Digital transformation is an ongoing journey. Now that many organizations have laid the foundations to successfully transform their core processes and start reaping the benefits of these changes, their focus has shifted to increasing ROI.

To make the most of their previous IT investments, companies are starting to further optimize high-volume core processes, like lead-to-cash, source-to-pay, and hire-to-retire. They’re automating the processes or process steps that are unique to their operations and thus outside the scope of the functionality of standard business applications.

Using process automation tools, customers can leverage low-code application development tools, generative AI, and prebuilt content to create workflow processes and task automations—extending or customizing business processes to meet their specific requirements.

The following are two common use cases that highlight how process automation can increase the efficiency in your lead-to-cash and source-to-pay processes.

Automate order entry

Processing purchase orders to create sales orders is an integral part of the lead-to-cash process. Automating this task vastly improves efficiency. For example, a company may have 100 business partners who each submit about 10 purchase orders a month—around 12,000 a year.

Many of these orders come in a wide range of formats, from Excel spreadsheets to unstructured data in the form of PDFs, emails, or scanned images of paper orders, which must be carefully sorted through for the necessary information to create a sales order.

With each order taking an average of 10 minutes to process, that’s 2,000 hours a year spent processing purchase orders and creating sales orders—valuable time that sales teams could spend on higher-value tasks like reporting, analytics, or compliance.

Modernizing purchase order processing with automation helps streamline the lead-to-cash process while also significantly reducing errors. Sales operations teams can collaborate with their IT teams to create a robotic process automation (RPA) bot to scan e-mails for selected keywords, extract the order information, and transfer it to the target system, where it automatically enters the information to create the sales order and triggers a notification to relevant stakeholders.

Automation helps optimize efficiency, freeing up valuable time for higher-value tasks and enabling companies to respond quickly to increases in business volume.

Automate paper invoices and free accounts payable to focus on what matters

No matter the industry, the many time-consuming, error-prone steps of paper-based invoice processing make it the most painstaking part of a company’s source-to-pay process. After receiving a paper invoice, an employee must validate the invoice and purchase order details, manually enter the relevant information into the system, map it with the purchase order and delivery, and then post it for financial processing and approval.

This averages out to about 12 minutes spent on a single invoice, and with thousands of invoices to process every month, it doesn’t take much for source-to-pay process performance to dip due to submission errors, bottlenecked workflows, and more.

However, with intuitive automation tools, IT teams can develop process automation that combines workflow orchestration, robotic process automation, and generative AI-based intelligent document processing. These capabilities can reduce the processing time of 12 minutes per invoice down to 45 seconds, increasing efficiency by 93% and eliminating errors caused by manual entry.

For example, after uploading an invoice document, a bot will automatically extract the details and create an invoice within the ERP system. Employees can also set up business rules to automatically approve or reject certain invoice types, with rejections triggering an approval workflow that notifies the stakeholder to check the invoice.

Foster a culture of collaboration

Your process experts know best where specific process-optimization opportunities lie. That’s why close collaboration between these process experts and your development teams is crucial for the success of any automation initiative. Cross-functional or fusion development drives innovation by integrating diverse perspectives and expertise.

SAP Build Process Automation combines low-code simplicity, AI-powered intelligent assistance, preconfigured content, and easy-to-reuse components in a centralized, managed environment. It enables both professional developers and citizen developers with no coding experience to define, adapt, and improve business processes. Developers can seamlessly collaborate with business users and easily contribute complex logic to low-code projects. Business users can easily modify workflows or business rules to suit specific needs without needing to involve IT to implement simple changes.

A successful digital transformation is about more than just adopting new tools and digitizing processes. It’s about embracing a digital-first mindset that empowers employees across the business to increase efficiency, reduce errors, and focus on tasks that improve customer experiences and drive innovation.

Automate creation of sales orders

With SAP S/4HANA and SAP ECC, you can leverage pre-built content to automate the creation of sales orders from Excel files.

If you’re ready to bring your company into the next phase of digital transformation, you can get started today with a free trial.

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