Tag: erp

How Cloud EDI Can Transform Business Invoice Reconciliation


  • How Cloud EDI Can Transform Business Invoice Reconciliation

It’s no secret that automation is a hot topic right now in virtually every industry. The ability to use software to save employee hours and costs and defer that burden to a machine that can process tasks in a fraction of a second is essential for any business with low-profit margins, like the restaurant industry.

After all, every task is critical, and every second counts when your employees are on the clock. And when it comes to finance processes like invoice reconciliation, EDI and automation are rapidly changing the way companies approach these tasks.

This article will explore EDI and invoice reconciliation, and how adding EDI can benefit your business over the long run.

How Automated Invoice Reconciliation Can Benefit Your Company

Any process that a human can do, a machine can do faster and more efficiently, even tasks vital to a business’s profitability, like invoice reconciliation. It is essential to reconcile your invoices as accurately as possible. Doing so will reap the following benefits for your company:

  • Saving work hours. Pre-automation, businesses will assign multiple employees to sift through invoices for hours at a time. With automation, these same employees can be contributing to other tasks, while EDI software reconciles the invoices for them.
  • Reduce invoice errors. People make errors all the time, even best our best intentions. Invoice errors can profoundly negatively impact a business, from overpaying/underpaying a supplier to not billing a client correctly. The software will not make these same mistakes as all values are based on computer calculations and checks and balances are in place.
  • Reconcile many invoices simultaneously. Humans can only process one invoice at a time. The software can process invoices in a fraction of a second. By reconciling many invoices quickly, you will save valuable employee hours.
  • Prioritize other more critical business processes. By automating invoice reconciliation, you can re-assign your human employees to other tasks. Every task needs to be prioritized for maximum efficiency to ensure maximum profits.
  • Establishes precedence for more automation. Automation saves money, especially when a whole business process can be automated, as in the case of EDI.
  • Cloud-stored data. Even the best office practices of data storage are no match for cloud-based storage. Cloud data can be accessed at any time, in any location, as long as you have online or offline access to your data. The same cannot be stated for data locked in an office. By utilizing cloud storage, EDI allows you to save copies of reconciled invoices, and check the reconciliation process for errors when you need to.

The Value of EDI and Invoice Reconciliation

Companies are using automated invoice reconciliation to scale up their business processes, especially in centralized billing. If you own or operate several establishments, you will need to process invoices from multiple locations quickly and efficiently. EDI allows you to do this, even if your various locations are being run independently by different managers.

By using EDI and automating the manual collection of data, you can reduce processing errors and increase efficiency when reconciling invoices. Messy handwriting, wrong inputs, and scanning issues are no longer a problem. You can enter all the pertinent information into a terminal, generate an invoice electronically, and send a copy to a centralized office for automated reconciliation.

Automated EDI is one form of IT management that is transforming business infrastructure and processes. Automation reduces complexity and increases efficiencies that can affect whole work teams, replacing manual, error-prone processes, and saving many more useful employee hours spent on other tasks.

Seamless EDI and Business Automation Starts With Tangentia

How is your company leveraging powerful cloud EDI functionality and automation to transform your invoice reconciliation processes?

Tangentia provides digital solutions for businesses of all sizes. If you’re looking to kickstart your automation journey, we can help. Get in touch with one of our EDI specialists today to get started.

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Tangentia is a Platinum Partner of IBM and well as partners with Automation Anywhere, UI Path, Blue Prism, Adobe, Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon and leading enterprise software vendors. We work with customers globally with offices in Canada and India to implement their RPA strategies using an agile methodology.
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A Quick Guide to Warehouse Inventory Management in 2020


  • A Quick Guide to Warehouse Inventory Management in 2020

The holidays are fast approaching, and that means retailers and wholesalers must be efficient in organizing their products and managing the inventory of their products.

Depending on the size of your operation, how you manage your products may differ. However, warehouse inventory management is not just a requirement for compliance with SEC regulations and the Sarbanes-Oxley Act (SOX) for public companies—it’s crucial to the success of any retail company.

We’ve put together this brief guide to help you understand the basics of warehouse inventory management.

What Is Warehouse Inventory Management?

