RPA solves integration and automation challenge for a national factoring provider

 

TowerCap, US-based national provider of custom-built working capital solutions, has innovatively deployed robotic process automation (RPA) into their factoring process to improve efficiencies for their clients.  The company provides cost-effective financial solutions to the contractors of  telecommunications and green-energy infrastructure.

Factoring is a financial transaction and a type of debtor finance in which a business sells its accounts receivable (i.e., invoices) to a third party (called a factor) at a discount. Factoring is used to convert receivable assets into immediately available cash for working capital needs.

Faced with the challenge of positive growth and scaling across multiple clients and industries, TowerCap sought a solution that would automate manual spreadsheet-based  processes. The cumbersome processes were hampering efficiencies and putting undue pressure on the team, where tasks could be automated.

Dean Rosenthal, co-founder of TowerCap, explains that manual processes left room for error, and required more checks and balances to ensure accuracy and manual uploads, taking valuable time out of the process. “With increased demand from the market, we had to find better ways of increasing our efficiency to support scaling our business model. Manual spreadsheets and formulas were simply inadequate for our needs.”

Part of the TowerCap factoring offering includes using 3rd party portals to obtain invoicing data.   However, this posed the largest challenge in offering seamless integration into varied portals if automation were to be successful.

Linxus, a leading South African-based Nintex partner, developed the solution for TowerCap by deploying an RPA bot to solve the portal integration challenge, and used Nintex Workflow to create automation rules per customer.  The end result removes repetitive human interaction from any manual tasks, barring approvals, and allows invoices to be fetched, uploaded, approved and paid in a seamless process.

Wilhelm Vermaas of Linxus describes the bot: “By using RPA, we could mimic the human action and scale the ability to fetch and upload invoices for payment far more quickly than the TowerCap team could.  Once approved, the rest of the process is automated, making sure no time is lost in payments.”

To give an idea of the scale, the bot is currently fetching over 200 customer uploads a month, accounting for some 11,000 individual invoice lines for payment.

Future plans for the bot and workflow automation include visual reporting and dashboarding through Microsoft PowerBI.

Some of the key benefits that TowerCap have realized to date include:

  • Automation: Scaling capacity, saving 10 to 12 manhours a week for the team, with further ability to scale
  • Velocity: Improving speed to review and process transactions
  • Accuracy: Confidence in the accuracy of calculations, formulae and formal process
  • Maturity: Formalised processes ensuring compliance and governance within the business

If you’d like to learn more about the Linxus RPA bot and automation solution they developed for TowerCap, please reach out on our Contact Us form.

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