These are unprecedented times for many businesses — the fluctuating global economy, straining of global supply chains, ever-changing markets, inflation, and war all set challenges for the present and into the future. It’s important for businesses to adjust to the new normal — for yet another new normal might be just around the corner.
Focus on Order-to-Cash Strategy and Operations
Mitigating credit risk on new orders, monitoring risk on receivables, accelerating cash flow from collections, managing cash flow, and optimizing working capital management are critical and essential for receivables and treasury operations to navigate businesses through these turbulent times.
Order-to-cash shared services teams around the world are responding in an applaudable way to meet these challenges to maintain business continuity in spite of unprecedented times. Receivables, credit, collections, and cash application staff in many businesses, large and small — as well as local and global operations, shared service centers, global business services, and BPO centers — are all straining to support essential operations. It is rarely “business as usual” in any sense of the phrase.
According to J. P. Gownder from Forrester, “The adaptive workforce will drive the future of work, whether you hope to prepare your organization for the next recession or to grow faster than you ever have before, adaptiveness is key to your future success in a world of automation and AI.”
Planning for 2024 and Beyond
In the ever-changing global climate, shared services executives are now forced to look at the way forward. Digitalization is on the top of every CFO and shared services leader’s agenda who is focused on shifting gears from “survive” to “thrive” in 2024 and beyond.
According to a recent IDC survey, 69% of finance executives are planning to reimagine their accounts receivables processes with automation. Order-to-cash shared services executives are at the crossroads of either a) redefining incremental improvements with small automation projects or b) reimagining end-to-end processes with next-generation digital platforms for exponential growth. Next-generation order-to-cash digital platforms promise the advantage of the trifecta power of automation, analytics, and AI to boost productivity and efficiency to unprecedented levels.
Shifting to Exponential Mindset
We are now in the age of AI. Artificial intelligence is in our everyday lives. As consumers, we are already leveraging the power of AI, the cognitive digital technologies that mimic human brain capabilities, in our smartphone apps, social media apps, Alexa and Siri digital assistants, voice-assisted maps, smart shopping, stock trading, and many other everyday applications. It is time we embrace AI in our enterprise and in our shared services to experience its tremendous cognitive and computing power to help us leapfrog our operations to new levels of efficiency.
According to Deloitte’s Future of Finance predictions, finance operations will become finance factories. Transactions will become touchless. “In the years ahead, cloud-based ERP, automation, and cognitive innovation will continue apace, creating opportunities to radically simplify processes and free up people. Adding blockchain to the mix will only accelerate this trend. As this transition picks up speed, the capacity of humans to add value will be unleashed.”
AI at the Core of Your Strategy
It is time for shared services executives, especially in order-to-cash, to understand the advantage AI can bring to their operations and how they can put AI to work in their shared services. World-class SSCs who put AI at the core of their order-to-cash strategy benefit from the exponential advantage of AI – unimaginable and unparalleled compared to traditional rule-based automation systems.
Here are four ways AI-powered platforms like Emagia create exponential efficiency gains. These are also the four reasons why AI should be at the core of your order-to-cash SSC transformation strategy.
- Intelligent Process Automation: AI bots can automate structured and repetitive work processes – such as invoice posting on customer portals, performing credit risk evaluation for every sales order, or bringing payment information from external portals – and can eliminate thousands of hours of manual work involved in your shared services.
- Strategic Predictive Insights: AI platforms bring powerful machine learning capabilities that are useful to identify patterns in large complex operations data, such your customer payment behaviors or potential collection risk or a payment fraud. This can not only eliminate thousands of hours of reporting and analysis but help you proactively manage your operations in a data-driven, intelligent way.
- Cognitive Engagement and Augmentation: AI-powered digital assistants use natural language processing and generation capabilities to engage with customers, managers and shared services staff worldwide to give invoices and payments information, request payments, and take real-time payments — much like frontline staff and customer financial services agents, increasing digital engagement with customers and improving productivity of managers and collections staff with cognitive augmentation.
- Cognitive Document Data Capture: AI-powered platforms bring the capabilities of vision — reading unstructured and image-based documents — in many languages and formats, extracting text and applying information in the right context using computer vision, OCR, and deep-learning capabilities. Thousands of hours can be eliminated in data capture and data entry associated with unstructured image documents, such as lockbox image files, checks, remittances, invoices, POD documents, contracts, and many more.
As a part of order-to-cash strategy, AI-powered platforms like Emagia deliver touchless transaction processing with 80% to 90% self-driving autonomous processes. Shared services staff can now focus on handling the 10% to 20% of transactions that are escalations and fallouts while gaining greater access to forward-looking analytical insights for driving growth in revenues and customers with digital speeds.
The Business Case of AI in Order-to-Cash Strategy
With AI-powered order-to-cash systems, you can shift gears in your shared services operations from “survive” to “thrive” and confidently support your business units to scale up their front office to digital B2B eCommerce models. Your back-office B2B order-to-cash shared services will be ready for exponential scale operations – processing credit, collections, deductions, cash applications, and payments at scale without the constant limitations of FTE headcount and the eternal quest for low-cost locations. With AI, finance operations will be transformed to digital factories with clear deliverable outcomes happening in real-time and in a very predictable order. This will become the new normal.
Building the business case for AI-powered order-to-cash platforms is not about building ROI on traditional headcount reduction or DSO reduction, but is instead a business case for strategic investment – infrastructure needed to gain business advantage and essential business systems required for business growth – to lead your business forward in the age of AI. Several companies have demonstrated that a strong, scalable, digital order-to-cash process can bolster strong earnings growth, profitability, and shareholder value.
Experience the AI Advantage
Order-to-cash strategy powered by a platform like Emagia will enable a shared service center to better fulfill its strategic mission through:
- Scalability – supporting exponential business growth – insourcing and integrating new divisions (existing or newly acquired), or new clients (in case of BPO SSC) – to realize the full potential of economies of scale. Remember, more acquisition candidates will be available as a result of the new economy.
- Efficiency – Drive productivity and increase process efficiency to deliver the cost efficiency expected by your internal or external clients.
- Experience – Improve the customer experience for your clients’ customers via digital assistants and enhanced self-service capabilities.
- Opportunity – Increase revenue opportunities for your business units using data-driven insights on risk, customer segmentation, and other valuable data. You can also increase the operations performance vs. Service Level Agreements (SLAs). This is especially important for Business Process Outsourcing (BPO) shared service centers to increase client retention and extension beyond the initial contract.
- Augmentation – Enable BPO SSCs to help clients to utilize the SSCs’ AI-powered O2C system vs. the client’s outmoded legacy O2C application. This will position the BPO SSC to deliver better results.
Take the Test Drive
At Emagia, we have a very clear purpose to bring the power of AI, automation, and analytics to help shared services run their order-to-cash strategy and operations better so their businesses can grow exponentially. We do so by empowering our customers and helping them to increase shared services efficiency, increase cash flow from receivables, mitigate credit risk, and optimize working capital management.
Right now, more than ever, we are leading through our purpose. During these times of uncertainty, we have opened access to Emagia digital order-to-cash tools to help you experience the advantage of AI and address current operational challenges.
