Four Business Imperatives in the New Normal—and How Intelligent Automation Can Help

Modern business models across the world rely on their ability to flow. Cash moves into and out of the business, while products move through the supply chain from point A to point B (and C, D, E and F) to get into customers' hands. People also need the ability to get to their jobs, purchase essential products, and take care of the day-to-day minutiae that keeps the global economy healthy.

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed all of that. Our normal ways of working have come to a screeching halt, as we hunker down to stay healthy. Think about this simple example: If you've noticed empty shelves at the supermarket where your toilet paper used to be, you're experiencing that disruption in the supply chain firsthand. Because it's a low-margin item, retailers keep stock on items like toilet paper low and only replenish when needed. Demand has ticked up so quickly that the supply chain can't keep up ... and shelves go empty.

This scenario is playing out on a larger scale around the world as our underlying fundamentals are challenged. The key to surviving and thriving is to identify new ways to operate, lead and redefine resilience. Here are several examples from leading organizations that are creating frameworks to meet business imperatives and emerge with a competitive advantage after the crisis.

Imperative 1: Managing Cash Flow and Liquidity

"Cash is king" aptly underscores the importance of cash flow and liquidity in the midst of the pandemic, and the anticipated slow-growth environment we will see in the weeks and months ahead. This is especially true as organizations look to short-term initiatives, pushing long-term plans and investments to the backburner until our collective path forward becomes clearer. 

Optimizing Finance and Accounting (F&A) functions across the enterprise is the clearest way to meet this imperative. Businesses can improve working capital by automating processes such as invoicing and collections, and using AI and insights from analytics across functions such as order-to-cash and record-to-report.

Imperative 1 in action: 

A leading sports medicine provider of orthopedic-care products had a problem with their revenue collection. Patients received products during consultations with a doctor or at a hospital, while the provider’s revenue was generated when the patient's insurer paid for their claim. In some cases, the insurer only paid a partial claim, leaving the patient to cover the difference. Unfortunately, the collection rate from patients was only 65%.

To improve collections, the company used prediction modeling powered by Adaboost to help close the gap. The model used two years of patient collection data to predict which invoices were least likely to be paid within 90 days, based on variables including the product, price, patient service center (PSC), territory, patient age and patient state. The operations team was then able to prioritize these patients for follow-up. This proactive approach increased successful collections by 13%.

Imperative 2: Improving Operational Efficiency

Driving down costs through operational efficiency should always be top of mind, but its critical now as businesses face new pandemic-related challenges to stay afloat and remain competitive. Enterprises should focus on three things: simplification, standardization and process improvement. Eliminating friction in these areas requires a focus on intelligent process automation and intelligent workflows to reduce errors and handoffs, lessen the burden on staff, improve their performance and cut costs.

Imperative 2 in action:  

The small commercial business unit of a leading P&C insurer received a high-volume of email-based service requests from brokers, agents and insured customers. Eighty-two percent of these claims were processed manually by 15 full-time employees, with a turnaround time of roughly four hours per request. 

The insurer implemented AI and natural language processing (NLP) to streamline this process and achieve Zero Touch Operations for over 2.5M requests. This freed up their full-time employees for more complex tasks, increased speed of delivery by 96% to just 10 minutes per claim, and saved the organization $2M over three years. 

Imperative 3: Increasing Customer Engagement to Improve Business Agility

The same shock and awe your business is experiencing during this pandemic is impacting customers, too. Enterprises will need to improve their ability to anticipate and deliver on customer expectations, which will be changing in real-time. Sustaining hard-won relationships requires leveraging data in ways that give staff across the entire organization insights to improve their outreach to customers.

Imperative 3 in action: 

 A large technology company leveraged data-driven insights to combine customer footfall data with time spent by customers at a specific business. The solution provides insights to several businesses on potential marketing promotions and micro-targeting, resulting in increased sales.

Imperative 4: Optimizing Risk Management and Supply Chain

The optimal risk management solution should already include the regular collection of insights and threat assessment, but now is the time to crank up the frequency and awareness around these tasks. This will be the key to better business decision-making in this environment of uncertainty. A deeper focus on data collection and analysis will help enterprises assess and stabilize supply chain issues such as optimizing inventory, logistics management, supplier/sourcing diversity and order management.

Imperative 4 in action:

For a Norwegian engineering company, keeping on top of changes to project delivery dates and the availability of materials was a time-consuming and costly process. Every day, executives were required to download purchase orders, check for date changes and communicate those changes to the appropriate staff member. However, they were only able to process 300 of the total 2,500 changes on a daily basis, leading to financial penalties and customer dissatisfaction. 

Using an intelligent automation solution, bots replaced the manual process of checking for date changes and material availability. These bots also alerted relevant staff about the changes, which led to an 80% reduction in handling time, a 700% increase in POs processed per day, and a cost savings of 2.5M Kroner (around $245K USD) per year.

Today's Resilience is Tomorrow's Competitive Advantage

These examples of meeting the imperatives necessary to survive and thrive during the COVID-19 pandemic should be viewed with an eye on the future. Eventually, we will emerge from the current lockdowns, uncertainty and fear that are fueling economic uncertainty and hardship. The mitigations we put in place today will be the competitive advantages of tomorrow—investing in technology that improves cash flow, efficiency, customer engagement and risk management will help enterprises survive and improve their readiness when the "new normal" becomes simply "normal."