Transforming BPO: From manual labor to AI automation with human expertise

Just recently I visited Malaysia and our team of 12 professionals. They take care of the exceptions from the ground rule, that software automatically deals with the flow of documents from our clients. It can be invoices, purchase orders, sales orders or any other type of business process, where huge amounts of quite similar documents shall be processed. Documents need to be created, enriched, approved and archived as effectively and in-expensively as possible. Companies often count them in hundred of thousands, and the volume provides a strong business case for automation and/or outsourcing.

My mission in Malaysia was to discuss options for career paths with the team members, who are our humans-in-the-loop in otherwise 99 % automated document handling. And let me emphasize, that we are very far from the low-skilled manual labor of past centuries. To be effective as humans-in-the-loop you have to combine great understanding of client and process and inside skills in the software solution. They not only secure that the invoice at hand is processed correctly, but they also help the AI and software to recognize and process it correctly from now on. This is why career paths could lead to both technology development or customer advisory.

The role of BPO and AI-driven automation

Things are changing very rapidly in the field of business process outsourcing (BPO). BPO used to be a controversial term as it implicated using low paid labor far away. Now companies in general have no problem in outsourcing business processes to robots/AI/rule-based software.

Let me give you an example. One of our bigger clients came in 10 years ago, where we installed our software on-premise at their office and they reached maybe up to 50% automation of around 300.000 annual incoming invoices. Their internal humans-in-the-loop were based in a Finance shared-service-center in India. The collaboration about automation gradually expanded to other functions and process elements. Just recently the same company turned to us for a full-service partnership with a cloud solution automatically handling nearly all of their now more than 1 million annual invoices and our humans-in-the-loop taking care of the exceptions. This move freed up 20 finance professionals in the company and furthermore the company does not need to maintain software knowhow as it is all outsourced to us.

Automation as the key to efficiency

5-10 years ago customers were much more in to the formats, features and functions of the automation software. Now they are saying “just make it work” and basically going for simplicity and efficiency. I think it reflects a more trustful approach to technology in society in general. The alternative to automation may be manual handling and it comes with in-built challenges . If a human works all day with the same repetitive task of putting data from hundreds of external invoices in to an ERP system errors are likely to appear.

This a totally different low-skilled and in-attractive data-entry task. From a business stand point it is furthermore becoming increasingly expensive to solve. Price of internal finance professionals and price of near-shoring and off-shoring service centers are only going one way.

Let me briefly give an other example. One of our American customers changed directly from a manual internal invoice handling to a full service cloud-based outsourcing using our Malaysian team as humans-in-the-loop. Taking this step meant 100 % outsourcing of all invoices, and they are now moving on to purchase orders and sales orders. Volumes in the company are lower than millions but numbers are of course rising when multiple types of documents are handled by our AI-infused automation software.

Leveraging scale and global economy for automated efficiency

As a vendor delivering BPO we have to think in scale and global economy. Malaysia offers better prices of skilled labor than Europe or America, and we have great success with our team here. Of course this has turned in to a competence center with huge benefits for our clients, because they get scale in handling exceptions.

Every client does not need to understand why an invoice is not automatically processed, because we have the humans in place to do it. The reason could be that the vendor is new or the vendor changed format in their invoices. This is detected and corrected by humans-in-the-loop, and the customer experience is 100 % outsourced BPO.

Companies are probably looking for this administrative automation to free up their internal resources for other digital transformation and innovation. We are in the age of AI, and what can be automated will be automated!