Elevate Your Business with Invoice Wise for Operations

Invoice wise for Operations

so welcome everybody Welcome to AI Academy as usual remember that we have a lot of resources that are available for you when we are not doing the academy uh so the first one our main point of communication is our Ai and intelligence Community Forum you can visit the Forum with a easy link Snorks and on our community site you can find a lot of getting starting guides FAQs and you can post your questions and the members of the community can help you or you can find previous questions that help in a lot of cases uh the the the academies are recorded and then are posted on our now Community YouTube channel that you can access on YouTube and you also have access to all the other acmis and all the other webinars that are recorded on the channel it's a really good place to go also remember that we have a get started with AI Solutions course on now learning so if you go to now learning and look for the get started with AI Solutions it's a great course that gives you an introduction to all our 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your questions to ask you to use the Q&A panel in zoom and we'll get your questions answer and with that let me introduce the topic for today today we're going to talk about automating the invoice D digitization with AI and account payable operations so some of you have might have been part of some of the previous sessions when we talked about document intelligence and how AI can extract information from documents and we talked about how to to set that up in more of a custom workflow manner but here today we're going to see how document intelligence is embedded in one of our outof thee boox product that covers the endtoend process of managing account payables and I'm going to let be work us through that and our agenda for today we're going to go through an overview and then a demo a recorded demo of the product and we'll leave plenty of time for questions so with that banie the floor is yours everyone a quick intro my name is bnie bhatnager I'm a product manager in our future products incubation team and currently I'm working on accounts payable and thank you L for inviting me to this call and talk about accounts payable it's a new product we just launched in me that was our first release and uh you'll see how Ai and specifically doc Intel which is a platform capability that's being leveraged in this outof thee boox workflow so with that let me share my screen so the workflow that L mentioned it's called accounts payable operations and it's part of the finance and supply chain workflows and uh L already covered the safe haror so that applies to the product and any of the slides and demo you'll see today so I wanted to start with this this slide and for a lot of folks who might not know what accounts payable is it's uh it's really an accounting term uh which is used to describe money that's owed to vendors or suppliers for goods or services that are purchased on credit and the slide shows a typical accounts payable process from when invoices gets submitted to when the processing happens all the issues are being resolved and you can see there's a lot of back and forth here a lot of different personas are involved before these invoices are ready to be paid and there are multiple systems that are involved in this whole processing there has there are a lot of issues and this accounts payable process is not new it's been there for a while these issues have existed for a long time even though there's been Solutions a lot of solutions out there in the market market and we've had conversations with a lot of customers and the issues are repetitive so it's it's a pattern that we are seeing some of the issues are with the manual and unstructured processing this poor collaboration and the accounts payable team which is this Persona and they play a critical role they just cannot keep up with the increasing volume of invoices inquiries that keep coming from the suppliers so this results in there's late payments there's incorrect payments employee productivity loss there's eroded supplier relations and a lot more issues so when you think about all those pain points ultimately they cost time and money we've even spoken with customers who process around 15 million invoices a year imagine that times the money you're spending in processing each invoice manually and the process like I mentioned is still really really manual lot of time is spent on fixing errors and those are still very manually done many different systems and people are involved in fixing those errors late penalties because if the payments not made on time and why is that again because the process is so manual and unstructured and a lot of time gets wasted 84% of the time of this accounts payable team is being spent on these tactical level where they're just fixing issues and errors and reaching out to uh different people who should be fixing those errors instead of that we want all these different personas and the accounts P team to spend time on more strategic uh value add areas so when we were thinking about a solution like I said the problem this accounts payable process and problems have existed for a while nothing new there so we wanted to do it in a better way we spent a lot of time with the research team lot of conversations with customers Partners so before we thought about a solution um we wanted to make sure we get it right some of the benefits that you'll see of this out of the box accounts payable workflow is that it's a unified workflow it brings all these siloed systems stakeholders together we've accelerated a lot of processes and that's why that's