Insight: Artificial Intelligence & ERP

With the increased interest in Artificial Intelligence, we discuss its current and future role in ERP.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) appears to be the buzzword for 2024, its use has certainly become ubiquitous, although it’s hard to argue that a lot of what it is being utilised for is of day-to-day benefit, but that will no doubt come.

That, however, is not the case when AI is utilised within ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning). Exel’s EFACS E/8 ERP solution has utilised AI for several years now, with its initial adoption being used to automate the input and matching of purchase invoices and their relevant information.

Typically, Exel’s customers receive thousands of purchase invoices each year. Each one needing to be registered, matched and processed; to do this manually is labour intensive and prone to mistakes, even when using Exel’s sophisticated Document Management system.

It’s for this reason Exel developed the ‘Invoice Processing Automation’ application, which uses state-of-the-art AI and Optical Character Recognition (OCR) to scan the purchase invoice and extract all the key information from the document.

The extracted information is used to match the scanned documents to Purchase Orders and Goods Receipt Notes within EFACS, significantly reducing human intervention, effort and eliminating the possibility of error.

This is all possible due to the inherent ability within EFACS to create ‘Workflows’, which provide a framework for automating the flow of a company’s business procedures via the software. Workflows, combined with Google’s ‘Document AI Invoice Parser’ – which applies advanced machine learning to read documents in a variety of formats and return accurately structured data – provide the required functionality for the invoices to be processed automatically.

With Exel’s commitment to continuous development and the advancement of ERP in the manufacturing sector, as well as the promise of AI’s potential, Exel’s development team look forward to utilising this technology further and increasing the scope of its use throughout EFACS E/8.

Click here to learn more about Exel’s Invoice Processing Automation module.