One of the Mid-Atlantic region's prominent property management companies, known for its size and success, recognizes the importance of technological advancement for growth. To take a significant stride in this direction, they plan to adopt Intelligent Automation (IA) as a crucial component of their technological growth strategy.
The manual procedure of acquiring invoices and organizing them for payment involves numerous challenges, including:
- Time-consuming process: Manual processing of invoices involves significant time and effort. Each invoice needs to be reviewed, entered, and verified manually.
- Human errors: The manual data entry process is prone to human errors such as typos, incorrect entries, or misplaced information. These errors can lead to inaccuracies in the AP management system.
- Inefficiency and delays: Manual processing can result in inefficiencies and delays due to the dependency on human resources, and unreliable technical sources. This can slow down the overall invoice processing workflow and hinder timely payments.
- Different formats: Invoices can arrive in various formats such as PDFs, scanned copies, or paper statements. Handling these diverse formats manually adds complexity to the processing task.
- Tracking and monitoring: Manually processed invoices may lack proper tracking and monitoring mechanisms, making it harder to keep a record of invoices, track payment status, or generate reports for analysis.
- Increased operational costs: Manual processing requires dedicated manpower and resources, leading to increased operational costs for the organization.
- Repetitive and time-consuming tasks: Reliability and performance issues can be found with some invoice provider’s portals, and technical sources used to download digital invoices.
To enhance the efficiency of Invoice processing and mitigate potential errors caused by manual handling, The Canton Group proposed implementing an automated unattended bot solution. This solution enables automated background processes, eliminating the need for manual intervention, and reducing the time required to complete each step.
In the proposed solution, two bots and a document management solution handle the workflows. First, a single bot is responsible for managing all the necessary steps to download invoices from reputable providers in the area. This bot extracts relevant data from each invoice and then adds it to the queue. To address the handling of invoices received via mail, the property management company has made the decision to scan the documents and utilize a document management solution to extract the pertinent information. This extracted data is then added to the queue. Next, the second bot retrieves the data from the queue and proceeds to sort and generate vouchers for payment within the Accounts Payable (AP) management system.
To enhance the efficiency of invoice processing and mitigate potential errors caused by manual handling, The Canton Group proposed implementing an automated unattended bot solution. This solution enables automated background processes, eliminating the need for manual intervention, and reducing the time required to complete each step.
In the proposed solution, two bots and a document management solution handle the workflows. First, a single bot is responsible for managing all the necessary steps to download invoices from reputable providers in the area. This bot extracts relevant data from each invoice and then adds it to the queue. To address the handling of invoices received via mail, the property management company has made the decision to scan the documents and utilize a document management solution to extract the pertinent information. This extracted data is then added to the queue. Next, the second bot retrieves the data from the queue and proceeds to sort and generate vouchers for payment within the Accounts Payable (AP) management system.
By implementing Intelligent Automation (IA), the process not only enhances the user experience for employees but also greatly minimizes the occurrence of human errors. With this technology, each invoice is efficiently sorted and converted into a payment voucher within a remarkable timeframe of 60 to 150 seconds (compared to the 15 minutes it currently takes an employee). Thanks to the utilization of IA, approximately 2,000 invoices are generated in the invoice processing application per month, accomplishing the task within a mere 100 hours (compared to the 500 hours it currently takes). This represents a substantial reduction of approximately 400 hours compared to the manual process. The implementation of IA has resulted in an impressive 80% decrease in the sorting and creation of payment vouchers. This ensures the employees can focus their time on mission critical and valuable work.
In the coming future, the property management team is expected to save approximately 4,800 hours over the course of the next year.
