Manufacturing Magazine December 2014 | Page 13

Harnessing the cloud financial process suite . Manufacturers can then automate sales order , delivery note and purchase requisition processing . Building financial suite automation in this way maximises both productivity and return on investment .
How can the Cloud help ? The Cloud is the infrastructure where an application or programme can run on many different computers simultaneously . Whilst it can refer to other types of network , Cloud computing normally refers to the Internet . In this sense , a company can provide access to software , but will store it on their central server rather than issuing the customer a physical copy . Customers can then access and use the software by connecting to the Internet and logging into the secure server . This is the Software as a Service ( SaaS ) model .
As software is run on the provider ’ s central server it is not necessary for the customer to store and run the software on their computer , freeing up the memory on the computer and increasing performance .
Cloud AP Using Cloud based SaaS to automate the back office AP function enables adoption of a complete solution for invoice capture and processing with minimal IT involvement or investment in additional hardware and software .
The most effective solutions will extract data from documents automatically , understanding the difference between ( for example ) text that is an address or company name and a purchase order number . By automating the extraction of this information , manufacturers can automatically match invoices to purchase orders and delivery notes . Where all of the relevant documents are available and the information matches , the software can process invoices for payment and securely store the information together in the Cloud .
Manufacturers are in a better position now than ever before to completely automate business processes . Historically , expensive additional hardware , software and infrastructure have been required from the outset , leaving comprehensive process automation available exclusively to large organisations . The SaaS model enables even smaller manufacturers to experience
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