ISSN: 2755-0214

Journal of Economics & Management

Research

Review Article Open Access

Finance Business Process Automation using RPA

Nilesh D Kulkarni1* and Saurav Bansal2

1
Sr Director, Enterprise Architecture, Fortune Brands Innovations, USA

2
Sr Manager, Enterprise Architecture, Fortune Brands Innovations, USA

Abstract
The paper provides comprehensive analysis of implementing Robotic Process Automation (RPA) in financial processes. It highlights the transformative
potential of RPA in enhancing operational efficiency, accuracy, and productivity. The paper discusses the strategic alignment of RPA with business goals, the
importance of establishing Automation Centers of Excellence (CoEs), and the selection of suitable processes for automation. It emphasizes the critical role
of governance, continuous evaluation, and the integration of RPA with other technologies like OCR for successful implementation in finance operations.
The document concludes by underscoring RPA's capacity to optimize finance processes, illustrating its effectiveness through various use cases.

*Corresponding author
Nilesh D Kulkarni, Sr Director, Enterprise Architecture, Fortune Brands Innovations, USA.

Received: June 08, 2023; Accepted: June 15, 2023; Published: June 22, 2023

Keywords: Robotic Process Automation (RPA), Enterprise Enterprise application leaders are often mandated by their business
Needs, Organizational Expectations, Automation Center of counterparts to rapidly deliver and deploy automation to increase
Excellence (CoE), AP Automation, Finance use cases, RPA & organizational efficiency, efficacy and agility. In response, they are
OCR Architecture launching automation efforts with technologies such as Robotic
Process Automation (RPA), Business Process Automation (BPA)
Introduction and Optical Character Recognition (OCR). The findings from
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is a technology that uses Deloitte’s 2016 and 2017 research indicated that cost reduction
software robots or "bots" to automate repetitive, rule-based was the main priority when implementing RPA.
tasks typically performed by humans. These tasks often involve
interacting with digital systems to process data, manage files, or However, there has been a noticeable shift in the aspiration
handle other routine business processes. for robotics. In their latest research the top three priorities for
executives were to increase productivity, improve customer
RPA bots can mimic many human user actions, such as logging experience and deliver automation at significant scale [2].
into applications, entering data, calculating and completing tasks,
and logging out. The key advantages of RPA include increased
efficiency, reduced errors, and the ability to free up human workers
for more complex, value-added tasks.

While RPA offers significant benefits in terms of efficiency

and cost savings, it's important to approach its implementation
strategically. Over-relying on RPA without considering the broader
context of business process management and digital transformation
can lead to suboptimal results.

Enterprise Needs
Orgnizaional Expectations
In this paper we focus on the IT function and its role in RPA.
Why? Because our in-depth case work and interviews show much
misunderstanding about RPA’s attributes, and how RPA fits with
corporate IT architectures, infrastructures, skills set, governance
and security procedures. In our view this has created unnecessary Figure 1: Top Three Organizational Priorities
barriers to adopting RPA, and delays to gaining the large process
and business benefits manifestly available – as demonstrated in
our case studies [1].
J Econ Managem Res, 2023 Volume 4(3): 1-5
Citation: Nilesh D Kulkarni, Saurav Bansal (2023) Finance Business Process Automation using RPA. Journal of Economics & Management Research. SRC/JESMR-292.
DOI: doi.org/10.47363/JESMR/2022(4)220

Organizations with successful RPA adoption and efficient business of Excellence for Process Automation.
processes have experienced positive impacts on their strategic • Cost Savings: Generate cost savings in support of increasing
goals, staff productivity, and customer service [1]. operating income.
• Business Efficiency: Absorb operations growth by absorbing
RPA Benefits Delivery against Expectations headcount growth that might otherwise be needed.
The organization expectations vary based on the type of the • Overtime Reduction: Paid overtime reduction by reducing
organization but when the expectations are mapped percentage paid overtime work.
‘met expectations’ or ‘exceeded expectations” we see that • Peak Management: Eliminate/Avoid the need for additional
Improved productivity has higher ranking over cost reduction. workforce planning to handle repetitive tasks during busy
periods.
• Higher Quality: Eliminate human errors, and improve
process output quality.

