How to Handle Complex Supply-Chain Processes in Business Environments

Businesses with complex supply chain processes involve hundreds of repetitive, mundane, but necessary tasks. 

There are orders to fulfill, shipping to deliver on time, invoices to validate and reconcile, errors and discrepancies to handle and resolve, fraud, and compliance issues to sort out. All of these take up a significant amount of time and effort.

For example, in a global logistics company, the procurement team may have several managers handling several separate tasks.

When a claims process comes in, the procurement lead may be required to judge refund tolerances. In most cases, they take several steps before arriving at such decisions, which can be tedious and time-consuming.

However, if the manager can clearly articulate the steps they follow to make decisions, those steps can be defined as rules and automated through robotic hyperautomation process. 

The result: less manual work, more time to focus on other core business matters, and enhanced workflow.

Benefits of Hyperautomation and AI in Procurement

AI and hyperautomation has progressed in the last few years. 

In 2020, the global Robotic Process Automation (RPA) market was worth $2.5 billion, with 78% of organizations implementing RPA and 16% planning to do so in the next three years. 

That tells you how rapidly businesses are adopting RPA owing to its many benefits, among them:

• Autonomously following up on deliveries and supplier performance, reducing the amount of human involvement in the process
• Discrepency resolution performed by machines, almost completely eliminating process errors and disputes
• Grouping orders across your business’s locations thereby increasing the potential for savings on big orders 
• Reducing the amount of compliance paperwork you need to file
• Software Bots manage and goveren order fulfillment procedures saving time for everyone on the team
• Reducing tail spend by ensuring employees follow processes and adhere to a budget
• Reducing purchase-to-pay cycle enabled through instant response to every event throughout the entire process
• Increasing compliance and lower probability of fraud

In many cases, businesses don’t examine their rules, which don’t make sense in the current digitally-led business environment. You can turn your business rules into more accurate and consistent algorithms to make better, more consistent decisions. 

How to Set Up and Use RPA in a Complex Environment

It’s not easy to make sense of the numerous issues in a complex procurement environment with an all-in-one tool. Often, an automation tool is the best starting point to create a procurement system built on efficiency.

But how do you get set up and start using it in a complex business environment? Let Nipendo handle it. 

Our cloud platform offers a complete, end-to-end, industry and vertical agnostic hyper-automation of all procure-to-pay processes across spend categories of both goods and services. 

Using robotic automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) capabilities, we can help your business augment your:

• ERP systems
• Procurement applications 
• P2P processes 

For enterprises that face complex procurement and supply chain environments, Nipendo offers quick implementation and automation of order fulfilment, shipping, deliveries, blanket orders, forecasts, task management, consignment, supplier management and registration, workflows and BPM, invoice reconciliation and other processes.

Through our process governance and compliance features, we can quickly configure and define business rules for your business processes.

Plus, Nipendo identifies and corrects errors or discrepancies using Deep Learning capabilities with continuous-improvement by learning user behavior and patterns, and through feedback. 

Nipendo easily and seamlessly integrates with your existing ERP systems and management applications. For example, if you’ve already installed Ariba or Coupa, we complement them and extend their capabilities, so you can enjoy a better return on investment (ROI).

Want to learn more about automation? Wonder how you could facilitate this within your procurement department? Contact us about your specific procurement challenges and goals.