How do I decide where to apply RPA in the order-to-cash cycle?

[Dennis25]

I’ve been mapping out our order-to-cash cycle and hit a wall trying to figure out where to apply robotic process automation for the best return. We have so many repetitive data entry points between systems, but I’m worried about picking a step that’s too fragile or won’t actually free up my team’s time. How did you decide where to start with yours?

[VioletZP]

I did a quick one week pilot in AP using RPA for the field transfers between our ERP and the invoices portal. It knocked 20-30% of manual keystrokes, but the exceptions flooded in when the supplier changed their schema. It felt good until we spent two days reconfiguring.

[Charles19]

I tried automating a bunch of data handoffs and learned it’s not the volume but the variance; one field name change and the bot was dead in the water, and the maintenance piled up like junk mail.

[Scarlett.J]

We started with a tiny bot that fills a default tax code in orders; it saved a few seconds per order, but then escalations grew because some orders still needed human validation. We measured throughput and saw modest gains, but the bottleneck moved to downstream checks.

[Tyler95]

So is the real blocker data quality upstream, or is the process handoff itself the bottleneck?