Ensure to clearly define the goal of the Automation COE with the
quantified result as a measure of success, one of the examples can
be number of human hours saved per period. This number can
be further dollarized based on the resource hour rate, to create a
clear CBA (cost benefit analysis) for the program.
Figure 2: RPA Benefits Delivered against Expectations, Percentage
‘Met Expectations’ or ‘Exceeded Expectations’ Perform the Business Process Automation candidate assessment,
some of the parameters that can be leveraged are
Automation COE • Process Complexity
The role of an automation COE will depend on your organization’s • Potential time savings
governance model. Before building the automation COE, enterprise • Potential cost benefits
application leaders must determine if their organization needs a
centralized, federated or hybrid governance model to support RPA & Agile Enterprise
business-led automation, and make the automation COE adaptive To unblock automation programs and achieve scale, executives
to organizational needs [3]. should encourage investment in new capabilities, and support
a culture of learning, innovation, iteration and agile ways of
To balance the need for rapid delivery of automation with the working [4].
required controls and standardization across the organization,
enterprise application leaders need an automation COE. Agile enterprises are more than aggregations of teams. They are
carefully balanced operating models that use agile methods to
An automation COE with a cohort of automation specialists can run the business reliably and efficiently, change the business to
play a crucial role in any organization. In a centralized governance capitalize on unpredictable opportunities, and harmonize the two
model, the COE will be fully involved in managing all aspects of activities [4,5].
decision making and delivery.
If the goal of RPA is to enhance the human work experience by
In a federated model, the COE will establish and enforce guidelines eliminating repetitive, low value tasks, it must be co-implemented
and standards for fusion teams. with the end-user. Fortunately, an agile approach encourages
close collaboration with stakeholders early and often [6]. Agile
In a hybrid model, the COE could oversee demand prioritization methodologies have shifted the approach to implementing new
and automation portfolio management, while all other aspects of technologies like RPA from being an IT-exclusive task to involving
automation delivery could be delegated to fusion teams. cross-functional teams. This helps in aligning business and IT
objectives, crucial for RPA's success. RPA systems, being sensitive
Defining Robust COE Framework to changes, benefit from agile iterative and flexible nature, allowing
Define the mission statement for the CoE, one of the examples for continuous improvements post-deployment. Moreover, agile
can be “An automation CoE-Center of Excellence enables provides a governance framework essential for scaling RPA and
organizations to utilize automation that make processes faster, intelligent automation enterprise-wide. Adopting a factory-like
more efficient, and have fewer errors”. model with reusable components and standards under agile ensures
cost-effectiveness, higher quality, and enhanced security in RPA
Define a clear roles and responsibilities within the Automation applications.
COE Team and identify the clear roles for the business team
members as well. It will more strategic if your organization RPA Vendor-Ui Path
support identifying the business champions to create a top-down All RPA vendors now offer a spectrum of capabilities that extend
acceptance of CoE. far beyond the realm of orchestrated screen scraping. Many RPA
products now offer task mining, process mining, low-code UI
Define clear Automation COE Program Objectives some examples development, workflow orchestration and decision automation.
below The following sections present leading (unbiased) commercial and
• Apply & Adopt Automation: To perform highly repetitive, open-source tools that we consider representative of the recent
mundane & routine tasks normally performed by knowledge applicability of RPA (ideally with the application and some AI
workers in order to save time and money, allowing employees techniques or algorithms).
to perform higher-value work.
• Enterprise Focus: Build an enterprise-wide automation UiPath is a tool that allows the development of RPA functionalities
program and roadmap to avoid working silos. Build a Center in its framework to create and execute programming scripts,
J Econ Managem Res, 2023 Volume 4(3): 2-5
Citation: Nilesh D Kulkarni, Saurav Bansal (2023) Finance Business Process Automation using RPA. Journal of Economics & Management Research. SRC/JESMR-292.
DOI: doi.org/10.47363/JESMR/2022(4)220

