Juniper Networks has annual revenues of more than $5 billion with 92 offices in 43 countries around the world.
To support Juniper’s aggressive market growth objectives in a highly competitive market, the Global Business Services (GBS) group needed to find innovative ways to cut costs and add value. It decided to automate all non-value-added manual work within internal operations— particularly finance—to drive efficiency and productivity. Simultaneously, it wanted to reduce processing errors while improving employees’ morale by replacing tedious, repetitive processes with creative and analytical work more suited to their human capabilities.
— Prateek Kapoor, Lean Digital Transformation Leader Juniper Networks
Juniper trusted the Automation Anywhere Digital Workforce Platform to automate the billing portal process for its six largest customers. By automatically triggering and uploading invoices to a customer portal every time a new order was delivered, Juniper was able to the automate invoice submission process of matching order number, item, quantity, price, and tax, eliminating all intensive, high-volume, and error-prone manual tasks. Juniper was able to add better controls to the process, helping to reduce overall risk.
Because automating business processes requires understanding those processes inside and out—including all exceptions to any rules—Juniper realized a first step was to document all aspects of each and every step in its portal billing operations. This helped enrich its own knowledge of its business, providing “magical clarity” into processes, and now that those processes are being handled by bots, Juniper is reaping the vast benefits of this new knowledge through greater efficiencies, productivity, and cost savings.
In the past, the Turn-Around-Time (TAT) to submit invoices manually in the customer portal was two days. Today, invoice submissions are created instantly. Delivering invoices two days earlier has reduced the Average Days Late by two days - and empowered Juniper to process invoices over the weekends and on holidays. Because Juniper creates and delivers invoices with 100% accuracy, there is a reduced number of invoice disputes as well as much faster dispute resolution
— Kevin Tucceri, Business Process Owner – Credit & Collections
Today, Juniper’s accounts receivables team has a digital workforce of software robots (bots) working 24/7 to submit invoices. Now that billing analysts are freed from these time-consuming manual tasks, they use their time to analyze and understand patterns and process roadblocks to facilitate smoother cash flow for the business. As Juniper continues to add new customers to its roster for billing invoices, it has unlimited production capability for processing invoices.