Warehouse inventory management is the system used to organize and track all of the company's owned products. For warehouse operations, this helps to ensure the right level of inventory is in the right place at the right time. Inventory is then converted to revenue once it’s sold.

In the United States, manufacturers, retailers, and merchant wholesalers carried more than $1.9 trillion in inventory in June 2018, according to the U.S. Census Bureau.

Accurately evaluating the inventory for the company’s balance sheet requires either physical stock count or an automated inventory system that creates an accurate record of each inventory-related transaction.

This quantitative product management differs slightly from a company’s warehouse management system (WMS), an umbrella term that supports the entire operation of a warehouse, including inventory management.

The best warehouse inventory management systems keep track of products and provide actionable business intelligence, such as identifying trends in product performance and sending reorder notifications when stock is low.

Current warehouse inventory management systems are outdated and often haven’t embraced everything automation has to offer.

Features of Inventory Management

There are many steps involved in warehouse inventory management, some of which include:

  • Picking and packing
  • Shipping
  • Managing locations
  • Receiving orders
  • Tracking inventory levels
  • Cycle counting
  • Generating reports
  • Providing business insights

What Are the Different Types of Inventory Management?

Manual

Every step of the delivery, tracking, loading, and data manipulation is done by workers. This manual system can increase the risk of human error at any point in the inventory management process. If there is ever a mistake, the only method of resolving the problem is another manual re-do.

Another downside to this type of inventory management is its unsustainability for more significant warehouse operations. Without computerized report generation, companies may see difficulties in turning paper-based information into useful data.

Barcode

This system uses the familiar label of black stripes that are affixed to the product, packaging, or pallet. Using wearable barcode readers, workers can speed up warehouse inventory management and save seconds scanning per item. This digital format is efficient and accurate by counting goods in real-time.

RFID

Radiofrequency identification tags are found in two configurations: active and passive. Active systems use battery-operated tag readers located throughout a warehouse and updates of inventory count and location. Passive systems are read-only when someone activates the readers through hand-held devices. Passive technology can be read at up to 40 feet, while active readers are effective up to 300 feet, but both systems automatically record inventory.

Warehouse Robots

With growing advancements in technology and automation, companies are starting to turn to optical systems mounted on the ground or aerial platforms. These systems use machine learning to read existing labels without barcodes or RFID and maintain accurate, up-to-date inventory.

Warehouse Inventory Automation: Is This the New Norm?

Modern supply chains are more complex than ever. Traditional manual processes are no longer viable for businesses that want to optimize workflows and reduce wasted resources.

Automation is the natural solution to these problems. It’s ideal for individual warehouses or companies that support numerous locations across the entire supply chain.

Effective fulfillment requires sophisticated solutions that are able to predict trends, make actionable recommendations, and increase the visibility of potential issues before they turn into larger problems.

Successful manufacturers, 3PLs, and retailers know the importance of optimized supply chains. That’s why they’ve heavily invested in cloud-based automation solutions for their supply chains.

Automate Your Warehouse Inventory Management With Tangentia

Here at Tangentia, we understand the transformative difference automated solutions can make for your business.

When you’re processing hundreds or thousands of pallets or cartons per day, automated processes can significantly save time, effort, and costs. For many retail companies, creating greater warehouse inventory management efficiency translates to a multi-million dollar impact.

Are you interested in learning more about warehouse inventory management automation? Get in touch with Tangentia today to learn more.

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Tangentia is a Platinum Partner of IBM and well as partners with Automation Anywhere, UI Path, Blue Prism, Adobe, Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon and leading enterprise software vendors. We work with customers globally with offices in Canada and India to implement their RPA strategies using an agile methodology.
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How Just-In-Time Inventory, EDI, and RPA Keep Your Business at Its Most Efficient

  • Automating Your Inventory : How Just-In-Time Inventory, EDI, and RPA Keep Your Business at Its Most Efficient

When it comes to your company’s supply chain, one of the most common weak links is inventory management. There are very few businesses that handle their inventory management well. Typically, retail businesses face problems scaling up their inventory management systems as they grow.

As your business grows, efficient inventory practices become more and more worth investing in. Retail companies with poor inventory management can suffer from stock issues, slowed turnover times, and needing to order excess inventory to prevent running out of stock. Slow delivery and stock issues are a sure way to reduce customer satisfaction, so keeping these issues at a minimum is important.

