Driving Productivity with AI Solutions to Elevate AP Departments

Semantik Invoice + Infor M3 Jumps Invoice Processing Ahead of the Curve 

Guest Blog By John Hagler, Director of Solution Delivery at Doppio Group

Accounts Payable and Finance departments have long struggled with invoice processing. From antiquated processes, legacy systems, manual data entry, handing mounds of paper documents, filing, re-entering data into multiple systems and delayed approvals to making and correcting errors, reporting, audits and vendor relations, many AP departments can benefit from modernizing their processes with digital transformation initiatives.

At Doppio Group, Infor integration experts, we are seeing our customers shift to cloud solutions that can help automate the AP processes. One of the most exciting products on the market launched earlier this year from our partner Ephesoft, called Semantik Invoice. This cloud-based platform utilizes AI to semantically extract critical invoice data necessary to automate AP processing, providing businesses with better compliance, increased visibility and over a 50% reduction in costs. Semantik Invoice is an out-of-the-box solution and can be deployed within minutes due to low code, multi-tenant cloud architecture so you can start taking advantage of its value and return on investment. Once the data is extracted, the Doppio team seamlessly exports the data into any Infor ERP system for its customers.

After comparing Semantik Invoice to other products in the market, this took us one day to create a solution without any knowledge of the product. Due to the backend sophistication yet simplicity to implement, we decided to create our own solution to help our customers accelerate their invoicing processes and eliminate extra steps. Moving forward, our clients can expect an implementation time of hours to days depending on the complexity of their processes. Here’s what we learned by combining these leading technologies together.

Deep Dive into Best-in-Class Technology

Compared to other solutions, especially those that are on-premises, Semantik Invoice has a simple UI, which any business users can learn quickly with its friendly extraction. The Semantik Extraction technology is template-free and can find the data anywhere on the invoice using AI. 

The clean build of the platform enhances the user experience, making processing even faster. When a supplier invoice is uploaded, Semantik automatically locates and pulls information, which eliminates the need to manually transfer information from a supplier invoice. It also makes for easier configurable confidence scores with over 97% accuracy of the extracted data. The data populates in a dashboard for easy viewing and invoice status. 

Accelerated Workflow

Let’s look at the overview of how the entire workflow is constructed and then walk through the steps. 

First, an invoice is emailed to a designated email address, where Semantik Invoice captures it. Once the data has been extracted, the document and metadata will need to be exported into Infor (in this example we are exporting the data into Infor M3). The ease of use to process invoices led our solution engineers to leverage AWS Lambda functions for the integration architecture. The result is a low-cost, serverless architecture that connects Semantik with Infor Document Management (IDM) for archiving and Infor M3 for transaction processing. Infor’s IONAPI connection points are used to quickly and securely transfer data into Infor products.  Both Ephesoft and Infor run on AWS for best-in-class performance metrics. 

These images show how a supplier invoice automatically populated from Semantik into IDM using a webhook, along with automatic attributes and specific fields. Users can see attributes to power in-context views with Infor ERP’s as well as power to ION workflows. Other alerts and tasks can be created, such as invoice approval over an assigned amount based on the customer’s business rules. Customers can also use mobile approvals or homepages approvals.

Once the information is pulled from a supplier invoice, it will be instantly present in Infor M3 and available to be reviewed and prepared for payment. The entire invoice processing can be done in seconds, with larger batches taking only several minutes. 

The Struggle is Over

AP departments no longer need to struggle with tedious tasks – the wait for intelligent, AI invoicing solutions is available and quick to deploy. The initial set up for end-to-end flow into Infor M3 can take as little as several hours or several days, based on the customer’s requirements. It’s refreshing to see solutions that can be spun up quickly versus months. If your organization hasn’t digitally transformed its processes yet, there’s a better way to make employees more productive, cut costs (we’ve seen up to 50%) and capitalize on the benefits of faster payments and discounts with AI technology in the cloud. The solution can also be used to feed into RPA systems. 

For more information, please contact Doppio Group at info@doppiogroup.com or you can reach out Ephesoft at info@ephesoft.com.