It’s not what you spend it’s how you spend it

Finextra recently reported that IT will be the top spending priority for the financial services industry in the UK during 2014. The site suggested that the investment would be driven by factors such as the increasing competition from peer-to-peer lending and crowd-funding – fundamentally digital platforms that have become popular as the credit crunch significantly reduced bank lending to business.

Banks however would be ill advised simply to copy the platforms that have sprung up in the digital era as alternatives and focus on using technology to enhance and support what they are fundamentally good at: providing and maintaining a relationship with their customers over a long period of time. Most banks now have secure client webpages for customers and many have apps that can reside on customers’ mobile phones. Access to information and transactions are therefore easily accessible. So where should this investment go?

In many cases banks could do well to focus their technology infrastructure spend less on front of house and more on back office functionality. Process automation has a number of key benefits for the banking sector, even beyond the obvious advantage of cost reduction. It provides a clear audit trail for compliance, a secure environment in which to store important documents and enables customer facing staff to have the latest information available at the click of a button.

Documentation can be captured in whatever form it arrives: email; fax or even by traditional post, processed and digitised and integrated quickly into workflows. This reduces manual intervention and ensures that relevant information is available quickly and easily. For those attempting to open an account, take out a new product or service or conduct unusual transactions, process automation can help to significantly reduce the amount of time spent waiting – an important aspect of customer satisfaction.

ReadSoft has been successfully supporting the banking sector with the implementation of process automation to bring traditional banks into the digital age. For more information and to read about some examples, please click here.

Driving automation into the BPO

The modern BPO faces new challenges that the industry has not had to deal with to date.

Traditionally BPOs flourished by offering increased flexibility and reduced costs to businesses that wished to outsource their business processes. The trade-off for businesses was the risk of a compromise in security or privacy. BPOs could chase lower labour rates around the world to deliver outsourcing at a more and more efficient cost.

In India labour prices up by 17% since 2009 according to Business Insider, so those days are broadly gone. This is driven by a number of factors, not least the significant reduction in labour arbitrage across the world. As new centres for BPOs grew, wealth flourished, pushing labour prices up. Furthermore infrastructure and property prices have remained high despite the global recession. BPOs are no longer able to differentiate on cost alone. They need to find other benefits.

This environment is further complicated by increasing competition within the BPO market and customers demanding more value from their outsourced relationships.

So where does a BPO look to add value, reduce labour cost, differentiate and stave off competition? Automation provides a significant opportunity. BPOs are always dependent on labour costs until labour is replaced with automation. New developments in automation enable ‘self-learning’ processes to improve over time, delivering a further value add to customers. This is particularly relevant for BPO that are tasked with continuous improvement targets – not least when renewals are being discussed.

 

To find out more about how Readsoft can help BPOs achieve real ongoing savings and benefits to customers through optimisation, click here.

AP Teams Assemble!

Accounts Payable News and ReadSoft unite to discover AP’s latest SME heroes

Nominate here

Are you an AP team that works well together and produces outstanding results? Is your team forward thinking, willing to take risks or dedicated to delivering innovation in your day to day operations?

Well now is the time to sing your praises. ReadSoft is teaming up with Accounts Payable News to find the UK’s best AP team – SME; one that exhibits a supportive, communicative work ethic to deliver best in class results.

The 2013 APN Awards offer a chance for AP professionals to be recognised for commitment, dedication and excellence across a challenging business environment which demands focus and dedication.

ReadSoft’s Ashley Kirk, an award-winning member of the ReadSoft finance team with direct responsibility for AR and AP, will be joining the judging panel.

“We will be looking for teams achieving best results,” says Ashley. “Key will be those teams able to demonstrate seamlessly efficient improvements which resolve the issues of excessive training, deliver less work for administrators, improve reporting and compliance, and crucially demonstrate cost reduction throughout the AP process.”

The winning AP Team of the Year – SME, should be able to demonstrate process improvements used effectively by all the team members; show where new technology has been recommended and then be able to give proven results, which include cost savings.

