Introduction
Shared service models together with process standardization and centralization have changed the efficiency and effectiveness of modern financial service organizations. In today’s world, CFOs are heavily investing in automation technologies such as Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Artificial Intelligence as a next step for enterprise transformation.
Finance processes such as Accounts Payable, Accounts Receivable, and Expense Management can often be further automated, thus freeing up employees to focus on value-adding activities. Gartner predicts that two-thirds of all customer service interactions will no longer require a human intermediary.
A few weeks ago, I presented a guided demo on “Automating financial shared service centers with SAP S/4HANA, SAP Intelligent Robotic Process Automation and SAP AI Business Services” as part of the Hyperautomation Webinar Series.
Use Case – Vendor Inquiry Process
In this webinar we looked at one specific finance process – the vendor inquiry process. SAP customers with shared service organizations often handle a high volume of inquiries from vendors.
Request Handling in Shared Service Centers
As a first step, service tickets are created automatically from incoming email requests and enter the ticket inbox of the shared service center agent. Next, Service Ticket Intelligence processes and classifies these service requests.
Business Entity Recognition identifies and extracts predefined entities from the service request itself and Document Information Extraction extracts structured information from attachments. The information extracted from Business Entity Recognition and Document Information Extraction (for example, the invoice number) is then checked against the relevant invoice posting status in SAP S/4HANA.
This status is the basis for either providing the service agents with assistance (e.g. preparing a response), or even directly answering the inquiry via a SAP Intelligent RPA bot automatically.
SAP AI Business Services involved
Three distinct SAP AI Business Services are involved in this scenario.
Service Ticket Intelligence classifies and processes incoming service requests. It leverages deep learning neural networks trained on large amounts of historical data. The model understands the semantics of unstructured ticket messages, classifies the ticket into their most likely categories and recommends to the agent solutions or knowledge-based articles from similar previously answered tickets.
Document Information Extraction extracts structured information from unstructured documents. The extracted information can be automatically enriched with your existing structured master data and transactional data.
Business Entity Recognition helps you to detect and highlight any given type of named entity in unstructured text and classify it in accordance with predefined categories.
SAP AI Business Services for shared financial service center hyperautomation
By automating and optimizing the request handling process in shared service centers, with the help of SAP AI Business Services, SAP Intelligent RPA and SAP S/4HANA, businesses and organizations can achieve new levels of operational excellence.
You can watch the full-length video of my session here:
Further information on SAP AI Business Services:
Explore: SAP Community Page for SAP AI Business Services
Dive deeper: openSAP Course & openSAP Podcast
Get an overview: Blogpost part I | Blogpost part II
Exchange Knowledge:
Document Classification Questions | Document Information Extraction Questions
Business Entity Recognition Questions | Service Ticket Intelligence Questions
Data Attribute Recommendation Questions | Invoice Object Recommendation Questions
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