How can retail companies improve their stock management and inventory processes? For most businesses, the answer is automation. Most inventory management issues stem from human error, inefficient practices, and incomplete item information. Automation resolves all these issues. It is intrinsically efficient and requires complete item information, and eliminates human error.

So, how can your business get started with inventory automation? The process isn’t as difficult as you might think. Just-in-Time Inventory (JIT), Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), and Robotic Process Automation (RPA) are a few strategies that you can utilize onto your supply chain to be well on the way to an optimized system.

What Is Just-in-Time (JIT) Inventory?

JIT inventory is a way to decrease waste and increase the efficiency of your supply chain. With JIT, your supply chain only receives goods as they become needed.

Pros of JIT?

JIT keeps your business at maximum efficiency. By having goods on hand only when they’re needed, you can keep your supply chain operating smoothly without needing to worry about long-term storage of stock.

Maintaining JIT inventory reduces the amount of waste your supply chain produces from leftover, unused goods. It also keeps the investment into your supply low, as you don’t need to stock more goods than you need.

Cons of JIT

While JIT keeps your business on top of its efficiency when supply is readily available, it can cause your business to suffer greatly from issues farther down the line of the supply chain.

Since you don’t keep a stockpile of the goods your supply chain uses, if they suddenly become scarce or expensive, your business might unexpectedly run out of stock. You might also end up needing to buy overpriced stock.

What Is Electronic Data Interchange (EDI)?

In general, Electronic Data Interchange is simply the technical term for two computers communicating with each other. In the context of the supply chain, EDI is a way to get a full digital picture of your electronic transaction exchanges with your customers, as well as your inventory.

Pros of EDI

Many supply chain issues, such as inventory shortages and surpluses, happen because of a lack of inventory visibility. EDI allows you to keep track of all your inventory in one centralized location, making it easy to track and prevent inventory errors.

With EDI, it’s also much easier to manage more complex inventory processes, such as multichannel sales. The more complicated the process, the more likely it is for human error to occur.

Having a guarantee that all of the information about your inventory is accurate allows you to make supply decisions with the big picture in mind. Overall, EDI improves almost all aspects of the inventory management process.

Cons of EDI

EDI can be hard to adjust for your supply chain to work around, especially if it is a legacy EDI system that is in place. This is especially the case for rapidly growing businesses, which don’t usually have particularly well-optimized supply chains.

If your inventory isn’t well-suited to EDI, it can take some work to get full value out of the EDI system. You may need to overhaul some of your inventory processes altogether.

What Is Robotic Process Automation (RPA)?

RPA is a way to increase the efficiency of your inventory management by replacing human operators with various digital systems. With an RPA system, the computer essentially uses itself by means of a virtual operator, called an RPA robot.

RPA robots have a wide array of functionalities and are able to completely replace human users for many applications. They can perform tasks such as moving and collecting data from various sources, as well as process data by performing calculations.

Pros of RPA

RPA can allow for quite a lot of inventory management automation, sometimes up to 90%. In general, processes that can be automated should be, as humans are almost always slower than an RPA robot. RPA robots can drastically increase the efficiency of your inventory management processes.

Like EDI, RPA removes the human element from many processes. In particular, RPA robots can handle data entry, data processing, and other repetitive tasks easily, with a 0% rate of error. This gives them a sizable advantage over humans, who are unable to focus on these tasks for as long.

RPA systems can also keep running overnight, giving them yet another advantage over human operators. Overall, RPA is almost guaranteed to provide a large boost to your business’s supply chain efficiency.

Cons of RPA

Like EDI, a proper RPA system is not trivial to implement. Rolling out an RPA project into your business’s inventory management or production environments actually has a good chance of failing at first. After some troubleshooting, you will likely start getting full value out of the RPA system.

Tying It All Together

Automation is a great way to increase efficiency and eliminate errors within your inventory management process. It can’t do the job on its own, though: if you want to optimize your inventory management, you should use a combination of JIT, EDI, and RPA.

How JIT, EDI, and RPA Complement Each Other

On their own, these three methods of optimizing your inventory are sure to increase your efficiency significantly. When put together, though, they are more than the sum of their parts.

