Customers make big investments in ERP to boost efficiencies which in turn enables growth and make them high performing organisations. Most organisations as part of their ERP implementations would have streamlined their business processes, established Shared Services Centres to carry out transactional elements for back-office processes.

Unfortunately, in many organizations, legacy processes hinder the implementation, and several tasks still need a lot of manual input and human intervention. This hinders ERP systems from achieving their full potential.

For any business to stay ahead of its competitors continuous Innovation is necessary. Organisations have several levers for process optimisation.

• Traditional process design/re-engineering
• Lean process improvements
• Finance application features adoption (E-Business, ERP Cloud) and
• Digital enablers, such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Intelligent process Automation (IPA) and the use of Analytics.

Robotic Process Automation can be a powerful springboard to the automation and digital transformation of these traditional processes. Prior to RPA, optimisation in ERP functions revolved around making the process lean and efficient through BPM methodology. These solutions streamlined the, but often at a heavy cost which included IT development, and even then, it cannot be said to have truly automated the process. This is where robotic process automation (RPA) comes in.

Finance is a good example of where RPA fits well and there is a reason most of our customers start their automation journey in finance and accounting. The finance back-office functions have a high number of tedious manual tasks. Further, many of the processes in finance workflows are data-handling chores that do not hinge on human judgement. They are repetitive and predictable, but necessary to the function of bigger finance workflows.

Something needs to be done to ensure business teams can be freed up from these mundane tasks and help them utilise their critical thinking and creativity.

Many people see Robotic Process Automation as a short-term tactical solution. This is not by itself a bad thing – we see this as stage one towards the digital shift. Most organisations start at this basic level, where the main objective of automation is costs saving from horizontal processes such as Finance and HR or other shared service processes. This is a useful proving ground for automation projects and provides the incentive (confidence, experience, funding) to move on to the future stages.

This is where our Winbot – Winfo’s Back Office Automation Solution come in. The Winbot solutions are prebuilt for Oracle E-Business Suite and ERP Cloud and the result is end-to-end process optimization for the following finance functions and more:

Procure to Pay

• Vendor Master Data Management
• Purchase Order Management
• GRN Creation
• Supplier Invoice Creation
• Supplier Statement Reconciliation

Order to Cash

• Customer Master Data Management
• Invoice Management
• Customer Receipts Management
• Customer Statement Reconciliation

Project Accounting

• Project Master Data Management
• Month End Accruals
• Rate Schedule definition

Record to Report

• Journal Creation
• Budgeting and Forecasting
• Bank Statement Reconciliation
• Intercompany Settlements and Reconciliations
• Finance Period End Close

Customers who have implemented Oracle ERP can implement the Winbot solution and get on their digital journey in a matter of weeks. The pre-build processes can be dragged and dropped into your ERP environment. Winfo can help develop a PoC and a roadmap in approx. 3 weeks’ time.

We believe this is a great starting point for businesses that want to lower costs, boost productivity, increase employee engagement, and facilitate long-term innovation with RPA.

Notes for Summary in the end

We are Winfo – a global IT solutions company with significant consulting experience across the UK and the US. Our experts have been problem-solving and solutioning across the Oracle Suite for many years. The senior Winfo team has at least 20 years of ERP experience.

We have been working closely in partnership with RPA providers since 2018 to deliver RPA based solutions to ERP customers. Our in-depth ERP experience combined with our now-extensive knowledge of RPA, is what sets us apart and allows us to deliver quality, niche solutions with guaranteed ROI.

Please contact us for a demo on Winbot and how you can fast-forward your digital journey.