allowing it to be programmed with an interface of blocks and 10. Is the PO number correctly mentioned on the invoice?
multiple plugins for the business process customizations [7-14]. 11. Do any prefixes or suffixes in the PO# have relevance from
The RPA UiPath platform is currently structured in three modules, supplier standpoint?
UiPath Studio, UiPath Robot and UiPath Orchestrator, in which the 12. Does invoice show the remit address or Zip code?
latter allows the possible orchestration of robots [7]. The UiPath 13. Does the unit and/or extended price on invoice match the PO
Studio module corresponds to a tool that allows to design, model price, if not, does the sum of line quantity match the PO?
and execute workflows and help in the creation and maintenance 14. Sum of PO matches single invoice line?
of the connection between robots, as well as to ensure the transfer 15. Is item number required for matching and clearly shown on
of packages, management of queues. In turn, with the storage of the supplier invoice?
log records and linked with Microsoft's Information Services
Server and SQL Server, as well as with Elasticsearch (which is The above question will ensure the viability of the success with
open source and built on the Apache License search engine) with a accounts payable automation with less human intervention.
Kibana data visualization plugin also allows to potentiate the view
of analytical information associated with the execution of RPA Finance Use Cases for RPA
processes. These features can be found in more detail in [8-14]. Few more use cases for finance operations are listed below

OCR Vendor-ABBYY
ABBYY's Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology is
a sophisticated solution that enables the conversion of various
types of documents - such as scanned paper documents, PDF
files, or images captured by a digital camera - into editable and
searchable data. This technology is particularly useful in digitizing
documents like magazine articles, contracts, and more, making
the information available for editing in formats like Microsoft
Word [15].

The OCR technology includes powerful PDF processing tools for

converting documents into searchable PDF and PDF/A formats,
ensuring the integrity of the text layer. Utilizing AI and ML
technologies, ABBYY OCR is capable of identifying the logical
structure of documents and accurately recognizing their formatting
elements, such as headers, footers, and font styles. The technology
includes sophisticated image pre-processing functions to optimize
images for OCR, enhancing recognition accuracy even for low-
quality images.

Finance Use Cases for RPA

Finance Processes: Accounts payable invoice automation (APIA)
tools automate the capture, validation and processing of invoices.
These solutions attempt to automatically match invoices to
purchase orders (POs) and contracts, or automatically code those
invoices that would not have a PO. The RPA in combination with
OCR technologies can be proven combination to achieve APIA.
Figure 3: Finance RPA Use Cases
While selecting the AP invoice processing use case automation
of the manual work using RPA and OCR, the selection of right RPA Envisioning Workshop
supplier and invoice is critical to gain the maximum benefit from Identification of the high value uses cases can be accomplished
the automation. Some of the critical Boolean questions to ask while with the help of the business and technology envisioning workshop
selecting the candidate supplier for OCR and RAP automations are to identify the areas of opportunities, gain trust from the knowledge
1. Is invoice text based? workers and remove the barrier between technology enablers (IT)
2. Does the supplier send high quality invoice images? Some and beneficiaries (business users). The below agenda can span for
red flags to look for include rescanned images, inconsistent four to six hours in two days of envisioning workshop.
positioning of fields, water marks, speckling/noise, etc. • Introduction
3. Does supplier send multiple invoices per attachment? • How automation helped Finance make work worthwhile for
4. Does invoice meet minimum DPI of 400? humans
5. Does the supplier master address information matches/closely • UiPath Automation Showcase for Finance
matches invoice addresses? • The Automation Value Proposition
6. Does the supplier include information to correctly map the • Digital workshop with Miro
business unit/org on the invoice? • Understanding key operating factors of Finance operations
7. Does the supplier include information to correctly map tax • Develop High Level Finance Process Heatmaps
on the invoice? • Review and validation of candidate Finance processes for
8. Does the supplier include information to correctly map freight RPA
on the invoice? • Ideation on top 5 processes
9. Does the supplier include information to correctly identify • Conclusion
miscellaneous charge on the invoice?
J Econ Managem Res, 2023 Volume 4(3): 3-5
Citation: Nilesh D Kulkarni, Saurav Bansal (2023) Finance Business Process Automation using RPA. Journal of Economics & Management Research. SRC/JESMR-292.
DOI: doi.org/10.47363/JESMR/2022(4)220