What will set apart the winning team will be the ability to demonstrate a team work ethos which recognises excellence in all key workers, not just an individual. That team will have to be imaginative and show intelligent performance.

“The winner will be a team with personality and drive, one which embraces the new, innovates and challenges existing wisdom with regards to the procedures we see in AP teams,” says Ashley. “All the judges are very excited to see what smaller British businesses are able to accomplish and look forward to celebrating their outstanding achievements.”

To be in with a chance of being named AP Team of the Year – SME, the nominated organisation must have a turnover of less than £50m pa. If you work in a team you’re proud of, of have dealt with a team you think is exceptional in its performance, acknowledge them today by nominating them for the AP Team of the Year – SME Award. The nominations are open until 9^th August, and the shortlist will be announced on the 16^th.

Ashley and the rest of the judges will then convene to choose the winner to be announced on the 8th October.

www.readsoft.co.uk

Defeating the retail doldrums

Many retailers had hoped for a bumper Christmas, but the final figures show a clear split between the big four – Tesco, Sainsbury’s, Morrisons and Marks & Spencer’s –  with Sainsbury claiming record day sales and Tesco reporting its strongest growth in UK Christmas sales for three years.

These results conclude a tough year for UK retailers, with a number of big High Street names going into administration, including Peacocks, Game, Aquascutum, Clinton Cards Comet and most recently Jessops. According to the British Retail Consortium (BRC) the retail segment has stagnated since the beginning of 2011, with few signs that the sector will improve in 2013.

So what differentiates Tesco and Sainsbury’s? The latter saw customer transactions exceed 27 million during the seven days prior to Christmas, partly on the back of six new supermarkets and 19 new convenience stores, bring the total to 500 stores across the UK. Tesco also saw its online food sales increase by 18% on the run up to Christmas.

It is a trend the BRC recognises: “For the more established retailers, it seems that much of the growth is now coming from online orders, while shop sales are stagnant at best. Many retailers have invested a lot in making their websites easier to use across devices and also increasing confidence in their online security.”

This seems to be borne out by Morrisons, with like-for-like sales in the six weeks to 30 December being down 2.5% from a year earlier, this is one retailer that as yet has failed to embrace online shopping.

The drive to increase traditional bricks and mortar stores, with the resulting staff increases, and the move towards online shopping means retailers of all sizes have to deal with ever greater amounts of unstructured data. Gaining control of this data and then deriving value from it to improve the customer experience is an area that ReadSoft has particular experience.

Each year Tesco distributes a six-page on-line questionnaire called ‘Viewpoint’ to its UK staff, giving them the opportunity to express their views on almost every aspect of their employment, in part this is what has helped Tesco continue to grow its business. With around 180,000 questionnaires, such surveys though ultimately valuable are time intensive and costly in terms of collecting, processing and analysing the data on the forms.

“We wanted to do more mining of the data to maximise the value of the information, as well as cut down the survey processing time and costs,” says Ros Draper, Viewpoint manager within Tesco’s Group HR Department. Once the questionnaires have been received, batched and scanned, Tesco used ReadSoft’s software to verify the data and pinpoint any errors, scanning around 10,000 questionnaires per day. The information captured by ReadSoft’s software means that the HR team has timely data at its fingertips to analyse staff feedback on a store-by-store basis and provide individual line managers with reports on how their staff are feeling. For the Christmas period this enables the retailer to recognise when workload becomes an issue for staff in stores. For Tesco this led to the introduction of a programme called ‘reducing vacancies’ to solve this issue and which leads to the creation of thousands of additional jobs at Christmas. You can read more about this project here.

This is just one example of how document automation can help retailers manage and derive additional business value from their data, and so drive greater customer engagement and sales in a tough and highly competitive market place.

Laying the foundations for a stronger business

In a world where speed of response is a highly prized commodity for businesses, being able to respond accurately and rapidly to prospects, customers and internal requests is a critical asset. Data is the foundation of modern business and the simple truth is that you cannot build a business when those foundations are fragmented, inaccessible or out-of-date. That is only going to lead to missed opportunities and loss of business.

