NelsonHall recently attended the Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) “Empowering the Customer to Win in the Digital Age” event hosted by HPE BPS. The theme was strongly around digital and empowering organizations to own the (increasingly digital) interface between customers, suppliers, and employees. In support of this theme HPE is investing heavily in automation, both in its own platforms, and in centers of excellence, partnerships, and methodologies.

For example, within F&A BPS, Hewlett Packard Enterprise (HPE) is investing in a tool to assess the automation potential of organizations’ finance & accounting processes, which is being built into HPE’s FIT (Framework for Innovation & Transformation) framework, and HPE is now developing automation and digitization assessments and roadmaps at the front-end of F&A BPS contracts.

In its targeting of F&A BPS, HPE is becoming more sector specific and incorporating metrics specific to target sectors within FIT, starting with the telecoms and oil & gas sectors.

HPE is also becoming more business metric focused in its approach to F&A BPS and highlighting that the benefits of automation extend way beyond process cost take-out. Cash acceleration and cash utilization are major areas of focus for HPE within F&A BPS. In particular, HPE is stressing that the benefits of source-to-pay automation go beyond halving the S2P headcount and start to open the door to profit improvement opportunities through dynamic discounting. HPE formerly used to advise its clients on negotiating longer payment terms with their suppliers; the company has now changed its focus to encouraging its clients to negotiate early payment discounts and automate/digitize their P2P processes to achieve rapid approval of purchase invoices so that they can optimize their early discounts against these invoices. In many cases, the purchase invoice approval process has been too slow and the knowledge of potential discounts too inaccessible to take advantage of what could amount to a profit improvement opportunity equal to up to 2% of total goods purchased. For example, HPE estimates that the HP GBS organization has saved $2.7bn in early payment discounts over the past three years by taking this approach.

Accordingly, HPE has established a center of excellence for automation in F&A, and is beginning to encourage use of data pdf technology to reduce the need for OCR or manual rekeying of invoices. The company has a number of pilots in this area.

In terms of robotics, the company is currently using UiPath and Blue Prism, the latter particularly for connecting with ERP software, and Redwood for support for R2R and month-end close, and has built-up a library of ~750 accelerators. The company is also extensively using PDF Cloud, and its own Vertica software. HPE’s Business Process Analytics Tool (BPAT) is based on Vertica, which is used to provide an F&A dashboard covering both an executive view of KPIs and drill-downs into service performance.

For example, within P2P, HPE is aiming to digitize F&A processes by:

• Reducing use of paper and scanning through use of PDF data capture and its partnerships with Tungsten and Tradeshift
• Further automation of invoice data entry and processing using RPA
• Identifying further opportunities for automation via BPAT.

Overall HPE is increasingly seeking to place automation strategy and vision at the forefront of F&A process design, with automation and digitization leading the way in identifying possibilities for straight-through processing. Indeed, based on HPE’s F&A services transformation journey diagram, the company expects ~60% of future F&A BPS productivity improvements to be driven by automation and 40% to be driven by process change and staff reallocation & best-shoring.

Contrary to some expectations, RPA is only one automation component. In HPE’s automation journey in F&A BPS, RPA is expected to deliver around a quarter of the total productivity benefits to be achieved from automation, with a whole range of tools and platforms contributing around 75% of the automation benefits to be achieved.

As usual, one of the major challenges over the past year has been in training the company’s solution architects in thinking digital and identifying benefits beyond those previously achievable. As HPE suggested, many of the existing F&A process benchmarks may need to be rewritten over the next 12-months.

F&A BPS is arguably the most mature of all the BPS services. However, with real-time analytics increasingly identifying the opportunities, RPA lowering the barriers to process improvement, and organizations increasingly willing to automate, F&A BPS is now off on a new journey that promises a step change in productivity. Automation plays to the strengths of HPE, and F&A digitization is an area where the company is intending to strongly invest and compete.