where we are very mindful of automating whatever is possible we've used dock inel document intelligence which is our parsing tool and we have a lot more on the road map on the AIML area and that's what we have focused on and in the end we learned that because there's so many systems involved the process is very complex not straightforward so we've made the UI really intuitive very simple and very easy interface to use so the end goal is that we get time back we save money and we make this process more efficient here are some benefits that you'll get from this accounts payable solution and I'll call out few important uh points here the first one is touchless and automated like I said we've taken away a lot of manual clicks you'll see that in the demo today higher efficiency again there are customers who have like 30 Erp systems really complex Integrations and we have a very agnostic framework for integration so we're like the simple layer of uh UI on the top of all these complex silot systems we're not trying to replace the system of record we are bringing those systems together and a layer on the top so one single system of action to process and coll collaborate and drive efficiency which is the biggest pain point when we uh when we've spoken with customers today and then there's a whole seamless collaboration layer on my channel which is for the end users an example is self-service for Supply inquiries virtual agent is something we've leveraged again we want to make that virtual agent more intelligent with more of the AI capabilities and as the platform keeps adding those capabilities we keep bringing them in out of the box for such workflows um so these are some of the key benefits you can read through them also but I just wanted to highlight a few important ones here and how we are offering this like I said this is part of the source to pay operations bundle and we already have two products which were out there so there's a whole procurement capability which allows customers to manage the sourcing and procurement related workflow that was the first product that we went live with this in this workflow the second was uh supplier life cycle operations that is to onboard engage offboard vendors using the supplier portal and then accounts payable operations this is the new capability that we talking about it's going to help pay those vendors that you've received goods from it's really an extension of these existing capabilities all three of the products work together and they leverage capabilities from each other so as a customer your experience is going to be seamless working with these products so next I want to talk about some of the key components like highlights of the solution that uh We've offered so the first two went live in May release uh the third one is coming out in August so the first one is the accounts payable workspace this is a workspace for the accounts payable team specifically that Persona and like Ed mentioned that is the most critical Persona and that team spends the most time trying to get these invoices paid fixing errors answering any questions inquiries on those invoices so we've leveraged our existing procurement workspace we've added on more capabilities this is a single pan of glass for these um accounts payable specialist it could be for any inquiries coming from suppliers new invoices or solving issues so one place where they can start and end their day and with a very easy intuitive UI the second one that I think is more meaningful for all of you here is document intelligence in accounts payable the biggest capability that's needed and that's the biggest pain point also today is it's it's all about paying invoices right when those invoices come in it's EXT extracting the information from those invoices how that's done today it's basically done using a thirdparty siloed tool the user interface is not easy the integration makes it complex with document intelligence every time I've shared it with any customer there's so much excitement and why is that why is this a differentiator for us first of all it's not like your traditional OCR capability it's AI backed really see lessly integrated in the workflow there is no extra effort needed there as invoices come in for the accounts payable team the system will use dock inel that gets triggered on it'll automatically start parsing and digitizing invoices and those invoices could come in the three formats we support so it could be an image a PDF and these invoices come in via email which is the most common source still so document intelligence removes that whole manual effort and to make make this even better because we want um we want to decrease the time of implementation that it takes for customers so we have a pre-train model where it's around roughly I think 750 invoices 17 to 18 different templates so you get a you get an easy start and then as new invoices come in you can um you can get those uh mapped and get those assigned to to the right extraction so document intelligence like I said is one of the key differentiating F uh feature that we have for this product lot of excitement for from customers on this the third is we have a supplier portal with uh SLO is one of the products that I was talking about so in this August release we are providing additional capabilities for these suppliers not only to email the invoices but they can also effective ly collaborate with the accounts payable team by submitting these invoices and inquiries directly from the portal so again a single pain of class for these suppliers they don't have to go to multiple places to in order to figure out how to send an invoice how to figure out when the invoice is going to get paid