Today’s fast-paced digital economy coerces organizations to deliver business agility. In fact, the difference between a thriving business and the one that is not; is in the scale of implementing digital transformation. Nevertheless, even in today’s dynamic business environment, there are organizations that have stringent ties with legacy applications. The situation is such that completely abandoning those legacy applications is not an option for organizations. In such instances, how can these organizations incorporate modern solutions to scale up in the current business ecosystem?

The good news is Robotic Process Automation (RPA) can bridge the gap between legacy ERP processes and modern automation. RPA enables organization to retain the benefits of legacy applications while leveraging advantages of modern automation. To put it simply, with RPA the use of Oracle ERP becomes easier. Accomplishing a task becomes less cumbersome and organizations need not worry about mistakes. Introducing RPA into Oracle ERP performs time-consuming tasks instantly, which brings about faster and less labor-intensive process optimization across organizations.

What Processes can you automate in RPA?

Rule-based processes like the ones found in financial services are the sweet spots for RPA implementation. If you describe tedious processes involved in functions like Bank Reconciliation, P2P Cycles, or account payables into detailed and logical steps, RPA bots can easily accomplish them; thereby allowing human resources to focus more on subjective, instinctive, and interpersonal tasks.

Let us now understand how RPA accomplishes some of the financial services more efficiently:

Bank Reconciliation

Bank Reconciliation is a time consuming process because it involves

  • Numerous locations or business entities
  • Multiple payment methods
  • Vendor payments comprising different time and payment methods

Hence, it is quite common that accountants spend days at a stretch matching transactions and discrepancies thereby, spending too much energy and time with no guarantee of accurate results.

However, with RPA, the reconciliation process becomes seamless, considerably reducing the need of manual intervention. This is because RPA enables:

  • Automatic login to multiple bank accounts
  • Automatic login to the ERP System
  • Extraction of appropriate general ledgers by the Bot
  • Cross Referencing of balances from Bank Statements to General ledgers
  • Preparing the Bank Reconciliation statement based on a predefined template

Procure-to-Pay

Considering the business agility that is in demand today, Oracle ERP alone is not enough to drive automation across an organization’s financial processes. In fact, a report by The Hackett Group says that ERP solutions do not have the edge to match with complex activities that are happening today like matching printed or electronic invoices with supplier master data, purchase order, shipping orders, shipping, and tax or discount data. This is where RPA has a strong use case.

When RPA is used within a single procure-to-pay process

  • Vendors send invoices in a PDF format as an email copy
  • RPA bots scan the file and retrieve the relevant information
  • RPA bots logs into ERP and complete the data input and finally matches invoice with the PO
  • After a successful checkout, bots can even issue self-driven payments

Key Benefits

  • Significant cost reduction which in turn will bring better ROI
  • Better compliance and security as robots will always adhere to formulated rules, follow data protection regimen, and leave a clear audit trial
  • Enhanced productivity with negligible errors
  • improved accuracy as robots work 24/7
  • Minimized human interventions resulting in lesser human errors and more time for human workforce to focus on high value tasks

Why Embrace RPA?

With RPA, organizations can automate routine tasks, boost productivity, and free people to focus on tasks that require higher levels of human intervention. RPA is the right kind of bridge between the obligatory legacy systems and the modern one. However, let us understand some of the key benefits of RPA for businesses.

Enhances operational efficiencies

RPA bots can accomplish complex tasks more precisely, and consistently and within a short span of time. Hence, RPA enables organization to automate manual tasks thereby, saving considerable amount of time in the process.

Delivers cost savings

By automating routine manual tasks with RPA, the chances of manual errors and inconsistencies reduce largely. Moreover, amount spent on administrative labor is also lower. Result is people have more time to deliver excellent customer service.

Drives future growth and scalability

With data collected from RPA, it is easy to analyze the areas of improvement and accordingly drive future growth for business. Organizations can also scale up or down the RPA software depending on the business requirement so that high quality is maintained both in terms of product and service delivery.

Conclusion

Organizations have witnessed multiple technological innovations over the last few years. However, technology is still evolving and introducing a wave of opportunities; RPA being one such process. Some years back organizations moved from traditional form of business to Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP). It is true that ERP delivered efficiency and integration but in some cases even ERP fell short because it failed to deliver the expected ROI within the defined timelines specifically because there was always a need to integrate ERP with the existing legacy systems. Moreover, when RPA merged with ERP, it started the next frontier to Resource Planning. The combination of ERP and RPA enabled organizations to unleash the real power of ERP systems with higher precision and efficiency. To put it simply, RPA can fulfill gaps left by ERP and bring in the next level of Resource Planning known as the Automated Resource Planning.