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During a meeting with one of our customers, where the account payable and procurement team were both present an issue arose. The account payable team was blaming the procurement team for delay in processing the supplier invoices they had received. A majority of the invoices they had received, they had done so by hand.
A common misconception that the supplier has is that the supplier assumes that the aging of the invoice has started as soon as the invoice is submitted to the customer. From the customer’s point of view, aging begins when the invoice has been accepted from the related parties within the organization. This gap has not been addressed to a majority of suppliers.
Account payable team was discussing the plethora of problems that arises on a daily basis. They receive multiple calls a day, from various suppliers, inquiring about their invoices. Just for this task alone, they have assigned a team member who is solely responsible for handling these calls, in order to stop them from hindering their efficiency. The said team member is also responsible for locating the invoices of the supplier in question, often checking with the procurement team to know if they have the invoice, if it had been handed to them. Due to the heavy burden a time consuming process, there is a generalized loss of efficiency. This leads to a disjunction between management and employees. The maximal potential of the employees is not being reached, due to the heavy load in the department, causing management to suspect a lack of effort rather than overwhelming workload. The workload would not have been overwhelming had the gap between suppliers and management (mentioned above) been dealt with.
Also during the meeting, A.B from the accounting team was blaming S.K how the performance of the procurement team reflects badly on the accounting team. For which, the latter gets the blame. In reply, S. K from procurement team asked what measures should be put into place that would allow the team to finish the invoices they have on a daily basis, which is only growing daily.
The conversation kept going back and forth, until finally, they concluded that the workload will not change, and their current approach is not helpful. The current approach is tedious and results in loss of the invoices. The loss of the invoices does not go unnoticed, as the teams get behind on orders, frustrating both the management and the suppliers, leading to a poor result.
At that point, I intervened and asked them to guide me through the processes they are currently using to process their payments. They proceeded to list it for me on the board (as described in the first paragraph). While they were writing it down, I was using my machine to access the web of ISP, creating the same invoice process in it. When I shared it with them, they were acting as test users, approvers and could submit a test invoice in the system. The whole process: creation, users creation and activation didn’t take more than five minutes. The teams were shocked when they noted that ISP did the same job automatically; cutting long hours and laborious effort for them.
A.B asked me “Are you serious? This can be automated as easy as that? We can have all our suppliers with in the same web portal?” I told him yes it is that easy. We created this system keeping in mind teams who are responsible for processing the invoice of the suppliers, in regards to:
The teams were surprised with the ability of the system to have a process created in a short period of time In addition; all the suppliers were in one place, allowing for better handling. After a short trial period, which included using this software with some of their actual suppliers, they were satisfied and purchased the system. Now, they send us thank you emails after having 100% of their suppliers onboard the system and using it to submit all their invoices.
Moral of the story is that ISP will help you build one channel. This channel will gather all your suppliers in one place, to allow for convenient invoice handling. This helps you in avoiding the daunting problem of lost invoices and lets you visualize the various suppliers and invoices.
Visit www.exceeders.com/store/invoice-submission-platform to learn more.
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Originally published Dec 18, 2018 10:49:38 AM, updated July 24, 2019
Topics: Exceeders Blog Fintech ISP
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We live in a time that is characterised by a major technology takeover, a time experiencing the 4th industrial revolution. Companies that want to survive and evolve must keep track of technology breakthroughs, because as we’ve come to know, technology can make or break a company’s success.
In light of that, it is imperative to always look forward in anticipation and not just wait for a trend to start “trending”. We have created a list of what we speculate to be the major technology trends of 2020 that everyone should keep an eye out for.
No matter how much technology advances, it is agreed that no single tool can replace humans. Most organisations out there are already familiar with automation, which involves automating simple tasks that require processes with predefined rules and structured data. The idea of HyperAutomation, on the other hand, involves a combination of tools that together result in the creation of an organisation’s digital twin, which allows for the automation of more complex work.
According to Gartner, combining robotic process automation, intelligent business management software, and AI enables organisations to visualise how functions, processes, and key performance indicators interact to drive value.
Allowing this digital twin to become an integral part of the HyperAutomation process as it provides real-time continuous intelligence about the organisation will enable more informed decision making. Successful automation involves several key factors: discover, analyse, design, automate, measure, monitor, & reassess.
An example of a tool that is designed based on these factors would be Exceed’s ESP.
While Blockchain was first developed back in 1991, it came to life with the introduction of Bitcoin in 2009. The idea of bitcoin mimics printed currency in the transactional sense, but instead of being regulated by a central bank or government, bitcoin is regulated by a network of computers. Blockchain is the protocol on which bitcoin is built.
In the simplest terms, Investopedia defines Blockchain as “a distributed, decentralised, public ledger”, which translates to digital information (blocks) that are stored in a public database (chain). While blockchain is beneficial in peer to peer transactions and small-scope projects, it remains immature for enterprise deployments due to technical issues.
However, market speculations anticipate it to be fully scalable by 2023. According to research conducted by Gartner, “true blockchain will have the potential to transform industries, and eventually the economy, as complementary technologies such as AI begin to integrate alongside blockchain.”
Can Machines Think?
AI involves designing “human-like” machines that are able to perform tasks requiring intelligence. Machines are built to mimic processes and tasks that involve recognition of images, speech, or patterns & decision making. Those processes include acquiring information and rules, using those rules to reach conclusions, & self-correction.
Unlike traditional coding, the computer creates instructions for itself using machine learning algorithms rather than having humans write those instructions. To demonstrate the effect of AI, take google translate for an example.
When it first went live, google translate used to have more than a million lines of code (human-created instructions). Currently, google translate has 500 lines of code due to machine learning. However, while it is expected to overtake every industry, one must understand its limitations.
