Stretched - The one adjective that best describes how accounts payable processors and supply chain vendors both feel these days. A total disruption of everyday business in the form of a pandemic has stretched the management and processing of supply chains in ways no one had imagined just a short six months ago.

In the age of this virus crisis, just completing the simplest tasks has taken on new meaning. Uncertainty and business disruptions further challenged with key processors working remotely has contributed to the increased number and frequency of AP email and phone inquiries. These increases are compounding an undesirable inefficiencies trend for both AP processors and supply vendors.

Employing Bots

But what if the AP inquiries can be completed without the emails, phone calls, hold times, and required direct human intervention? What if supply vendors could easily get immediate answers to their repetitive and time consuming questions or make common updates to their customer managed vendor master information? What if AP could provide quick broadcasts on deadlines and policy changes?

Chatbots specifically designed to work with AP processing offer these capabilities and more today. Effortlessly and seamlessly, both the buyers and suppliers benefit from the robotic automation of bots that intelligently provide up to date statuses, answers, updates or policy changes.

A 2018 study by Facebook showed that 56% of people would rather message than call customer service. The use of a frictionless texting interface that is very familiar to vendors makes for quick and strong user adoption.

Chatbots understand natural language with sentiment analysis. They can be designed to comply with strong identity and access management protocols. Chatbots, designed with smart process automation and artificial intelligence, don’t require significant investment in new hardware or software.

AP Automation

Most AP managers and processors have long been tightening the belts and implementing cost controls along with utilizing invoice management technologies. Invoice management applications have been key to automating and streamlining AP processing to achieve cost reductions, improve processing times and optimize cash flows. Supply chain vendors similarly have optimized operations to do more with less as they tightly measure and manage inventories and shipments while increasing collaboration with buyers to best manage working capital.

The leading SAP based invoice processing solution, SAP Invoice Management by OpenText, is well proven for enabling AP productivity gains and supporting better financial decision making. By adding VIM Bots, you can super-charge the SAP Invoice Management application, allowing suppliers to get the AP/procurement policies information they need 24 hours a day, 365 days of the year at a fraction of the cost.

VIMBots

Suppliers can ask questions on the status of invoices they have submitted using natural language via SMS text or web chat. Security controls at each level ensures that the bot will provide invoice information only to a user with proper viewing permissions. 

VIMBots can be trained on your procurement process knowledge to answer general questions thus further reducing live calls to your AP department. 

This SaaS application runs on a cloud platform and comes with deep seamless integration with SAP and OpenText. VIMBots works with any mobile device on either Android or iOS. 

To increase supplier relationships and increase productivity of your AP processors, super-charge your invoice processing with VIMBots. 

For more information or to request a Spotline VIMBots demo, contact info@terralink-global.com