5 January 2023
Investments in automation have increased by double digits over the past few years, and this rise is anticipated to continue even if it will happen at a little slower rate than in prior years.
Businesses’ plans for automation in 2023 and their investment priorities will change as a result of the uncertain economy and the necessity for automation technologies to work together flawlessly. Since many predict that 2023 will be a recession year, firms will adopt a more restrained approach to IT investment.
Investments in automation have increased by double digits over the past few years, and this rise is anticipated to continue even if it will happen at a little slower rate than in prior years. When there is a downturn in the economy, emphasis will be more intensely focused on how automation may actually boost financial performance by bringing more cash to the balance sheet and cutting costs to increase operating profitability.
Key Priorities Of Financial Automation In 2023:
Automating manual repetitive operations, addressing supply chain issues, enhancing order-to-cash, enhancing customer experience, and cutting lead times will be the top priority in terms of processes. There must be several types of automation in place to address these issues. According to some, the main technology required to enhance operations is workflow automation. Along with robotic process automation, intelligent document processing, and other forms of automation, application integration is crucial.
Broadening automation technologies to support seamless end-to-end automation
Enterprises have typically had to choose a variety of automation solutions from several vendors to adopt through automation. Finance teams need to give smooth integration of these technologies a high priority because it is a major problem. Leading automation platform vendors have added various forms of automation in recent years to provide a wide range of automation capabilities. These types of automation include workflow automation to move work toward completion while supporting both automated and human-in-the-loop requirements, front-end automation using RPA, and backend automation using APIs. It also offers content automation, which applies AI to transform both structured and unstructured content into a form that can be accessed by machines.
Finance teams are now more simply and swiftly able to extract insights from massive data sets because of the expansion of automation capabilities. As a result, CFOs and leaders in finance are able to make better judgments than before and unstructured data can be unlocked to provide firms a huge competitive advantage.
Measuring the business value of automation
The ability for finance teams to link improvements to financial outcomes is another major challenge. Process mining, which examines a business process, and task mining, which determines how employees carry out the actual work or tasks within a wider business process, can both help finance teams overcome these challenges.
Process mining creates documentation on how a business process operates in production by gathering event logs from applications, producing a statistical study of process efficiency. Task mining records how manual labor is conducted by monitoring employees when they are performing the tasks. It also generates a statistical analysis that offers a score about whether the task is a viable candidate for automation.
Further automating manual repetitive processes and reducing lead time
As the economy gets tighter, it is important to thoroughly grasp the automation potential before investing in it. This will help create high-quality paperwork and specifications and give you a way to prioritize your efforts. Businesses can dramatically shorten closure days, enhance agility, reduce costs, boost productivity, decrease delays, and minimize errors by automating their financial procedures further. In turn, this frees up the finance team’s time to concentrate on other important areas such as growth strategy, risk management, and success.
Finance executives predict more financial volatility in 2023, thus automation technologies should be a key component of enhancing operational performance. Leading automation platform vendors are concentrating on various initiatives to provide platforms that are extensible, easier to use, and significantly better at planning, quantifying benefits prior to an automation, and measuring performance on an ongoing basis that is tied to financial performance. It is imperative that businesses review what they have automated and identify areas for improvement in order to better position themselves for the uncertain market of 2023.
