Why IntelliChief?

For hundreds — even thousands — of years, businesses have relied on paper to memorialize contractual relationships and to facilitate, communicate, and record transactions. Early computers and ERP systems promised some relief by creating and tracking documents and generating paper trails to manage business transactions. Yet, this led businesses to become even more reliant on analyzing, interpreting, comparing, storing, and managing the mountains of paper documents generated in business processes.

In just a few short decades, however, innovation and the advent of digital documents has virtually eliminated the need for paper. But businesses, because of deeply entrenched processes, legacy systems, and human resistance to change, have been slow to adopt technologies that would free them from the paper trap, and humans remain at the heart of processing all those digital documents.

Today, a new generation of innovation and AI-enabled robotic automation is generating a race to embrace new technology that captures, processes, stores, and automatically tracks documents in digital format without human intervention. The full benefits of automation have enabled these businesses to:

• Eliminate work and the rising costs associated with processing large volumes of paper documents
• Eliminate paper and costs related to on-site and off-site storage, maintenance, and retrieval of paper documents
• Eliminate costly errors made by humans unsuited for the repetitive, boring work of processing paper documents
• Dramatically shorten processing cycles to:
  • Avoid delays that incur penalties and reduce available discounts
  • Improve overall financial performance
  • Enrich the human experience of customers, suppliers, and employees
• Simplify and direct the work still performed by humans to minimize labor and cost, simplify training and onboarding of new employees, and reduce risks associated with human error
• Eliminate the unpredictable work cycles of employees who process paper documents because humans must eat and sleep, deserve a work-life balance, take vacations, get sick, have bad days, change jobs, and require management oversight
• Enhance management control of document processing by enforcing best practices and efficient workflows, and automatically generating communication, alerts, and escalations to keep processing and processes on track

For enterprise-scale businesses, the costs of manual and paper-based processes and the benefits of replacing them with automation are enormous. But in the past, many have questioned whether the costs of change, including systems, consultants, business disruptions, training, etc., were justified by the ROI. It may seem intuitive that if your business is building a better mousetrap, continuing innovation in mousetrap design would advance the business faster than processing mousetrap orders more efficiently, but that is not necessarily true.

To succeed in our hyper-competitive, fast evolving, and risk-filled economies, businesses are focusing on breakdowns and bottlenecks within mission-critical business processes because:

• If orders, invoices, and payments aren’t processed efficiently, businesses are missing out on revenue, delivering a bad cusotmer experience, and constricting growth
• If accounts payable isn’t operating efficiently, businesses aren’t paying their bills on time, taking advantage of early pay discounts, avoiding penalties, or getting the most favorable terms because supplier relationships are damaged
• If cash isn’t applied to the correct GL accounts, analysis of key business metrics like product costs, margins, supplier performance, and profitability are skewed, adversely impacting management decisions
• If OSHA procedures aren’t followed and documents aren’t processed correctly, safety is impacted, which may result in reputational damage and financial penalties, or — even worse — places employees at risk of injury or death
• Without real-time visibility into every step of the sales order process, customer service suffers, continuous quality improvement is elusive, and the accuracy of financial and operational reporting and forecasting is suspect
• Regulations, employee benefit programs, employee turnover, and the need for increased training and professional development are resulting in document processing requirements that are burying HR departments
• Inconsistent adherence to corporate policies and governmental regulations raises the risk of falling victim to increasingly sophisticated fraud, processing overpayments, or incurring costly penalties
• Scaling to accommodate periodic surges in volume, long-term growth, or expansion of a centralized business process across multiple divisions or companies can be difficult and costly — especially when multiple ERP systems are involved