The biggest weakness of JIT is that it’s prone to human error. Improper data entry can result in an unexpected stock outage of your product. EDI and RPA prevent this by removing the capacity for human error in the majority of the inventory management operation.

On the other hand, EDI and RPA can suffer from bottlenecks. It doesn’t matter how efficient your data processing is if your business is bogged down by extra costs relating to storage or other inefficiencies. JIT helps alleviate this bottleneck by increasing the efficiency of your business outside of data processing.

Can I Have JIT or EDI Without RPA?

While JIT, EDI, and RPA are tools that are best used together, they can be used individually to great effect. You should make sure you’re on the lookout for the potential issues with using these tools.

So as long as you build your inventory management process around the tools you’re using—you should be able to work around JIT, EDI, and RPA’s various weaknesses. Overall though, we recommend trying to implement all three inventory management tools, as they work best in tandem.

An Investment in JIT Is an Investment in Efficiency

If your business has been growing and you’re having trouble handling demand for your products, the solution may not be to expand and spend more. Oftentimes, it’s much more budget-friendly and effective to invest in ways to improve your efficiency than expand your flawed, existing system.

When it comes to improving the efficiency of your supply chain, the best way is with automation. JIT, EDI, and RPA are all easy-to-implement forms of automation that are designed to provide you with a quick return on investment. Once you have these systems in place, you’ll find that your inventory management model is much more scalable.

If you’re interested in learning more about JIT, EDI, or RPA, feel free to contact us today to find out how these tools can help your business be the best it can be.

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Tangentia is a Platinum Partner of IBM and well as partners with Automation Anywhere, UI Path, Blue Prism, Adobe, Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon and leading enterprise software vendors. We work with customers globally with offices in Canada and India to implement their RPA strategies using an agile methodology.
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Integrating Your EDI Data Into Your ERP Systems: What Are Your Options?

  • Integrating Your EDI Data Into Your ERP Systems: What Are Your Options?

    By Karen Briones

Everyone’s heard about Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) systems by now. But seamlessly integrating EDI data into an Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) system is one area where many companies struggle. It’s important that these two systems communicate flawlessly to minimize processing times, eliminate errors, and avoid compliance issues.

Many companies rely on EDI systems that they struggle to maintain as they start to transition into the era of cloud technology. Most of them are legacy EDI systems that have been patched along over the decades, and trying to make them compatible with modern ERP systems is often a challenge.

So, how can you ensure that your EDI data is compatible with your ERP system? Let’s start by assessing the types of problems that most companies face when trying to integrate their EDI data with their ERP.

The Most Common EDI Data Integration Problems

Let’s face it—incorporating your EDI data into your ERP system isn’t an easy task. Here are a few of the most common problems you’ll encounter:

  • Poorly-built integrations that aren’t standardized. The entire premise of EDI is built around the idea of standardized file formats. Your organization may have developed a series of internal processes and policies over the years. Each layer of added difficulty only complicates the integration process.
  • Handing the project off to an inexperienced team. Every aspect of your integration needs to be managed carefully as a simple error could potentially lead to a halt of the rest of the downstream processes, and worst, compliance issues. Don’t make the mistake of handing the project off to an inexperienced team. The data you send and receive is important to your business, and it’s vital that your vendors and suppliers have access to accurate and compliant data to minimize disruptions to your business processes.
  • Relying too heavily on manual processes. Accountability and control are important aspects of EDI—but relying on manual processes can complicate the integration process. It is best practice to automate these processes to ensure that the data that you are integrating is accurate and reliable from end-to-end.
  • Deploying too many back-end applications. It’s not uncommon for businesses to use various CRM’s, ERP’s, and other applications to simplify their back-end processes. However, integrating your EDI data into multiple applications can increase the likelihood of costly errors being made.

Every organization is unique, and the challenges you face may be different. Still, your main focus should always be on maintaining the integrity and accessibility of the data that is essential to your business and your customers.

EDI Data and ERP Integration: Your Options

Several options exist when it comes to integrating your EDI data into an ERP system. The most popular options include:

Use a Third-Party EDI Integration Plugin

Some companies use a Third-Party EDI Integration Plugin that acts as a bridge between their EDI and ERP systems. While this may prove successful for your organization, the cost associated with this option is typically high.