As a result, enterprise content management (ECM) is on most organisations list of ‘must have’ tools.  Without content management, from an ECM platform such as Microsoft SharePoint, information is just data – unsorted, unusable and costly.

As a CIO there are searching questions to ask of a business:

• How much data is in your SharePoint sites – and how many sites do you have?
• How do your compliance officers cope with data proliferation and the risk of lost documents?
• What is the financial cost of the offsite storage and retrieval of paper documents?

If you cannot answer these questions, or the answers terrify, then you should really start to look at how automating your SharePoint environment can make a significant difference to your operations. We describe the proliferation of unstructured content as a ‘data whirlwind’ –  documents which are edited and uploaded to varied network locations; emails arriving and being sent; incoming and outgoing post; all changing all day, every day and increasing exponentially.

This is a surprisingly common situation, according to Gartner Group, “Enterprise content will grow 650% by 2014,” but here is the shocker, “80% of it remains unstructured.” Given such predictions, there is a good chance your business will be dealing with unstructured data, and if that is the case then your business is going to be more disorganised and less controlled which means there is a greater chance for non-compliant, ‘risky’ material to get caught up in the daily workflow. Consider mistakenly sending out an old, uncontrolled version of a contract to a new customer with key clauses missing, one wrong document could be the difference between profit and loss on the deal.

There is certainly no difficulty in creating the data, so much so that getting historical data in and out of your ECM has become the biggest barrier to making effective use of SharePoint. ReadSoft offers one simple, standardised solution which can capture any document and convert the data to indexed digital files will reduce labour and costs associated with managing/storing paper documents, and moves a business in a positive direction.

To learn more download our latest whitepaper here

It’s a Kodak moment today at the Oracle User Group Conference #ukoug2012

The 2012 Oracle User Group Conference is proving to be a roaring success, visitor numbers are up, and with ReadSoft being the only Accounts Payable (AP) automation specialists exhibiting at the conference, stand #28 has proven to be a hive of activity. Today our partner Kodak joins us to demonstrate how using high quality scanning and our automation software can advance financial processes.

Deploying advanced scanning systems and automating invoice processing removes cost and increases efficiency in the payables process. The aim is to replace the costly, time consuming, error laden manual management of tasks within the processing lifecycle during Invoice Registration, Reconciliation, Approval, Payment, Filing and Retrieval. This efficiency is largely borne through removal of paper from the process and enabling digital documents and workflow within Oracle R12.

Whether controlling workflow for invoices entering Oracle E-Business Suite with ReadSoft INVOICEIT, or seeking a solution for complete document processing automationwith PROCESSIT, ReadSoft’s consultants are on hand today and tomorrow to discuss the necessary steps for automating and fully integrating accounts payable processes in R11i and R12 Oracle installations

The 2012 UKOUG Conference continues today and tomorrow the ICC Birmingham.

 

Bringing shared services up the government agenda

It was a historical day in the Houses of Parliament this Thursday. Not only did the arrival of the Leveson report drive vehement political debate in the House of Commons, but behind closed doors an exclusive gathering of the UK’s leading lights in shared services and outsourcing were brought together by ReadSoft and the Shared Services Forum UK.  

Against the backdrop of the Churchill Dining Room, in a series of presentations and debates, representatives from the UK’s largest shared service centres (SSCs) including RBS, Rolls Royce and TalkTalk, where hosted by Bob Blackman MP, Chair of the All Parliamentary Group for Outsourcing and Shared Services, as well as former Shadow Chancellor of the Exchequer, the Right Honourable Michael Portillo.

In a series of wide ranging conversations, these companies came together in order to deliver their wealth of experience and insight in order to shape future government agenda on shared service centres and outsourcing in the UK.

ReadSoft was proud to sponsor this unique event and took the opportunity to present its view on the value of automation as a sensible future course for Shared Service and outsource providers seeking a more cost effective and efficient means to extend services to customers, and so ensure Britain remains competitive in the future.

Click here to learn more about ReadSoft’s solutions for SSCs and outsourcing.