RPA in procure to pay: automate your procurement processes
RPA (Robotic process automation) has transformed the business world. Almost every process in every industry in the world has implemented some sort of automation. It’s one of the most dominant forces in today’s economy.
Why? Because RPA is the virtual, intelligent workforce that enables businesses to grow more successfully. It’s like outsourcing, but cheaper, faster, and way more effective.
RPA uses artificial intelligence (AI) to complete repetitive, rule-based tasks by automating, aggregating, and consolidating labor-intensive processes. Computers work much faster than humans, which makes RPA effective for tasks that don’t require much insight, real life experience, or subjective judgment to complete. This technology can boost efficiency and reduce error; most importantly, it’s extremely scalable - making it perfect to accommodate growth. Create more RPA processes and scale things up and down easily whenever you want.
How Robotics Process Automation works in procurement
Imagine an assembly line with robotic arms putting everything together and picking up the right thing and putting it at the right place, and apply this to your procurement process.
When someone raises a requisition for products or services, RPA automatically routes that to the right person for approval. Because of the built-in artificial intelligence, the system knows who to send this to, as the structure of your organizations would have been mapped into the system. Upon approval, your virtual workforce creates a purchase order (PO), and matches this against the other components - the goods receipts and the invoices, once they arrive. It automatically draws information out from those documents, checks for a three-way match, and subsequently triggers a payment.
With a digitalized Procurement workflow, you can facilitate completely straight through, touchless processing, so you don’t need to do any data entry, archiving and coding manually. Robotics is essentially doing what your Finance team does, freeing up their time for better suited tasks. You’ll reduce human errors, decrease supply chain risk, and also, save a bit of paper; helping the environment.
Procurement automation with Medius
Medius Procurement comes with RPA technology that will streamline your procurement process. It’s less complex than the traditional way of configuring integrations between systems, and it’s flexible, meaning it’s easy and quick to meet changing needs or fluctuating demand. By digitalizing workflows, you create significant savings and improve efficiency across your organisation. For example, we’ve seen our clients re-allocating people in their AP team into other roles.
If you would like to know more about our RPA or Procurement technology, you can read our guides, or contact our team.