Etc so they can have the experience all in one single place so moving on um we have a whole road map so this is really the vision that we're going after for the accounts payable so there are two key features like when you think about accounts payable one is invoice processing that we've been talking about and then the second is inquiry management this is really any questions that A supplier or an end employee could have on the invoices payment of those invoices so let's talk about invoice processing in this we have I'd spoken about um email being the most most common source of how invoices get submitted we've just enabled portal there's other channels that we want to introduce as we keep building more it's going to be an iterative approach it's a journey for us we also are going to introduce RPA Bots which is another platform capability so this is for the Legacy tools where no apis are available so different ways you can capture invoices as soon as the capture happen happens document intelligence starts parsing those invoices it does it at a header and the line level so that's pretty cool where it brings out all all the data once that happens then the system automatically and like I said we've automated a lot of manual clicks the system will automatically start matching these invoice to a purchase order and then exceptions are triggered these exceptions are preconfigured we've used flow designer so as a customer you will have more exceptions you can easily configure those using flow designer and then approvals which is a key piece of accounts payable right there there could be thresholds who should approve what all of that approvals is a platform capability we do that really well so we've just leveraged that and enabled it so you can use this for accounts beable also and conf configure it based on your needs and then there's the whole auditing and dispute management this is a huge gap today there's no tool that does it well this is on our road map and this is where we see a lot of AIML being used for example anomalies of when payments are made or when invoices come in the auditing of that automatically finding any patterns Etc so there's a lot to be done in this area but this is going to be a focus and action item for us uh in one of our future road maps and then the payment uh we don't do the actual payment within service now but we get those invoices with any issues and approvals done and they are ready to be paid so via integration you can attach or send those payments to whichever Erp system that is we have a whole road map if there's interest let me know which in uh which um Erp we will have Integrations with we do have spokes in an integration Hub with most of the key big vendors out there the Erp vendors but some of these uh some of these spokes will be upgraded with the actions that are needed for accounts payable which are like very common Erp systems so there's sap uh Hannah and ECC is the one we just spent live with we have arba Koopa Oracle some of those key Erp systems on our road map and then is the inquiry management we enabled that also with email so you can get inquiries as a supplier you can submit an inquiry when is my invoice going to get paid we email but we've enabled portal also in August so that's coming out pretty soon and these suppliers once they've sent those emails or via portal they've sent an inquiry or a question then there are email templates again a key platform capability So within through their email they can do the correspondence or they can get automated notifications which is like directly on the portal they can also uh respond and communicate with the accounts payable team so these are really the two workflows or the two use cases we have in this workflow that we've looked at and built some of it so there were three areas as we were thinking about a solution that where do we want to focus on one was the Tactical side like I'd mentioned we really don't want these personas or teams to be spending time at the Tactical level so we've automated most of it the experience like I said is straightforward we've made it really easy automated as much as we could out of the box on the Strategic side we've provided a dashboard which is a Consolidated View and it's solving for the accounts pable Specialists their managers so they can really see what the landscape is on on the accounts payable side what's getting paid what's getting delayed Etc but we want to take it to the next level where we want to introduce kpis on metrics like how much is the efficiency this is more for the leadership to know how much is the efficiency how much how many invoices are going touch LS Etc so a lot more is going to come on that and this is going to be out of the box of course these are configurable if you want to change the view or add different metrics for yourself and then the intelligence side um ad mentioned dock inel again a lot of excitement so this is something we're really happy about we get a lot of amazing feedback and we keep adding the doc to the Dock inel road map also I'm sure L shares that quite a bit then there's virtual agent that's coming out soon where these suppliers or it could be an end user we virtual agent they can get responses so you really don't need a human that's solving for questions that are really common and the virtual agent can also provide Solutions so we are looking at that next as I speak knowledge base um and then process optimization this came organically with customer conversations so the idea was that we have these processes that we've automated but we don't want to really automate the same process so if you had at 50 steps we don't want to automate all 50 steps we want to see how