Knowledge in AI comes from data, and for the machine to be accurate, it must read from accurate data. While businesses have been understanding what AI can and can't achieve for the past few years, it expected that the future points towards a time where machines are appointed not only all of the physical work, as they have done since the industrial revolution, but also the mental work involving planning, strategising, and making decisions.
Sources:
https://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/blockchain.asp
https://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/gartner-top-10-strategic-technology-trends-for-2020/
https://www.simplilearn.com/top-technology-trends-and-jobs-article
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You see the end product but we’re bringing you closer to the people behind it !
Among our recent partnerships, we joined forces with Ubility.
To bring the service provider closer to YOU, we sat down with their CEO Khaled Dassouki, to gain firsthand insight on the things they do and the types of human capital profiles that drive their success.
Khaled is a Lebanese national with an engineering background and PhD in Artificial Intelligence & Security obtained at Université de Technologie de Troyes, France.
As a result of over 20 years in the field, Khaled decided to establish Ubility in France and build it on a base of Artificial Intelligence in Customer Experience, which was considered to be highly innovative as it was a niche field.
Khaled was quick to notice that there had been a shift in the way business was carried out, the shift had been made to be more customer-focused. With that came new challenges, the ease with which customers can connect with the business led to a huge influx of queries and requests for support, which was very time consuming, tedious, and required businesses to grow their customer support teams leading to higher costs.
While growing their teams did solve some challenges momentarily, organisations were quick to realise that the complexity and average time required to resolve customer challenges was growing which eventually led to dissatisfied customers. Not only that, customer service agents were quickly burning out as they were answering an ever-growing list of routine questions rather than helping solve complex problems and offering innovative solutions.
Taking all that into account, Ubility offered an AI-powered platform that learns from interactions between an organisation’s customers & their customer care team to enable quick suggestions of appropriate solutions that could solve a customer’s challenge in seconds rather than minutes.
In addition to that, Ubility also offers AI training for professionals in the IT industry, a sales chatbot that is based on a recommender system and knows the sales cycle, and AI Consultancy in which they are recruited to build and implement AI services in response to an assessment of an organisation’s processes.
Success Story
Ubility was commissioned by a Telecom operator in the gulf to assess and analyse their IT processes. After a thorough analysis done by their team of experts, it was concluded that a huge portion of their IT processes had an opportunity for automation.
After studying the best ways in which they could automate their processes, they determined that incorporating AI would allow the elimination of a manual process by looking at historical data. Instead of their operational costs raking up to 50,000 USD a month, they were now cut by 80% to be only 10,000 USD.
Intrigued and want to learn more?
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Every sales manager knows that taking proper care of the sales team is an unwritten rule of a business to achieve greater heights.
Every business owner dreams of a sales team that is 100% motivated all the time. Unfortunately, this dream is often not a practical reality.
As the pressure of digitisation on sales functions has grown in the past couple of years, companies are looking for new approaches to optimise sales enablement.
In some ways, empowering a a sales team simply means giving them greater autonomy of decision making and thereby brings better outputs. Sales managers seek out for better ways to do so because no marketing mixture is going to be everlastingly successful!
Training is one of the core elements in empowering any workforce. This is also true for a sales team. There are always new technological developments happening in a company's environment. If they are more technical in nature, giving proper training to the team members is a proactive approach.
The overall skill developed by the sales team is depending upon the quality of the training they receive. It is very important to pay attention to each member and shape them as equally trained and skilled.
Nobody needs to tell you that communication and collaboration are the keys to have a healthy sales campaign. It is all about having up-to-date information and keeping everyone on the same page.
Uninterrupted communication through relentless collaboration enables greater dynamism. Authorities should make sure that there is no communication gap and no one in the team is left behind.
Though sales persons are perceived as the smart ones, there needs to be constant empowerment. They should be more customer-centric for the most part. To have greater customer focus, it is important to have strong back up and this can be provided by the manager who offers ultimate support with solid marketing campaigns.
These campaigns should have the essence that attract and keep the customers hooked. In a way, the management is providing them ultimate authority to do more things which is aimed at bringing more fulfilling outcomes.
Offering more money, time off or a great gift is another great way to give employees a goal to work toward. A recent Aberdeen study shows that non-cash incentives are usually more effective than financial compensation, with top performers 31% more likely to prefer non-cash options.
Your best bet of getting the right incentive for your employees is by giving choices and let them vote on what incentive they’d most prefer. It will give your employees a greater sense of involvement, kickstarting a refreshed sense of excitement.
This should be cited as the most important point because, without the contribution of IT, organisations cannot dream of making it big. These days, marketing success needs smart technology solutions. If the sales team needs to be out in the field, why don’t they have a smart sales application?
We must agree that a sales application can do a lot of automation tasks which have been actually pestering the hapless sales team. It is going to be a great remedy as the features are most advanced and help to sort out several sales issues.
Enabling self-service for B2B buyers isn’t the only benefit of digital commerce. By bringing the sales team into the digital channel, B2B merchants can target the most complex parts of the purchasing experience and turn them into opportunities to retain and grow each account.
The competition in B2B commerce is growing, and the increasing expectations for great digital experiences mean that even long-time industry leaders will need to evolve in order to stay ahead. Empowering the sales channel to provide insightful, consultative selling across all their accounts will resolve the channel conflict that many companies struggle with, accelerating growth for years to come.
We live in a time that is characterised by a major technology takeover, a time experiencing the 4th industrial revolution. Companies that want to survive and evolve must keep track of technology breakthroughs, because as we’ve come to know, technology can make or break a company’s success.
You see the end product but we’re bringing you closer to the people behind it !
Every sales manager knows that taking proper care of the sales team is an unwritten rule of a business to achieve greater heights.