Work with a Third Party EDI Service Provider

Third party EDI service providers not only ensure your EDI compliance with your trading partners’ EDI requirements, but they also typically offer ready-to-use integration modules for most ERPs. Many companies rely on Third Party EDI Service Providers to fully manage their overall EDI infrastructure, freeing them from costly in-house management and maintenance of these systems.

Utilize Web Services

The more modern ERP, WMS and eCommerce platforms have started to embrace web services/API integration to allow their applications to seamlessly communicate with other applications. EDI data can be incorporated into your ERP by utilizing APIs.

Implement Flat Files

Flat files are known as text database files. They are the most basic form of EDI data available. This method uses simple text files called flat-files (or CSV) to ensure data is compatible with the majority of ERP systems. Other EDI systems may use the XML format. These two file formats are the global standard in EDI and are highly-integratable with other ERP solutions.

Need Help Choosing the Right Integration Option for Your Company?

Integrating your EDI data into an ERP system is a major process that every organization that handles huge amounts of data should consider. Tangentia specializes in fully integrated EDI solutions, and can help your company successfully build the bridge between your EDI, ERP, WMS, eCommerce and other business applications.

Tangentia has decades of experience working with EDI systems, and we understand exactly what it takes to build an automated system that is flexible, compliant, and functional while being cost-effective.

Get in touch with a member of the Tangentia team today to see how we can automate your EDI data flow between your existing business applications.

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Tangentia is a Platinum Partner of IBM and well as partners with Automation Anywhere, UI Path, Blue Prism, Adobe, Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon and leading enterprise software vendors. We work with customers globally with offices in Canada and India to implement their RPA strategies using an agile methodology.
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Tangentia Offers Support for SWIFT 2020 Updates


  • Tangentia Offers Support for SWIFT 2020 Updates

SWIFT is a messaging network designed to facilitate the global transfer of funds. It works by sending electronic messages from one financial institution to another to notify them when a transfer of funds is made.

Each year, SWIFT updates its service based on changes requested by their customers. This update is the MT Standards release and it ensures the message types (MTs) exchanged by SWIFT users continue to meet their needs, both for existing businesses and new businesses.

The release for 2020 is called the Standards MT November 2020 and includes the following
changes:

  • Payments MTs to facilitate migration to the ISO 20022 Program and to ensure compliance with regulatory and FAFT requirements
  • Manual and automated solutions for mandatory payment confirmations
  • Support for additional security information to be transported in messages as per regulation
  • Support for local regulatory requirements
  • Support for local regulatory requirements
  • Increased structure to messages for both party fields and trade party fields
  • New features that offer support for changing business processes and new financial instruments
  • Clarification of definitions to ensure improved consistency in messages and improved automation
  • Changes agreed to during a fast-track maintenance process

Applying the changes in the SWIFT Standards Release Guide is mandatory for all financial institutions. However, making the required changes can be costly and it is important to balance that cost against the resulting benefits.

Tangentia can help with the update process, ensuring it is as efficient as possible and minimizes costs, while ensuring full compliance. We have extensive experience implementing SWIFT EDI gateways using solutions from IBM WebSphere Transformation Extender (WTX), IBM Sterling B2B Integrator, GXS, TIBCO and others.

Contact Tangentia for more information on SWIFT 2020 updates.

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Tangentia is a Platinum Partner of IBM and well as partners with Automation Anywhere, UI Path, Blue Prism, Adobe, Microsoft, Salesforce, Amazon and leading enterprise software vendors. We work with customers globally with offices in Canada and India to implement their RPA strategies using an agile methodology.
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Tangentia + Dynamics 365 Business Central – Cloud ERP made easy

  • Tangentia + Dynamics 365 Business Central
    Cloud ERP made easy

Tangentia + Dynamics 365 Business Central – Cloud ERP made easy

The latest trends in the marketplace have shown that companies have begun to be more and more open to keep their data on the cloud. This is fast becoming true with their ERP systems. For Microsoft, it is not just a strategic decision to therefore re-brand their ‘on premise systems’ but a means of keeping up with the competition. Customers these days are not just looking for an ERP system that handles the finance and operations of the company but also embeds ecommerce solutions. This allows for a one stop shop cloud based solution that companies can exponentially benefit from.

