Automate data consolidation to enable strategic analysis
Organizations must find time for strategic analysis to navigate uncertain business trends. However, with the tools currently at hand, they can feel they are being asked to do more than is possible.
The data consolidation required for resilient strategy can weigh heavily on legacy tech stacks. With maintenance, security, version history, and data siloes, this can become unmanageable and eat into strategic tasks.
Large manual workloads can add up and strain teams into making potentially costly errors. A recent Gartner survey of accountants found 59% make financial errors every month, and 73% attribute this to increased workloads.
Automation presents a solution to arduous manual data consolidation that can be automated accurately and flexibly, reducing workloads so teams can spend more time being strategic. According to IMF, almost 40% of tasks globally are now susceptible to automation.
In this blog, we will explore the use cases for automation, its value as a solution, and how it can help enable agile strategy.
Use cases for automation in ERP
ERP can support various back-office tasks across key functions such as finance, HR, procurement, and more.
On-premises and legacy systems create manual work and have poor data integration, leading to large workloads, poor collaboration across functions, and little time to focus on strategic tasks.
Here are some examples of the tasks you can streamline with Cloud-enabled automation:
- Payroll – The payroll process is recurring, and those managing payroll must generate payroll reports manually. As organizations grow, this process becomes increasingly complex with more employees, international payments, and multiple pay groups. When data entry, consolidation, and reporting are automated, users can spend more time analyzing datasets, making observations about the payroll process, and developing forecasts, strategies, and plans.
- Invoice Handling – By digitizing invoicing processes, it becomes much easier to manage and validate data for accuracy, duplicates, and common errors. This ensures fewer invoices are sent back for reprocessing and strengthens compliance. Processing historic invoices is also simplified when data is consolidated in one place, enabling teams to analyze invoicing processes and conduct audits seamlessly.
- Expenses – Expense processes often require collaboration between HR and financial teams, involving significant manual documentation. When integrated into the Cloud, data flows seamlessly between these functions, improving accuracy and visibility. In Cloud ERP, remote employees can submit expenses on a self-service basis, enabling HR and Finance to ensure compliance collaboratively and form strategies to reduce costs.
By adopting Cloud-based ERP automation, organizations can streamline back-office tasks, reduce errors, and empower teams to focus on strategic goals.
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The outcomes automation can help you achieve
Any tech implementation needs clear outcomes to measure success and make a clear case to stakeholders and investors. Below are some of the outcomes that automation can achieve:
- Reduced manual workloads – People managers may already notice increasing manual workloads negatively impacting employee experience and the ability to attract modern talent.
- Improved productivity – As organizations grow, more work or clients naturally increase workloads. Simply hiring more talent creates additional work for HR, but many industries and roles suffer from talent shortages.
Nucleus Research suggests: "We expect organizations moving their ERP to the Cloud to cut IT costs by 20% […] and increase managerial productivity by 15%.”
- Increased Compliance – Automation frees up time for compliance tasks. It can also leverage pre-defined templates for reporting, ensuring mistakes don’t affect compliance.
- Reduced financial errors – Financial errors are costly. Gartner found many financial accountants make errors monthly due to high manual workloads. Automating basic tasks reduces fatigue-related errors.
- Employee Self-Service – Automation enables employees to handle admin tasks themselves, ensuring accurate data entry while consolidating the data seamlessly.
- Improved Strategic Insight – The most valuable outcome of automation is improved focus on strategy. Time saved on automating tasks allows teams to prioritize analysis and planning, which drives organizational success.
What is the future of automation?
Automation is becoming intertwined with AI, especially with innovations in Cloud ERP. While automation and AI are different concepts, they are sequential: successful automation implementation lays the groundwork for AI adoption.
Forbes notes: “Intelligent automation of a business is a prerequisite for AI. If you are thinking about jump-starting your artificial intelligence efforts, it is best to start by building your automation intelligence.”
When data is integrated into the Cloud and processes are automated effectively, AI can leverage accurate data, advanced reporting, and machine-learned insights to support user decision-making.
How can Unit4 help you refocus on strategy through automation?
At Unit4, we have extensive experience onboarding ERP solutions and aiding digital transformation across industries. Our Cloud ERP platform integrates automation to enable strategic thinking by reducing manual tasks.
Unit4’s Smart Automation Services integrate with our next-gen ERP suite, ERPx, to further streamline business processes. ERPx automates a significant proportion of tasks, providing an optimized, customized, light-touch user experience.
Claus Jepsen, CPTO at Unit4, explains: “Our goal is to dramatically reduce the amount of time that users need to spend interacting with ERP systems by automating processes and making tasks more intuitive and intelligent.”
NRS (formerly Magnox) introduced Unit4 FP&A to automate and accelerate financial budgeting and planning, saving their teams around 2,500 hours annually.
The National Trust utilized a unified view across finance, procurement, and projects to automate processes. Previously, overlapping manual tasks made it difficult to extract data for analysis, which hindered strategic planning.
The National Trust’s Finance Manager notes: “Unit4 ERP gives our executives the facts at their fingertips to revise spending plans, change the way we operate, and prepare for the future.”
To learn how Unit4 can support automation in your organization, talk to sales today, visit our