Reference RPA & OCR Architecture Enterprise application leaders are often mandated by their business
The below architecture diagram illustrates the reference counterparts to rapidly deliver and deploy automation to increase
architecture for a company with on-prem Oracle financial system organizational efficiency, efficacy and agility. In response, they are
and with ABBY hosted on the cloud and ABBY development tools launching automation efforts with technologies such as Robotic
hosted on the Azure to ensure the privacy of the data exchange Process Automation (RPA).
between on-prem systems and cloud systems
Around 38% of the business users are looking RPA as a productuty
improvement enabler, while only 18% belives that it helps improve
customer experience.

An automation CoE with a cohort of automation specialists

with a centralized governance model plays a crucial role in any
organization. Defining a robust CoE Governance Framework with
clearly defined mission, objectives, roles and responsibilities with
the quantified result as a measure of success will help generate
expected results and meet business stakeholder expectations.

To unblock automation programs and achieve scale, executives

should encourage investment in new capabilities, and support
a culture of learning, innovation, iteration and agile ways of
working. An Agile methodology have shifted the approach to
implementing new technologies like RPA from being an IT-
exclusive task to involving cross-functional teams. This helps in
aligning business and IT objectives, crucial for RPA's success.
Figure 4: RPA Benefits Delivered against Expectations, Percentage
‘Met Expectations’ or ‘Exceeded Expectations’ UiPath is a cloud-based platform that allows the development
of RPA functionalities, combining and combining ABBYY's
1. Shows the RPA BOT extraction of the invoices from the Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology can enable
email server and then sending the invoice to the secure on- many potential use cases for automating finance operations.
prem FTP location
2. The ABBY FC (FlexiCapture Cloud), which is a cloud- Accounts Payable Invoice Automation (APIA) tools automate the
based platform for document and data capture. This platform capture, validation and processing of invoices is a vary successful
offers advanced capabilities for capturing, classifying, use case, right design of the architecture and data flows using the
and transferring critical data from both unstructured and provided reference architecture can help achieve results faster
structured documents. ABBYY FlexiCapture Cloud uses without learning curve. The other use cases that finance can apply
machine learning and AI to improve classification and data RPA are Customer Setup, Billing and Cash application.
extraction, allowing for faster and more accurate processing
of documents [16]. To ensure continuous process improvement and engagement with
3. The extracted data from the invoice is pulled by ABBY the finance teams to gather more use cases, a very well laid out
FlexiCapture Connect using port 443. FlexiCapture Connect envisioning session is a great tool.
is a Windows service designed to facilitate document import
and export operations within ABBYY FlexiCapture Cloud. It Finally, RPA is an enabler to reduce process waste, eliminate
allows users to import documents into these projects, export mundane tasks so that skilled workers can be redeployed to high
documents from them, and synchronize data sets [17]. value work especially in the back-office departments like finance.
4. The RPA process imports the extracted datasets into the Oracle
EBS system by calling EBS APIs and posting the invoices References
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J Econ Managem Res, 2023 Volume 4(3): 4-5

Citation: Nilesh D Kulkarni, Saurav Bansal (2023) Finance Business Process Automation using RPA. Journal of Economics & Management Research. SRC/JESMR-292.
DOI: doi.org/10.47363/JESMR/2022(4)220

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Copyright: ©2023 Nilesh D Kulkarni. This is an open-access article

distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License,
which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium,
provided the original author and source are credited.

J Econ Managem Res, 2023 Volume 4(3): 5-5