New Research Reveals the Key to Successful Midmarket Digital Transformation Begins with AP Automation

Epicor Software Corporation, a global provider of industry-specific enterprise software to promote business growth, announced today new findings from sponsored research that provides insight on best-practices for digital transformation for midmarket companies, specifically how a focus on process improvement in accounts payable can provide cost and productivity windfalls to fuel expanded digital transformation efforts.

The report from Levvel Research, Tackling AP Automation with a Holistic Document Management Approach: The Scaling Company’s Guide to Using Enterprise Content Management (ECM) for Digital Transformation Success.

While organizations recognize the need to transform their business for improved efficiency and competitive advantage, many organizations face a sense of “paralysis” in getting started or fail to garner the anticipated return on investment (ROI) once digital transformation initiatives are underway. This is particularly relevant for midmarket companies with fewer resources to devote to digital transformation and which must approach digital transformation more carefully.

Levvel Research analysts advise that rather than taking a “shotgun” approach to transformation, it can be more strategic to pick a starting point in a high-cost area, such as accounts payable, as many midmarket organizations have manual, inefficient, high-cost AP processes.

• "With the DocStar platform, business leaders can start their path to digital transformation in any area of the organization and expand to additional use cases and departments. Given the high degree of manual, inefficient, high-cost processes, accounts payable is an ideal starting point."
• - Tom Franceski, vice president and general manager of DocStar, an Epicor solution

While a multitude of tools and technologies exist to support digital transformation, enterprise content management (ECM) can be used to help streamline finance operations such as AP/invoice management, and is also flexible enough to support other areas, such as contract management, HR, and sales order processing.

To this end, Levvel researchers say midmarket companies adopting a scalable, cloud-based ECM platform that integrates with existing applications often results in the greatest positive impact for the business, higher ROI from existing technology adoption, and a greater push towards the long-term benefits of digital transformation.

“The best-practice approach of narrowing the focus of digital transformation to high-value, strategic document-centric areas of the business completely aligns with what we advocate,” said Tom Franceski, vice president and general manager of DocStar, an Epicor solution. “With DocStar, business leaders can start their path to digital transformation in any area of the organization and expand to additional use cases and departments. Given the high degree of manual, inefficient, high-cost processes, accounts payable is an ideal starting point.”

DocStar is a browser-based enterprise content-management and process-automation platform enabling global digital transformation. With DocStar, businesses can better leverage their supply chain and operational areas such as finance and human resources. DocStar delivers proven technology and global process expertise that empowers organizations to work smarter, reduce costs and invest for growth.