A value promise is every recipient’s subjective interpretation, and that’s why formalizing it is a challenge, at least for me. What makes this even more complicated is the diversity of the promises. How do we make sure every Aico team member understands the customer value that their work creates? And how do we communicate our value promise to customers, who work on solutions for financial management processes for a living? And furthermore, how can we prove that our value promises really deliver the customer’s view of value?
Aico combines planned, repetitive tasks under a supervised and partly automated process. Aico also takes care of ad hoc tasks and controls them through it’s inbuilt workflow. The overall process is managed by people, RPA (Robotic Process Automation) solutions and Aico’s own intelligent automation, based on real understanding of the added value that an expert accountant produces. Collecting data is easy, but the conclusions drawn based on the data ask for expertise.
Aico revolutionizes the future of financial management
The development of financial management has historically been slow, but right now the discussion on automation is very much on. Especially RPA has raised a lot of interest and many pilots have been started, also in finance departments. From Aico’s point of view, RPA is as much a resource as a human. It does the same routine tasks as humans used to do, only more effectively. Here also lies RPA’s weakness – it’s not able to develop or improve the process, it just does it faster. Supervising it might even be trickier than overseeing a human, and following the entire process just as challenging as before. Here’s where Aico brings its own value promise to the table: We offer a solution that takes a look at the entire process and all its work phases, whether planned and repetitive or ad hoc tasks along with their approval processes.
Out of the results, better supervision is a nice to have perk, although legislation in different countries and regulations such as SOX, IFRS and GDPR set a very precise framework for operations, and might well motivate financial management. Aico’s real strength, however, is the savings that can be attained with the help of its modules. One must be careful when promising savings. Customers’ operating environments vary and accounting systems already deliver a number of capabilities which can reduce the potential saving and complexity that Aico delivers. We need to be sensitive to this and ensure we make promises in the context of the customer’s existing world and not simply generic claims of large savings.
We approached the subject years ago and drew the conclusion that building financial management software is not just about coding, but an in-depth understanding of the subject detail. This results in good specifications, which result in good code, i.e. features that simplify the tasks. As an essential part of our team, we hired accounting professionals, who now work for us in various roles; as product managers, documentors and operational consultants. Without this substantial professionalism, it would have been impossible to come up with a value promise, i.e. the amount of customer savings you get with Aico.
We use this practical experience to work out different companies’ savings potential. We ended up cautiously defining a different value promise for each Aico module: How much time can you save in your company’s financial processes if you take Aico into use.
However, this alone is not enough. What we need is customer affirmation of our promises. We owe a big thanks to our active customers for the fact that they want to truly develop their operations and go out of their way to do so. It’s been fantastic to find that savings have often been even better than we have been able to directly promise.
Now I would like to challenge you to challenge us; opening a discussion that delves deep into your company’s operating environment. Let’s find the core of our savings value promise in your organization, one that you can take forward to stir discussion when considering financial process streamlining. I am sure that these talks are held in every company. Let’s begin a journey together towards understanding!