Keeping the above in mind Microsoft has introduced ‘Dynamics 365 Business Central’ (formerly known as Microsoft Dynamics Navision) which is available on both “Premise” and on “Cloud.” Business Central offers organizations a single, end to end solution for managing finances, operations, sales and customer service and a solid opportunity to easily upgrade from entry-level accounting software and legacy systems.

Business Central is customizable and brings the full power of Dynamics NAV to the cloud. One of its most telling features – it provides businesses with tools that they can use to analyze their cash flow by analyzing historic data to make predictions for future periods. The cash flow forecast feature is made all the more dynamic as it can utilize the Azure Machine Learning to model various scenarios and provide groundbreaking insights into what to expect for the future. Azure Machine Learning allows the business to extend the time horizon for cash flow forecasts. It has the following models to calculate forecasts:

  • ARIMA (Auto Regressive Integrated Moving Average)
  • ETS (Exponential Smoothing State Space)
  • STL (Seasonal Decomposition of Time Series by Loess)
  • TBATS (Exponential Smoothing State Space with Box-Cox transformation, ARMA errors, Trend and Seasonal components)

What it does differently is that it applies advanced statistical methods to the historical data to generate data in the future and include that data when calculating the forecast. When we predict receivables or payables, we use the due date as a date field and not the document date or posting date, so we don’t need to define and apply a payment term to the predicted results.

Azure ML is free in Business Central; you just need to turn it on. If you have two years of data, you can expect to forecast values accurately for up to four months. Business Central has introduced a ‘threshold’ factor that can be adjusted in the Cash Flow Forecast setup. The field is called “Variance %” and allow you to specify range of deviation, plus or minus, that you’ll accept in forecast.

The Tangentia Advantage

Tangentia EDI Engine

Tangentia has been at the forefront developing custom integration solutions that has previously connected the client’s Microsoft Navision ERP system to their Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), ecommerce and Warehouse Management Systems. (WMS)
The Tangentia Navision Engine (TNE) has supported MS NAV version 4.0 all the way to MS Dynamics NAV 2018. As of May 2019, Tangentia Navision Engine also seamlessly integrates and connects your EDI trading partners with the Business Central Cloud ERP. TNE has the following features:

  • Single user interface for all your EDI, WMS and ecommerce needs
  • Guaranteed EDI connectivity to 2000+ retailers worldwide
  • Supports ANSI X12, EDIFACT, RosettaNet, cXML, Tradacoms, ebXML etc.
  • Lifetime EDI Compliance – no additional cost for trading partner mapping changes or label modification
  • One-time flat EDI integration fee utilized across all trading partners
  • Highly customizable to meet business processes that might vary from company to company

Tangentia RPA and AI

RPA is making a real impact in enterprise space and empowering knowledge worker by helping them focus on the more meaningful and value-added side of their work and offloading more mundane and repetitive tasks to an RPA powered robot. There is an enterprise workforce revolution underway led by RPA and AI/Cognitive technologies.
There is a plethora of solutions providers in this space, each with its own specialty. However, there are three main vendors that come to mind. They are – Automation Anywhere, Blue Prism and UiPath in alphabetical order. Among these, UiPath is probably the fastest growing since it has recently received funding from big Silicon Valley Venture Capital firms in series C and D rounds.
Gartner predicts that by 2022 worldwide RPA spending will total $2.4B with an expected CAGR upwards of 30% in the next five years.
Here are some of the trends:

  • Digital Transformation: Traditional businesses are faced with competition from the likes of Amazon, Airbnb, Uber, Google, Microsoft and Facebook to name a few and are forced to change their business models to adapt to the new digital reality.
  • The rise of the Omni channel: Consumers are increasingly preferring to do their shopping digitally and interact with merchants with minimum touchpoints in a seamless manner across all channels.
  • Availability of Actionable Data: Digital businesses are able to collect data and actionable insights about their customers in real time and adjust to the market demand accordingly. For example, Uber rates go up if there is a high demand in an area for its rides on account of some event. Similarly, Airbnb is able to hike its listing rates based on the demand in an area.
  • Scalability: It’s much easier to scale up if you are a digital business. It took much less time for Airbnb and Uber to overtake their traditional counterparts in terms of market size and market cap.
  • Flexibility: Digital business is more efficient, responsive to customer needs and able to cross-sell.

