The Great Facet of Chatbots within ERP
A decade ago, I was participating in a leading PeopleSoft FSCM project, and the finance team complained that the product was not interactive in terms of people communication or sharing requests and questions within the application. They were comparing their current system with the then-latest web applications which allowed some sort of interaction within the application.
They were looking for features that allowed them to mark their likes or dislikes or enter comments. Their grand requirement was to have some sort of artificial intelligence built into the product that would reduce the human interaction over simple questions and automate the answering of simple requests.
And look, how the world has changed in a decade! Now, emojis are everywhere and so is artificial intelligence that large organizations leverage to handle customer queries. This has become the norm in modern society and it is now infiltrating the ERP applications and finally, PeopleSoft has lived to their expectations and provided new features, be it fluid pages for mobile devices, Kibana analytical dashboards, and their relatively latest feature Chatbots.
What is Chatbot?
Chatbots is a text-based conversational feature, allowing users to inquire about the status of their transactions. This will reduce the human interaction (with the support team) and increase applications efficiency and enhance productivity by searching the needful transaction quickly.
PeopleSoft has established its footprints into the emerging chatbot technology and uses its application logic with Oracle Digital Assistant (ODA). It has designed chatbots around its key functions (Employee Expenses and Supplier Requisitions) where users can have human-like (voice or text) conversational interaction to obtain the status of their transactions.
Chatbot features in Financials and Supply Chain Management
In organizations using procurement, the main inquiries are related to the status of requisitions. Users have the ability to search by item id such as HP ELITEBOOK Laptop. So, instead of navigating through the menus of procurement, the user can invoke the bot to search by item and the bot will retrieve the details of the requisitions which will include the product images (if setup).
Similarly, all organizations use some sort of T&E module and users always inquire about the status of their expense reimbursements. Using chatbots, employees can retrieve a variety of details related to the expense reports say, ‘show my expense reports of last month’, ‘Show my expense reports of last week etc. And out of the retrieved reports, say if any of the reports is still unapproved then the user can follow up with the approver for further action.
The use of this great technology will save an organization’s time, effort & cost. Integrating chatbots into your business application is a great way to offer superior customer service and increase engagement levels.
About the author
Mahesh Kurdukar (India) has been part of Version 1’s PeopleSoft India team for over 3 years and has an overall of over 18 years experience in PeopleSoft FSCM working on projects across the USA, APAC & UK.
If you have any questions or would like more information on the Version 1’s PeopleSoft Financials Chatbot features, please contact him at mahesh.kurdukar@version1.com.
Keep a lookout for a series of blogs in the near future.
