality dashboards with a lack of customisation capability LIMITATIONS OF EXISTING PLATFORMS
- 11. WHY STREAMLINE FOR INVOICES ? 11 Performance management Speed & cost reduction Reading performance Functional wealth - & BPM
- 12. 12 DRIVING INVOICE DATA EXTRACTION - CAAS
- 13. 13 DATA EXTRACTION PERFORMANCE CAAS Extraction Performance • Data quality • Processing time Ease of use (Data entry, ADR engine settings, Data correction) OCR/ADR (CLOUD) OCR/ADR (ON-PREM) MANUAL INPUT HIGH MEDIUM LOW LOW MEDIUM HIGH
- 14. 14 CAPTURE AS A SERVICE (CAAS) • Managed service for real-time invoice reading in the cloud Supplier Identification – Based on a complete and quality controlled, mutualised supplier repository – Fuzzy logic New approach to extracting invoice data – No memorization by geographical location! – Knowledge base valid for ALL invoices • Supervision and optimization of automatic reading engines by our teams of experts • The best read rates without any setup effort AI DRIVEN INVOICE CAPTURE
- 15. 15 FURTHER INFORMATION 15 Capture-as-a-Service (CaaS) for Processing Supplier Invoices
- 16. 16 ITESOFT CLIENT - POLYONE GLOBAL PROJECT FOR AP AUTOMATION
- 17. 17 – ISSUE • Optimise business processes: • On a global scale • In a multi-IS context • Minimise deployment times per country (worldwide planning: 5 months) – PROJECT SCOPE • 90,000 invoices per year • France, Belgium, Luxembourg, Germany, Spain, Italy, Canada, USA… • Purchasing: Ariba • ERP: SAP POLYONE
- 18. 18 We now have absolute security and accessibility to financial data on a group-wide international scale. Daniel Fargeaudou International Finance Controller – SOLUTION • 1 singe SAP server, 1 single Ariba server and 1 ITESOFT database for all countries: based in the USA • Thick client for capturing invoices in each country • Automatic detection of SAP and Ariba workflows based on order number • Graphical editing in Web mode from each decentralised site • 100% of all workflows in ITESOFT – BENEFITS • Roll-out: 1 week/country • End-to-end traceability • Reduce supplier processing costs • Absorption of peaks in accounting activity with unchanged staffing levels POLYONE
- 19. 19 QUESTIONS?
- 20. 20 THANK YOU.
Editor's Notes
- Good Morning everyone, and thank you for joining us today. Firstly, thank you to our partners Fujistu for the warm welcome and introduction, and for putting this webinar together. As you can see, we have about half an hour this morning, and there is a lot to get through. So let’s get started.
- For those of you who do not know who ITESOFT is, the following are some of our key numbers..
- Why are we all here today? Well, of course, for you to learn more about ITESOFT, but why? In short, ours is a market place that is evolving and growing at a rate previously unheard of. With this comes a raft of new technologies, challenges, benefits etc. What ITESOFT finds is important, is that we need to balance these new technologies. Of course, RPA, big data, analytics etc. are now pretty well established, in some form or another. AI, machine learning, fuzzy logic perhaps not so much. These technologies are in the marketplace, so how can we ensure that our clients and partners are able to gain all of the advantages they are seeking, future proof themselves and understand what is really possible at this moment in time?
- Before giving you ITESOFTs answer to these new technologies, a few slides just to highlight two or three of them in a little more depth.
- So let us start with the oldest of the “new” technologies we will look at. Cloud based solutions have been readily available now for a number of years. In most cases, concerns around data control, and associated risk have been alleviated. This has been helped significantly by the influx of big brands into this market place, just consider the likes of SAP and their SAP Hana ERP. The cloud as a platform really should be a no brainer for most organisations today. The enormous cost reductions associated with moving software solutions onto a cloud platform alone make this a very enticing route for organisations to take. Reduction in time to implement solutions, no need for costly upgrades, reduction in internal server requirements, reduction in time and cost impact to internal IT teams all adds up to make this a highly valuable proposition. Another enormous benefit is that cloud based platforms are lowering the bar for entry into automation. Where before, all of the associated costs of automation meant that SME’s would struggle to build a business case, cloud based platforms have made this significantly easier.