Tangentia provides end to end implementation services around the three main automation solutions – Automation Anywhere, UiPath and Blue Prism. Some of the benefits of choosing Tangentia are:

  • A strong commitment to client success over our own.
  • A rich history of past experience in implementing RPA solutions.
  • Knowledgeable resources with certifications in RPA solutions.
  • Strong domain expertise in specialized verticals e.g. BFSI, Healthcare, Telecom, Insurance etc.
  • A strong partner ecosystem that brings the best of breed solution offering.
  • A delivery model that is global and based on Agile Methodology and best practices.
  • A metrics-based approach to ROI.
  • Good past client references

Identifying and working with a right partner is the most important and crucial step to ensuring a successful RPA journey.

Tangentia Procure-to-Pay

  With Tangentia’s EDI, Automation, and Ecommerce services, we can provide a complete streamlined Procure-to-Pay process for the Global enterprise. The Procure-to-Pay (P2P) is an end-to-end process starting with requisitioning goods and services and ending with making payments for them.

The 7 Steps Procure-to-Pay process involves:

  • Raising the Purchase Order
  • Vendor confirmation of Purchase Order
  • Advanced Shipment Notice
  • Receipt of Goods
  • Submitting Documents to Finance
  • Vendor sending Invoice to Customer
  • Final Payment to Supplier

This apparently simple process can be complex due to legacy systems, and errors from manual entries, leading to unnecessary costs. Implementing an Procure-to-Pay cycle can provide an opportunity to bring efficiency to the process and save costs.

Tangentia Order-to-Cash

With Tangentia’s EDI, Automation, and Ecommerce services, we can provide a complete streamlined Order-to-Cash process for the Global enterprise. Order-to-Cash (OTC or O2C) is the top-level business process for receiving and processing customer orders.

The order to cash process is simple and can be illustrated with the following steps:

  • Customer sends a purchase order
  • Vendor creates a sales order
  • Vendor ships and delivers goods
  • Vendor sends invoice to customer
  • Customer pays the vendor

Order-to-Cash systems affect all areas of a business and are critical to operational success.

In a standard system, orders are received via different sales channels, such as phone, emails, fax, online channels or through sales persons. This input complexity added with other manual entries, makes the process error-prone and the system inefficient. Implementing an Order-to-Cash cycle can provide an opportunity to bring efficiency to the process and save costs.

With Tangentia’s EDI, Automation, and Ecommerce services, we can provide a complete streamlined Order-to-Cash process for the Global enterprise.

About the Author

The author, Akash Singh is the Head of Project Management Operations(PMO) at Tangentia. He oversees projects around EDI/ Ecommerce/ RPA and AI from a delivery standpoint ensuring client satisfaction and success.

Tangentia is an expert in implementing Digital Transformation solutions leveraging technologies like RPA, Artificial Intelligence, EDI and Ecommerce.

Tangentia implements solutions around Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central and you can learn more here.

To learn more about Tangentia EDI solutions Click Here

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Paperless Factory: Invoice Processing Digitalization

  • Paperless Factory: Invoice Processing Digitalization

    By Shantanu Paknikar

Overview

Terms like “Paperless office”, “Paperless factory”, “Digitized Office” have been around for a long time, as an aspiration for the future. And yet, even today, the ground reality is that there are a lot of paper documents that are still in existence. Purchase Orders, Invoices, Shipping Notes, Goods received notes, Proof of delivery notes, and several other documents are still generated, received, and processed in large numbers in companies all over the world. Processes to handle paper documents are largely manual, time and effort consuming, prone to errors, require data re-entry at multiple stages, and result in operational inefficiencies. The need of the hour is to leverage technology to digitize such documents and automate the processes to handle them.

Example use case: Accounts Payable (AP)

Consider a typical use case for Accounts Payable (AP) and the Procure to Pay process at a factory that receives shipments from its suppliers. Trucks arrive at the factory gate with an invoice for the goods they are delivering, along with associated documents such as a shipment note and sometimes the purchase order (PO) corresponding to that shipment. Let us look at how the documents are typically handled.
The invoice and associated documents are in the form of a hard copies (physical paper copies). At the factory gate, this physical invoice is manually inspected, and tallied with the ERP system data. Once done, the gate clearance is recorded (manually again) on the physical invoice, or printed out as another physical document to attach to the received invoice. The invoice is then passed on for further processing.

