Open Text : Becoming a fully digital finance organization

Twitter recently announced that employees could now work from home on a permanent basis if they so choose, as did Square. OpenText™ has also moved to a hybrid work model with several employees permanently transitioning to remote work. This trend looks set to continue once 'lockdown' restrictions are lifted. With greater numbers of people now working outside of the traditional office, business and digital transformation strategies must adapt to enable this flexibility, including a requirement to manage all structured and unstructured information to perform essential finance and financial management tasks.

The Harvard Business Review highlights several areas that are key to digital transformation. Besides the required organizational change management, there are three main aspects to consider from a finance department perspective:

• Identifying business-critical documents
• Digitization of incoming documents
• Document management

Let's take a look at these three areas.

Identifying business-critical documents

In invoice management, digital processing has been widely common for many years and has allowed the straightforward matching of invoices, as well as even 'no-touch' scenarios to occur. Next to the well-known values of process automation, the digitalization itself provides, especially in these days, huge benefits. It enables organizations to keep their core services running, whether in a shared service center across the globe or a single home office.

A large amount of value in invoice processing is within the automatic processing of invoices, which is achieved by a large percentage of organizations today. 'Problem invoices,' however, may require access to further procurement systems to obtain additional information. Typically, documents like order confirmations or delivery notes resolve these issues but have often been neglected. These documents must be digitized to become fully independent from manual searches or even an on-premise presence.

Digitization of incoming documents

An expanded invoice processing solution covers the digitization and processing of these related documents, for example:

• Order confirmations
• Delivery notes
• Quotations
• Remittance advices

Document management

Information flows between the back office and business units are largely interconnected. For example, within the procurement process, the back office may need to investigate invoices not matching purchase orders with several different business units. Besides the process flow, access to structured and unstructured information is essential. To facilitate this and to become more resilient, it is mandatory to digitize and manage this information using process flows and electronic workspaces for extended document management. Typical use cases are:

• Disruptions in the supply chain: Delays in supply chains may cause delays in reselling or manufacturing products, which may in turn have cost effects or cash flow impacts on an organization. It`s important to get insight into any information related to postponed deliveries in the procure to pay process.

• Financial obligations: Early insight into financial obligations and potential delays in supply chains will impact a business. Based on the extended incoming document processing and Extended Enterprise Content Management (OpenText™ Extended ECM) systems, information and documents can integrate within business systems to accelerate access to them from anywhere needed.

OpenText has partnered with SAP® for over 25 years and has won the SAP Pinnacle Award SAP Solution Extension Partner of the Year for 13 years. OpenText Professional Services have the right experience, knowledge and experts to help organizations to become more resilient. They have already helped many customers achieve process efficiency, financial insight and smooth business execution. If you would like to discuss this further, please contact Professional Services.