- Next up is RPA, again., this is not something that is particularly new in our industry. The very purpose of automating invoice processing is applying the concepts of RPA to a process that is, by its very definition, repetitive and low value. What we are seeing is that the term RPA has become far more widespread, and better understood over the last few years. Where the key focus of automation was previously focused around terms such as OCR, now these are seen as a means to an end. The end result, freeing up time for teams to deliver on more value added tasks by allowing software to manage the mundane. RPA alone is of enormous benefit to organisations, it does not only apply to processes such as the keying of invoice data, but can be utilised across an organisation. Classification of documents, Mailroom processing, Production, Etc. Even in construction we are seeing the use of machines and software to reduce manual burden, and low value add tasks. There are countless videos on social platforms of machines laying bricks, pathways and roads without any more than human oversight. Robotic Process Automation is becoming more and more mainstream, with more and more use cases that could be quoted on an almost daily basis.
- AI is already having an impact on our lives, from our smartphones to Alexa and Siri. In business, the field of Machine Learning is already delivering enormous benefit, BUT what we need to remember is that a lot of what we see on news channels is actually built around symbolic learning, and this field is arguably still closer to science fiction than real world use. From Machine Learning we have two distinct fields, Statistical Learning and Deep Learning. Both of these are leveraging data to drive improvements. Where AI is starting to really come into play is allowing machines to have flexibility in their approach to simple tasks, for example, workflow of documents for approval or management. Machines are able to build rules based on data far more quickly than humans can. They can make their calculations based on vast amounts of data in relatively short amounts of time. Although Symbolic Learning is not yet having an impact for most businesses, we have all seen the strides being made in this area by the likes of Google with the latest Google assistant making reservations. David Cearley, VP at Gartner has said that enterprises should focus on business results enabled by applications that exploit narrow AI technologies (using Machine Learning) and leave general AI (Symbolic Learning) to the researchers and science fiction writers. Certainly, as AI currently stands, this would be a very sensible way to view this very exciting technology.
- ITESOFT started, like most software organisations, with a highly customisable, on premise, software solution. The benefits of these solutions were undeniable, however the sheer scale of the projects, and associated costs, often stopped organisations before they even started. Over time, and with the advent of cloud technology, there has been a significant shift towards more standard solution offerings, consider Facebook, Amazon, LinkedIn, Netflix etc. Sure, you can add an image, or change a piece of text, but fundamentally every single one of us logs into a service that is identical. The same was true of software solutions for organisations. CRM’s and ERPs in the cloud offered limited amounts of customisation. With this in mind, ITESOFT decided to break the mould, offering the benefits of the cloud, but with the knowledge and customisation of an on-premise software offering.
- And so we come to Streamline for Invoices. What were the biggest drivers for this solution? As you can see on your screen, these can be neatly summed up in 4 key areas. Speed & cost reduction. How could we provide a solution that had considerably faster implementation times, and subsequently started reducing the cost to organisations? By making use of cloud technology, we are able to provide a fully working solution, that will handle the vast majority of supplier invoices, in a matter of days, not weeks. 2. Reading performance. Our solutions have always cited some of the best reading rates available in our market place. What was important is that we could deliver this to customers, whilst adhering to rule 1. In order to this we needed to create a solution that already knew what information it was looking at, and would continue to learn with every new document and key stroke it came across. 3. Functions wealth. ITESOFT’s solutions for workflow and document management were multi award winning. Building on our experience of delivering these tools, and with the development of a PBM platform, we are able to offer our clients not only best in class workflow processes in the cloud, but the flexibility for our clients to make these work for them. Not the other way around! 4. Finally, performance management. We are in an age of “big data” where the capture of information is now vital to organisational success. What is just as important to us and our clients, is that they are able to easily see all of this information and make use of it to drive benefit for their business. Using the latest DataViz tools we are able to do just that. Two final points to mention on this product Firstly, one of our key drivers during development was to provide a solution that would make use of historic investments made by our clients, as such we have both Synchronous and Asynchronous connectors to virtually all ERP’s available on the market, and, Secondly, and as important for our clients in many instances, in order to ensure platform security and stability it is hosted on the Microsoft Azure cloud platform.
- Let's take a moment to discuss the topic of extracting invoice data from an image. Businesses still receive a large proportion of paper-based invoices that they will scan to obtain an image. This proportion can vary between 50 and 80% despite pushes towards e-invoicing. If the rest of the invoices are transmitted in electronic format, a large proportion also remains transmitted in an image format, a PDF or similar.
