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We are moving closer and closer to a hands-free world. Think of all the things in your life that you’ve already begun to automize. We’ve traded home-cooked meals, Blockbuster, and brewing coffee for the drive-thru, Netflix, and the all-powerful Keurig Cup and there’s nothing wrong with that. We’ve traded these things away, so we have more time to focus on the things we love, our passions. But why haven’t we done the same with our businesses? How much time are we losing manually going through every single invoice, travel expense, and sales order? What would the outcome be if you were able to spend more time focusing on the things critical to your business? At the end of the day, you have a choice. Do you want your business to be Blockbuster or do you want to be Netflix?

After reading this blog post, make sure to check out this video on Intelligent Business Document Processing by clicking the link!

The Baker Benefits

As someone involved with a small to medium sized business, you already know that there is no asset more valuable than time. There’s simply just too much to do, so your time shouldn’t be wasted inputting data from pdfs and emails. Picture it like this. You are an artist baker, business is going great, and you just hired your 250th employee and opened your 10thshop location. You are now presented with a choice. You can either spend your time sifting through the hundreds of invoices, proof of deliveries, purchase orders, and remittance advices or you can automate these tasks and spend your time doing what you love best – baking cakes, exploring your creativity, and helping your customers.

With Intelligent Supplier Invoice Processing already out and Intelligent Travel Expense Scanning having released the past week, ByDesign is evolving into a truly hands-free ERP. If you want to talk about competitive advantage in the small to midsize market, time makes the difference. With Intelligent Mobile Expense Reporting, Intelligent Supplier Invoice Scanning and Mobile Lead Creation coming soon, ByD customers will be able to clearly see the benefits of the automation these solutions offer.

If you want to see the newly released Intelligent Travel Expense Scanning in action, click here and for the “older” Intelligent Invoice Scanning click here. However, this is only the beginning. We will soon reveal how blending up the Intelligent Robotic Process Automation with the AI services will help you with the upload of the documents in ByDesign with Proof of Deliveries, Sales Order creation based on customer Purchase Order sent via email or Remittance Advice creations based on your customer’s email notifications. So just stay tuned for a 2021 full of intelligent business document processing transformations in ByDesign.


You might be asking, how big does my business need to be to benefit from Intelligent Business Document Processing? In my conversation I spoke about last week with Simona Maerincei, she said the following, “Well, there are SMBs that are working in ByDesign, which are between 50 users and 500 users, at most maybe 1000 users. The beauty of all the scenarios I put up until now is they don’t need huge amounts of data and don’t need any pretraining.”. They are more or less “plug and play” services and you don’t need to run a 10,000-man operation to start seeing the benefits of this. Any time saved is time you can invest back into what really matters for your business.

I will give you a simple example: an average ByDesign customer is processing 1000 invoices per month and half of them are currently manually input in the system. Assuming you can processes 5-6 invoices per hour with fully loaded costs of 60 to 120 thousand Euros per employee per year (depending on high or low-cost location) and a total rate of automation of 60% to 80%, we are looking at about a direct customer business benefit of 14 to 60 thousand Euros per year at no extra cost for you the customer. And that’s only considering invoice scanning. Add into the equation all of the other business documents I mentioned before and you'll start to see compound interest.

Alone We are Strong but with Partners We are Stronger

If you are an SAP partner, you might be wondering if there is any way you can get involved with these new solutions. In what is probably my favorite part of our conversation, Simona said,

“I’m pretty sure that there are still existing documents that we haven’t yet thought about. I would love to get customers and partners saying, “We still need hands free processing for X business document”. Then we can create a roadmap for these ones or better yet, train our partners on how to get the right mix of Intelligent RPA and AI services in order to create them by themselves. We want to foster a healthy ecosystem of partners.”

There will be an infinite number of ways that partners will be able to innovate inside of these solutions. You will have the power to create individual document processing solutions that fulfill your customers’ needs and desires. This is also true for the other pillars of Business Process Automation. I’d recommend that you stay tuned for how partners can get involved in Decision Assistance/ Making and the Next-Gen UI which I’ll be talking about in my 3rd and 4th blog post of this series coming later this week.

What’s Next?

So, will it be Blockbuster or Netflix? It’s a decision every SMB will need to make. How exactly will you spend your time? Doing the mundane or diving deep into your creativity and exploring the real potential of your business? Look out for my next two blog posts in this series where I’ll be talking about the next two pillars of Business Process Automation. Our partners should stay excited too!

We are building a great community where those involved with SMBs can ask questions, find answers, and share their thoughts and ideas! Join the community today! Make sure to check it out and follow the page here.

Questions related to small to medium size businesses? Don’t hesitate to ask anything (Directly related to SAP or not) here.
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