that process can be done in a more efficient way faster how do we do that so we have process optimization which is our process mining tool it's a platform capability what this does is as these processes are running it tries to it it goes through the process and then it tries to figure out which step is inefficient or is taking the most time so it looks for candidates that can be automated or can be improved upon and it Flags those which is really cool because the whole idea of accounts pable is that how can we make it faster how can we save time how can we take away those inefficient clicks and steps that are taking much longer to process these invoices so there was a lot on this slide but I just wanted to give you an overview and once we're in Q&A I'll be happy to answer any questions that you have so before I do a demo and it's a recorded demo which walks you through the end to end of how accounts payable works and there's a big focus on document intelligence which is the AI capability we've used so far in in this release so the way the process typically works and which you'll see in the demo is that invoices get submitted and email is what I'd mentioned we went live in a May release portal is coming out in August we've introduced uh integration with sap but there's more Integrations that we want to introduce as soon as those invoices come in Doc Intel gets turned on it starts parsing all the important information which is configurable we have around 38 Fields we've provided out of the box common fields for an an invoice but of course you can add more edit those whatever your need is but doc Intel it starts parsing out all that critical information starts digitizing it as soon as that happens a case gets created so every invoice that gets processed is a case every inquiry is a case so it's all case management which gives you out of the box visibility transparency on how your invoice is getting processed who's approving it if there any questions critical questions Etc so once the digitization happens a case gets cre Creed then the system and if you know there's two-way three-way matching a two-way means there is no purchase order uh sorry two-way is there's a purchase order three-way means there's a receipt that needs to be done so the system is configured to intelligently know what type of matching it needs to be and once the matching happens then the system like i' mentioned there are preconfigured exceptions exceptions are errors that can restrict the invoice to get paid it could be where a wrong supplier is submitted or receipt of the goods is not done so different types of exceptions so those are automatically raised by the system and those exceptions then need to be resolved it could be an employee needs to do the receipt so the system can automatically create tasks and assign it to people which can be configured and once those exceptions get resolved then the invoice is it's approved and then it gets ready in a ready state to be paid in the Erp system so that's really the workflow invoices come in all of this uh issues are resolved approvals happen and then they get ready to be paid in the Erp system so with that let me switch to the demo so like I said it's a recorded demo it's going to walk you through the product the highlights which where we use the AI capability dock Intel future capability like process optimization so with that I'll hit Play Welcome service now accounts payable operations we'll follow our supplier as they submit an invoice the accounts payable team as they process invoices and inquiries and the business owner as they collaborate with accounts payable to resolve exceptions John a representative from Acy Corp a strategic vendor logs into the service now supplier port portal to begin interacting in real time with his customers John can do a number of collaborative tasks such as update information submit requests for customer inquiries and even submit invoices for payment John had previously delivered goods and services to his customers and now needs to submit an invoice for payment after a few simple questions John is able to attach his invoice and submit the request for payment John saved a ton of time by using the virtual agent he can also easily selfs Serve by track the status of his invoice now that the invoice is submitted let's take a look at the invoice processing workflow Gilly is an agent on the accounts payable team she uses service now as account payable workspace to get work done in the past she's been saddled with manual repetitive work and dreams of putting her time towards more strategic efforts with service now's workflows and invoice automation Gilly can break free from manual work and focus on valuable strategic initi iives the accounts payable workspace contains a library of Rich insights and other performance metrics that accounts payable teams care about such as invoice automation touchless invoices and on time versus late payment Trends all on a single page these metrics are critical for monitoring the efficiency and improving the operations of accounts payable within the organization everything on this page is actionable so accounts payable team can drill into the underlying data and collaborate with their teams when Gilly starts her day she opens service now into her accounts payable worksspace showing her a number of reports metrics and lists to help her prioritize and complete her work she sees that there are now three invoices assigned to her that have exceptions and she wants to resolve them straight away Gilly takes a look at the exceptions and sees that John's invoice from Arizon needs her help to continue processing in the invoice record Gilly can access all of the