- What we have here, ladies and gents, is a nice easy way for us to view how invoice data extraction has changed over the years. On the left, the vertical axis, we have extraction performance, the quality of the data that is being fed into an ERP for example. This is often the key objective, highest quality data. On the bottom, the horizontal, we have ease of use, how much time and impact the processing or technology has on the business. Something that is often overlooked. By manually entering the invoices, the data will not be of great quality and the time to process will be rather long, hence being positioned in the bottom left. No surprise here that manual processing, in any form, hits this bottom quadrant. The use of OCR and ADR technologies makes it possible to automate the extraction of data with better quality, and, thanks to automatic controls with much shorter delays. However, the performances of these technologies are very dependent on the quality of the data of the supplier master files held within an organizations ERP, and the optimizations by the people in charge of managing the solution. On-premise deployed solutions offer a range of optimization and tuning tools that provide better performance than entry-level cloud solutions that do not offer these. ITESOFT can now propose a solution allowing our clients obtain data of very good quality in quasi-real time with a maximum ease of use, that is to say with minimal impact on our clients time, or effort on their behalf. This is what we propose with CAAS (Capture as a Service)
- So as we have seen, the key differentiator of Streamline for Invoice is "CaaS", a real-time, cloud based, invoice reading service that is unique in the market. This disruptive service, entirely operated by ITESOFT, is based on artificial intelligence technologies and making use of big data best practices to ensure quality supplier master data information. The benefits are very important. The simple improvement of a reading rate from 50% to 95% makes it possible to multiply, by more than 3, the number of invoices being processed by each FTE when compared against best in class solutions. Thanks to CaaS, you no longer need the technical skills to set up playback engines, or "little hands” to video code invoices. In the vast majority of cases the invoices are fully automatically read. This is where the solution really opens the door for re-sellers and partners as the need for programming and coding the solution is virtually eliminated. To obtain such performances, the supplier identification engine does not rely directly on supplier master data provided by each or our client (often of very variable quality) but on a shared repository. CaaS integrates a set of advanced processing algorithms to maintain the quality of this shared repository. Using this for the first match of an invoice Once the supplier has been identified from this repository, fuzzy logic algorithms make it possible to link to the data provided by each of our clients in order to recover their unique ERP code. The automatic matching rate between the identified supplier and the ERP code in the customer's repository is continuously supervised by ITESOFT teams combined with multiple machine learning tools. The performance of data extraction engines is constantly monitored by our experts. If necessary, they immediately implement the necessary actions to optimize the extraction of data from the invoices of a specific supplier, which benefits all the customers of the service. This element of the suite is available as a stand alone product, designed for fast, agile implementation and reduced financial and time impacts. As it comes with a vastly reduced price point it opens the door for organisations of all sizes to be able to make use of this disruptive technology, and for our partners to re-sell, and I can see a question about this in chat, we will come back to you!
- As time is short, if you would like to read more about CaaS, please do visit our website, itesoft.co.uk, and check out the WhitePaper. For more insight into WHY this is important to an organisation, there is also a white paper focusing on transofrming the process of supplier invoices into a competitive advantage.
- To finish up our presentation, we would like to quickly touch upon one of ITESOFTs international clients, PolyOne.
- PolyOne trades across multiple countries, they had already invested heavily in their ERP and in a procurement platform from Ariba. What they needed was a scalable solution that could be implemented across multiple sites and in multiple countries to handle invoice capture, matching information from the systems already in use. What was equally important to them was that the solution could be implemented quickly, handle various taxation rules, multiple countries and leverage the existing investment in other solutions. Visibility, auditability etc. become a real focus for them during the course of this digitalisation project.
- So, PolyOne chose to work with ITESOFT to deliver the solution that they needed. As you can see, roll out of the platform was done in a timely and efficient manner, averaging just 1 week per country. The solution gave them the desired traceability, alongside all of the other, more standard, requirements from these platforms, reduced costs etc. etc.
- Thank you all for listening, there have been a couple of questions posed during the webinar, but do feel free to submit any others you may have. We are limited on time so I shall work through these in the order in which they were submitted. If we don’t get to yours, we will be in touch after the webinar to give you your answers. First up, Q. You mention Capture as a Service is available as a stand alone product, what is the cost of this? Thank you, not an easy question to answer. To keep it simple, price is based on the number of documents that are to be processed, which on average, works out to be about 50p per document based on a 3 year contract. I will state, this is retail pricing only and is an average. In terms of implementation, this can be achieved in just a matter of days. Q. Why offer a solution that is only capture? We have found that more and more organisations are investing heavily into both purchase order requisitioning, and by default workflow tools within ERP’s for faster approvals on receipt of an invoice. The gap for a lot of companies is in intelligent capture and data management. So, what we are offering is a solution that will integrate with existing platforms, leveraging existing investment and not asking our clients to double their financial investments. As we are very sort of time I will pass back to Andrew for closing, and will answer all other questions after the webinar.