New Solutions for the New Normal: Keep Business Moving Remotely

New Challenges Created by the New-Normal

Local, state, and company mandated quarantines for non-essential workers are creating huge challenges for organizations that need to keep business moving and keep employees working through this public health crisis. Even with access to necessary equipment at home, many back office and administrative employees are dependent on physical documents, forms, and access to software that is only available at the office.

We have heard from many of our customers that they are struggling to find workarounds to these restrictions. In some cases, employees are forced to defy quarantine orders and risk their health to retrieve documents from the office. Some companies are now spending large amounts of time and money couriering documents to and from employees’ homes, or work. Almost all IT departments are overloaded with requests for access to VPN and other remote resources.

In this post, we hope to provide recommendations, solutions, and service offerings that can be deployed rapidly to meet the current challenges of our new normal as well as create value for your business long-term. They also protect the health and safety of your employees, which is the purpose of our new normal. We are available at any time to discuss these solutions and our team is ready to start working remotely to save you time and money.

Solutions for Finance & Supply Management

Finance departments are under the most pressure to keep the business moving. From processing payments to paying vendors, purchasing products and services to providing products and services, Finance is responsible for making sure your company continues to have the resources it needs to operate.

Capture Purchase Requisitions Digitally

Many organizations still rely on physical forms to submit and process Purchase Orders or Purchase Requisitions. Especially during this time, your employees are going to need quick access to resources to help them work from home, outsource work to vendors, or perform other essential duties in this new environment. Capturing Purchase Requisitions digitally puts these requests into your team’s hands immediately for faster processing and approval.

One of the ways you can capture Purchase Requisitions digitally is with digital forms, or eForms. There are many options for deploying eForms, including native functionality in most ERPs and content management systems. Another option is RPI’s Yoga Forms, a light-weight, cloud-based platform with a simple drag-and-drop forms designer and out-of-the-box integration features. Yoga Forms can be deployed rapidly and you can start designing and deploying forms immediately.

Require Vendors to Submit Invoices Digitally

Every day your company receives more paper invoices mailed by nervous vendors, which means the challenges you are experiencing today will only compound over time. Either employees have to defy orders and risk their health to go get invoices from the office, or you’re spending money on courier services to deliver invoices to your employees’ homes.

Capturing invoices digitally puts them in the hands of your AP Processors faster, allowing your team to keep up with invoice volume and protect your supply chain. Using the current public health crisis as justification, it is the perfect time to create a new policy that either requires or prioritizes payments for invoices submitted digitally – for example, via email. Physical invoices can still be accepted, but payment will be delayed.

This small change makes a big difference for your AP Processors working at home, and creates pressure for vendors that are relying on those payments.

Capture Invoices Digitally

Requiring invoices to be submitted digitally creates the opportunity to capture invoices directly into your current invoice processing and approval workflows. This eliminates the need for your AP Processors to monitor email inboxes or online portals to focus on the important work of processing invoices and getting vendors paid.

There are a number of vendor portal and EDI solutions available for digital invoicing, but a quick and easy solution is to capture invoices from an email inbox. RPI’s Yoga Capture is a light-weight, cloud-based platform that can be deployed rapidly to start monitoring inboxes immediately. Invoice images and data can be integrated directly into your ERP or content management solution.

Alternatively and especially if you already have a Vendor Supplier Portal, Kofax RPA (robotic process automation) offers the ability to automatically retrieve and integrate invoices into your ERP or content management solution.

AP / Invoice Processing Automation in the Cloud

For those organizations still processing and approving paper invoices, or emailing invoices to approvers, there has never been a better time to realize return on investment for invoice processing automation. With your teams working remotely, invoice processing in the cloud offers the most value by eliminating the need for VPN connections, installing software on computers, or in-person implementations.

Kofax’s ReadSoft Online is RPI’s recommended intelligent data capture (OCR) solution for invoice processing automation in the cloud. ReadSoft Online offers invoice capture, classification, data extraction and validation, and even workflow – all in the cloud. Data capture includes header, line-item matching, and GL coding automation, and workflow includes invoice exceptions and approval routing, if needed. ReadSoft Online integrates with any ERP or finance system to pass images and validated data.

Infor Accounts Payable Invoice Automation (APIA)

For our Infor clients, we strongly recommend Infor APIA along with ReadSoft Online or any other intelligent data capture solution. Infor APIA allows you to move invoice exception workflows and approval management into your Infor ecosystem, which allows you to take advantage of existing vendor and PO tables, and GHR data for approval hierarchies.

For integration between ReadSoft Online and Infor APIA, RPI also offers Yoga Connect, which is a rapidly deployed connector built specifically for Kofax and Infor products.

Solutions for Human Resources

In response to the current public health crisis, HR departments are buried with employee requests, general questions, and overall crisis management. Employees and managers are worried about employment, benefits, and work-from-home policies. All the while, HR employees are also forced to work and collaborate from home to provide consistent, clear responses.

Capture Requests & Requisitions Digitally

Most HR departments still rely on physical forms for all kinds of employee requests and requisitions, from changes to benefits to medical leave of absence, and even new hire requisitions. With employees working from home, and the likelihood of additional requests and requisitions coming in as a consequence of the public health crisis, it’s going to be more important than ever for your HR staff to stay on top of getting requests and requisitions approved.

Capturing employee requests and requisitions digitally puts them in the hands of your remote HR workforce faster. Your ERP and/or content management solution likely has some available functionality to build digital forms or capture requests as records, but RPI’s Yoga Forms is also an option that may be faster to deploy.