contextual information about the invoice behind the scenes service now's document intelligent application to scan the invoice and using pre-trained AI models has extracted the relevant contents and made them actionable parts of the invoice record here you can easily see how service now reads fields from the invoice and matches them up to their respective Fields if needed Corrections can be made here using a simple user interface no issues are found and the invoice was properly extracted getting back to the invoice Billy sees that there are exceptions that need to be resolved exceptions are anything that could block the payment of the invoice data mismatch inaccuracies typos quantity mismatches in this case insufficient good receipts exceptions are automatically found using an exceptions rules engine that runs behind the scene in this invoice it looks like an exception for insufficient Goods receipt was found in order to pay this invoice we must verify that the request to receive the items they ordered not only can Gilly see which align items in the invoice are causing the exception she can track the task that has been automatically assigned to the requester to verify the receipt of the goods once this is completed the invoice can continue processing Gil's work is done continuing our theme of employee collaboration our workflow now moves to the business owner Paula she's just about ready to board an airplane plane as an urgent request for her input comes from the now mobile app Paula gets notified of an invoice related to her purchas order requires a good receipt she's taken to service now to confirm the good receipt she follows the prompts and verifies each affected item the good receipts have been verified and now the invoice can be paid this is where it gets cool let follow Gil as she tracks the efficiency of the accounts payable automation back on the invoice Gilly continues to monitor the progress and notices that the exceptions have been resolved with the goods receipts verified all exceptions have been resolved and the invoice can be paid on time John is thrilled to get an email from his customer letting him know the payment's on the way accounts payable leadership can monitor the ongoing health of their processes with a built-in process mining capabilities Gilly spots and insight indicating that a large number of invoices may include manual steps J can also explore the data using an intuitive process map to uncover where the manual steps are and the impact to the bottleneck they're creating she can then turn those findings into Improvement opportunities and then proc monitoring Improvement and optimization is reality for accounts payable on the surface now platform all right so hopefully that gave you a good idea of of how the product works and some of the capabilities the last slide that I wanted to share was that like I'd mentioned we went live in May but we went live as control go to market so it's available for you to download and the links are here I'll put it in the chat also once you if you want to download accounts payable once you click on these links it will ask for an it'll send an automated approval someone will approve it and you should be able to play around with accounts payable that's all I had like um if there are questions I'm happy to take some questions absolutely thank you bie we had two questions that are kind of the same uh related to sap so somebody is asking if if that's a sap function that service Now is offering now through the platform and somebody else is asking if if that that product replaces the existing ASAP system although does it complemented right so in for the first question yes we have like ad mentioned integration out of the box so we went live with ECC and S4 Hannah what that means is we already had the spokes in our integration Hub spokes for sap we've added actions specifically for accounts payable so now what with this integration live if you want to leverage the spokes you should be able to use the accounts payable integration with no extra effort for these two ECC and S for Hannah and for the second question no we're not trying to replace any of the source systems or Erp systems we are basically um a layer on the top and we're looking to coexist so sap and all these other arba Koopa type of systems they become the transactional systems but we kind of bring those systems together and we are like a layer on the top is what I would say okay great great we get one last question what does all actions refer to um so all actions what that means is that when we have these spokes which are just connectors from service now to whichever application the spokes are for those Foles need to have actions what that means is for every product like for account payable it's specifically around invoice processing if you have accounts receivable it's going to be around that so it's different things that you want a different type of information you want to send back and forth to these to these Source systems so these actions are what allow you to do that so today for example for PeopleSoft we do have actions available but that could be for incidents or change management not necessarily for accounts paybl so those have to be added in hope that answered the question I I loved it I love how we showed the the power of the platform how we can simplify and automate some operations how we can balance between apis and uh paper documents that are processed via dotel and AI thank you so much bie we're going to end the session today uh thank you everybody for joining and the great questions thank you everyone hope this was helpful and reach out for any additional questions happy to chat and provide more information