CFO Focus Turns to Financial and Operational Metrics

When companies hire talented and expensive employees, the last thing they want is for them to spend their days manually keying data into spreadsheets. That sort of work, while necessary, doesn’t create value. It’s exactly why intelligent process automation exists, and is seeing increasing demand, by offering businesses a way to handle those repetitive tasks so employees don’t have to.

“That frees up your knowledge workers, because they’re an expensive resource,” Paul Argiry, chief financial officer of Bizagi, told PYMNTS. “For most companies, 50% or 60% of your cost is human beings, your employees, and then with the war on talent and inflation, those costs keep going up and up. So, how do you make them more efficient so they’re focusing on what they’re really meant to do versus those routine tasks? That’s really the benefit.”

Argiry is familiar with the benefits of automation, not only in his own role as a CFO, but as the financial lead of Bizagi, a company that offers a platform for intelligent process automation that powers more than 1,000 organizations worldwide.

As a CFO, he said, he always has his pencil out, ready to go line by line item looking for potential cost savings. At the same time, he looks for operational improvements that can be made. For example, he recently was involved in studying various service tickets that had come in for support in order to find out what is causing that need among customers.

“As CFOs, we have the opportunity to look across our organizations,” Argiry said when interviewed for PYMNTS’ “Day in the Life of a Digital-First CFO” series. “Don’t just be focused only on the financial metrics, but also on the operational ones.”

Delivering Intelligent Process Automation

Bizagi handles not only the data, but also intelligent process automation, Argiry said. For each customer, the company applies digital process automation to what it describes as non-differentiating processes and differentiating processes.

Argiry said the former are tasks that will not set one business part from another — for example, a vacation approval process or an order-to-cash process — while the latter are those that really delve into a company’s “secret sauce” so to speak.

“Generally, clients will have about a dozen or so of those [differentiating processes], and that’s really where we can add value,” Argiry said.

He gave the example of an HVAC technician who’s out in the field. In the past, the technician would have to pick up the phone to learn what parts were in inventory. Today, with that process largely automated by Bizagi, the same technician would check inventory via a wireless tablet and then have the parts delivered directly to the job site when needed.

“That’s the value that we’re seeing across all industries; we’re not industry-specific,” Argiry said. “Everyone has processes, and they want to automate them, so we’re in the thick of that. It’s really about making the processes more efficient as well as how, with artificial intelligence and machine learning, we really drive value in that and we can help people automate and improve their cycle times and really drive value across their organization.”

Driving Down Costs, Improving Visibility

In procurement, too, the Bizagi platform automates what has traditionally been a business process involving multiple steps. Argiry gave the example of buying an office chair. In the past, that would involve finding the chair, negotiating the price, ordering it, receiving it, proving the invoice and then delivering the payment. When that process is automated, it’s all done in one step.

“You put in one order and — boom — a couple weeks later a chair is showing up in your home office or in your true office, back in the day,” Argiry said. “That’s what we’re seeing, there’s some value that’s getting driven out of the process, driving costs down for organizations and their procurement-to-pay systems.”

When applied to supply chains, one of the benefits of automation is the ability to see the location of goods — an ability that’s especially important during today’s supply chain challenges. When working with a shipping client, Bizagi saw that companies were using different systems that were in silos, Argiry said. Bizagi used its platform’s orchestration layer to pull together the information and create a dashboard that enables the client to track goods through the supply chain.

“For you and me at home, we can find out where our shipment is with FedEx or UPS, but when you’re doing B2B on the other side, some clients don’t have as much visibility,” Argiry said. “We’ve really been able to improve that with our solution. Being able to see where those goods are, where the bottleneck is, that’s really been some of the value that we’re driving on supply chain.”