The further processing might involve invoice being sent to a verifications team, where the received shipment is checked for quality. Once done, the ERP system is updated (manually) indicating that the shipment received has cleared the quality check. The quality clearance might then get recorded manually on the physical invoice document, or a QC certificate might get printed out and attached with the invoice.

The invoice (and the received goods) are then sent to the stores section where there is a quantity verification (counting) process. This involves matching of the ordered quantity of goods from the original PO in the ERP system, with the quantity in the invoice, with the actual quantity received. The matching requires a visual inspection and a manual comparison of the PO and Invoice for quantity as well as other details.
Once the matching is completed, the goods are accepted at the store, the ERP system is updated (manually), a Goods Received Note (GRN) is printed out and handed over to the supplier's delivery associate, and the physical invoice is sent to the accounts team for the payment approval.

Business Challenges

The limitations of this process are obvious. It is inefficient to have the paper invoice (and other documents) being sent across from one department to another. There is quite a bit of work on data entry and re-entry including updates to the ERP system, which could also result in data errors. Also, with a paper-based process, search and retrieval of documents later (e.g. during audits) is a very painful process since the actual physical documents are not easy to find. These inefficiencies impact both the cycle time as well as productivity of the factory personnel involved in receiving and processing shipments.

The solution: Invoice Processing Digitalization

These inefficiencies can be addressed by a technology solution that involves converting the paper-based manual process into a digital, automated process. Such a solution involves two main steps:

  1. Digitization of the physical invoice
    This involves the following

    • Scanning of the invoice and converting into digital (e.g. PDF) form
    • Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to extract specific data fields and values from the document
    • Generating and adding “tags” or “meta-data” to the digital document, to help describe the document and to help for later search and retrieval
    • Storing the digital documents in a document repository or document management system (DMS), to be accessed when needed
  2. Intelligent automation

    Just converting the documents to digital form and storing them is not good enough. The next step is to have a process automation/workflow engine that can orchestrate the document workflow via a process application. The process application will handle approvals, automatic forwarding of the document to the right stakeholder, automated alerts and notifications, and integration with any back-end systems that might be needed. Process applications can be made “smarter” or “intelligent” through technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML). The use of AI to complement automation is in fact what has given rise to the term “Intelligent Automation”.

Benefits

Invoice processing digitalization offers some obvious benefits. The scanning and conversion of the document to PDF form can be done at the gate itself, after which the physical documents can be sent for filing immediately, eliminating the risk of the physical document getting lost or damaged. Search and retrieval can now be done on the digital documents, reducing the time required from a few hours to a few seconds. With intelligent automation, manual data entry or re-entry can be automated fully or partially, reducing the chances of data entry errors. Overall, digitalization offers direct improvements in operational efficiencies with invoice processing cycle time reduction, reduced costs, and improved staff productivity.

Summary

While this article covers the AP area and a portion of the Procure to Pay process, digitalization equally applies to other areas such as Accounts Receivable (AR) and Order to cash processes. These processes are a part of any organization and digitalization of such processes goes a long way towards achieving the vision of the “digitized office” or “paperless factory”. This is of course, provided that companies are willing to invest in digital technologies such as intelligent automation. A lot of companies have already implemented such solutions, or are in the middle of doing so. Where does your company stand?

Footnote: Tangentia’s Invoice Digitalization Solution is designed to help you address the challenges related to handling physical invoices and related documents. Leveraging the power of Robotics Process Automation (RPA), Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Workflow / BPM technologies, the solution delivers all the benefits of digitalization including reduced invoice processing cycle times, reduced invoice processing costs, elimination of data entry errors, improved staff productivity, significantly reduced time and efforts for document search and retrieval and zero risk of documents getting damaged or misplaced during processing. The solution is a part of our Digitalized Office / Paperless Office offering, which includes automation solutions for Procure-to-Pay as well as Order-to-Cash processes.

Please contact us for a complimentary, no-obligation demo and a free consultation with one of our experts.

Write in to automation@tangentia.com today!

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