Unit4 has launched Smart Automation Services to enhance user efficiency and productivity in ERP systems by leveraging AI and context awareness, aiming to automate mundane tasks and create more intuitive user experiences.
Tools will deliver non-invasive seamless experiences to improve user efficiency and support process automation
London, UK, March 20, 2024 – Unit4, a leader in enterprise cloud applications for people-centric organizations, today announced the launch of Smart Automation Services, which will enable its customers to leverage artificial intelligence and context awareness capabilities to improve efficiency and productivity. These services will integrate with Unit4’s next generation enterprise resource planning suite, ERPx, and its virtual assistant, to further streamline business processes. Leveraging these services, ERPx can automate a significant proportion of tasks and enable an optimized, customized, light-touch user experience.
Smart Automation Services combine several tools which Unit4 has been developing to underpin its agile, microservices-enabled ERP Suite. It integrates AppStudio, a tool to streamline development and automation of new application functionality in ERPx, with Extension Kit Flows and Apps, a low-code platform for building, customizing and connecting business apps to ERPx. The Services also include Industry Mesh, which enables agile integration of Cloud applications with ERPx and Unit4’s next-generation virtual assistant. Together they help to streamline the development of user interfaces (UI) and empower ERP users.
Our goal is to dramatically reduce the amount of time that users need to spend interacting with ERP systems by automating processes and making tasks more intuitive and intelligent.
Claus Jepsen
CPTO, Unit4
“Our goal is to dramatically reduce the amount of time that users need to spend interacting with ERP systems by automating processes and making tasks more intuitive and intelligent,” said Claus Jepsen, CPTO, Unit4. “Using detailed research of user experiences and smart automation, we know how to automate mundane tasks and provide UIs which will dramatically change the way ERP is viewed. If we can empower users to focus on more rewarding tasks, we will extend the value of our technology to businesses.”
Unit4’s Smart Automation Services use automation and intelligence to enhance the people experience for users. Combining AI with context awareness, Smart Automation Services will be able to craft personalized experiences which improve user efficiency. Unit4 has been able to validate this approach through its internal use of AppStudio to develop and deploy new capabilities, and through detailed ethnographic research of user behaviours and habits. Along with product usage data and analytics, Unit4 has also quantified user observations, and measured both the impact and effectiveness of new functionality. In an initial pilot for employee self-service, the company dramatically reduced the time spent on task completion and task interaction.
“In the digital world, organizations are relying on automation to improve productivity. With the right tool set, and with more information at their fingertips, organizations can also enhance employee effectiveness and efficiency, creating better and informed decisions while improving the velocity of decision making,” said Mickey North Rizza, Group Vice President, Enterprise Software, IDC. “With this enhanced decision making, the organization becomes much more competitive in the digital world.”
Unit4 has also used Smart Automation Services to develop additional functionality including Payroll Navigator, Procurement Invoice Approval, Contextual Help, and Integration Widgets. In the course of 2024 – 2025, Unit4 will release further innovations for payroll, expenses, procurement, finance, and its virtual assistant. Longer-term, Unit4’s Smart Automation Services will be focused on a number of goals for this program, such as reducing the time to process bank statements, decreasing payroll mistakes, increasing the accuracy in recognizing receipts and reducing manual processing time for invoices.
