The manufacturing industry has made innovative attempts to automate, particularly on the factory floor. However, automation within manufacturing companies has not made it to most back offices where processes are still carried out manually. The back office carries out the most essential business management functions for all companies; therefore, success in the back office most certainly had a direct effect on the company’s success.
Expanding Automation to the Back Office
Automating the back office provides opportunities to streamline, optimize and integrate essential workflows throughout the entire organization, making all back-office processes more effective and efficient. Leaving the back office out of the automation discussion is completely contrary to a company’s vision to optimize all operations for growth, scalability and success.
Without automation, back offices typically rely on tedious and unorganized methods to store and track information such as spreadsheets, emails, and piles of paperwork. Through automation and the associated digitization, most manual tasks can be eliminated – significantly reducing errors, and speeding up task completion exponentially, freeing up employees’ time to focus on more meaningful, revenue-contributing tasks.
To that point, while automation is often framed as a job stealer, it has been regularly demonstrated that automation can actually create more jobs. According to Deloitte’s report “The future of work”, which cites a World Economic Forum report, as many as 133 million new jobs could be created as organizations shift to integrating more technology, creating a net gain of 58 million jobs. Additionally, executives interviewed for this report stated that they did not envision layoffs due to automation adoption.
Benefits of AP Automation
There are many reasons why to automate your accounts payable process. Automation software bridges the gap between the floor and the back office and streamlines the entire manufacturing process among different teams including sales, operations, finance, and accounting. Automation software bridges the gap between the floor and the back office and streamlines the entire manufacturing process among different teams including sales, operations, finance, and accounting.
For the Accounts Payable (AP) team especially, automation poses many benefits and has the ability to inform and empower employees across the entire organization: visibility into project statuses, automatically input orders, alert finance teams of issues, evaluate inventory, and create and process invoices. These processes eliminate manual intervention, paperwork, countless email chains, and the massive number and scope of spreadsheets it takes to keep track of every aspects of the AP process. With AP Automation you will also have ever increasing transparency into end-to-end processes, as well as reduced errors and backlogs. Most importantly, however, automating accounts payable will save your company both time and money, and in the long run provide new and improved revenue streams through more strategic payments discounting, payment rebates and increased accuracy and efficiency of workflow.
There can be no doubt – neglecting your back office in the automation process is one of your biggest missed opportunities for immediate improvement, both in terms of revenues and efficiency.
Contact us to learn more about automating your accounts payable process today!
