“Once a quarter, I used to do a vanishing act that any professional magician would envy, along with scores of accountants worldwide, I vanished into accounting’s month-end close cycle” writes Amir Jafari, Vice President, and General Manager of ServiceNow’s Finance Business Unit, in a very candid blog he wrote on the painful activity of finance close that every finance professional performs during the quarter close. 

As rightly shared by him, Finance Close is a rigorous, time consuming, and chaotic activity where the likelihood of errors is high. The finance team faces numerous challenges during the Finance Close period, such as 

Long close cycles and high turn around time Excessive manual processes, including emails and spreadsheets, to manage financial close periods.  Inefficient, disparate processes and siloed data  Constant risk of financial-reporting errors and lack of visibility Coordination with a multitude of  team members reporting from different geographies that

Customers have been spoiled!

Kudos to e-commerce giants such as Amazon, who have done a fabulous job of delighting their customers at every step of their purchase journey. A customer who till recently was accustomed to making an online purchase by selecting, ordering, and getting the delivery of the ordered merchandise now expects intuitive interfaces, around-the-clock availability, real-time fulfillment, personalized treatment, global consistency, and zero errors. 

Thanks to automation, which is helping e-commerce companies achieve all this and making it possible to offer products and services swiftly, resulting in a seamless user experience. The companies have raised the bar and increased customer expectations to the extent that they have now become increasingly demanding of online purchase experience. Starting with the amount of time that is spent on a shopping page, the number of clicks, down scroll to reach choice of merchandise, every possible task is automated leaving no spot for

Being virtual has made it even easier to connect during a conference. We can now find each other with one click. Meet us at the 69th SES Conference. Let’s bring the energetic, sharing, and growing with each other kind of vibe we create every year to this year’s virtual SES conference. 

We are excited about this year’s theme“The Value of Standardization and the Standards Professional” and can’t wait to meet, share and learn from each other about our unique journeys through these unique times we all are in together.

The SES (Standards Engineering Society) offers a great platform for the Standards Professional Community to come together to address mutual challenges, opportunities, interests, and successes and take action in the direction of making this world a safer place.

InfoBeans has been a proud exhibitor at SES consecutively for the last three years providing valuable contributions to enhance the standards

Imagine a process improvement that increases productivity not by 10 or 50 percent, but by 1,000 percent or even more. Envision reducing a process cycle time not by hours or days but weeks and lowering operations costs by manifolds.

It seemed like a pipe dream, but RPA has made all of this a reality.

Wow! But How?

So, when you automate processes, it definitely results in bringing operational efficiency, reducing Turn-Around-Time, and slashing costs. Your doctors and other nursing staff now have more time to personally attend your patients, offering a sense of security and peace of mind to them. Likewise, your administrative staff who were till now entrenched in manually intensive tasks can now perform more value-based tasks resulting in an undeniable increase in their sense of belonging.

Awesome! But What’s in it for the institutions? 

A lot, seriously. And we have the numbers to prove

ServiceNow has now landed in Orlando with exciting features, patch releases, notable changes, and hotfixes to existing functionalities. Not much time has gone since the NewYork release that had path-breaking features like guided app creator, integration hub, two new portals – Operator Workspace and Service Owner Workspace, and made enhancements to the Virtual Agent besides making Agent Workspace available. 

ServiceNow is here again with its Orlando release with major attractions such as updates to Predictive Intelligence, Mobile Onboarding, and Virtual Agent in addition to introducing AI and Analytics in their release. The AI engine in the Now intelligence helps predict issues and automates action through analytics. Both AI and Analytics together improve the speed and efficiency of an incident or problem cycle. 

Here is a consolidated release notes information for new and updated Orlando features:

1. Deeper Insights into Analytics:  

Performance Analytics: Ask questions and receive answers using natural everyday language.

With a “can’t wait to automate strategy”, banks are the frontrunners riding the automation wave. They have successfully shifted the uninspiring and routine tasks to machines while engaging their human resources in more resourceful tasks. The results are phenomenal; there is a dramatic increase in the operational efficiency and improvement in customer experience, among a multitude of other benefits, making automation inevitable for banks.

What made banks the early adopters of the automation wave is the realization of the fact that it is an excellent way to enhance productivity, performance, and to bring round-the-clock efficiency in processes. Challenges such as strict regulations and controls posed by the Government, the rise of the fintechs, change in customer behavior, demand for faster and personalized services, and Mergers and Acquisitions have left banks with no other choice than to embrace automation. 

As it is, the banks spending on IT is twice as much

Blockchain is of paramount importance as it facilitates users to own digital goods, assets, and data. It is a global distributed digital ledger that ensures transparency for all stakeholders within the network besides being a trusted and reliable technology. Both the ideas, Smart Contract-Based Crowdfunding, and Rewards platform, have harnessed the power of Blockchain in addition to using smart contracts.

A Smart Contract is an option contract between two or more parties written as a code in Blockchain. The individuals involved are anonymous, but the ledger is the public ledger. The Contract executes itself according to the coded terms when there is a triggering event like an expiration date. Regulators can use the Blockchain to understand the activity in the market while maintaining the privacy of individual actors’ positions. It is entirely autonomous and increases transparency, security, accuracy, speed, efficiency while keeping the transaction cost low.

Smart Contracts based CrowdFunding: Crowdfunding

It is challenging to manage too many UI tests at the same time and meet release deadlines. Does it take too long to execute your Regression tests too? The simplest and most powerful way to overcome the challenge is to test all the tests in parallel. Parallel Test Automation is an innovative approach to help you run the tests parallelly and save your time so that you can focus on your core business activities.

Overview: Testing was done manually during the early stages of software development. As the industry advanced, there came some early-stage automation tools like AutoTester, UFT, and PreVue, to name a few. But as the tools were complicated and expensive, people started looking for better solutions. The new automation tools such as “Selenium, Katalon, Testim” emerged to go hand in hand with the rapidly changing software technologies.

As the software industry grew further, people started realizing they needed

As per a survey by the World Health Organization (WHO), 466 million people across the world face difficulty while they hear, speak and convey their message, which is over 5% of the world’s population. They don’t use voice as a primary medium to send their message and instead explain it through gestures. With gbML, the same gestures get captured in a computer, which then translates them into text and speech for ordinary people to understand and make sense out of it.

(gbML is a term designed by our team for the innovative idea, do not search the name on the internet!)

Idea: Only a few people understand the sign language used by the partially or fully disabled, and it becomes difficult for them to convey their message to everyone. gbML efficiently reduces the gap between the two.

How it works:

The differently-abled person performs gestures in front

With technologies like JavaScript native speech recognition API and a JavaScript speech synthesizer, the possibility of your favorite voice assistant acting as your navigator while you interact on the web is not far-fetched. Both technologies have empowered multiple functions on the website and make it easy to interact with the web. 

Read more to know how?

Overview: Speech recognition technology has gained momentum in recent years. It provides advantages on both an individual as well as enterprise level. Amongst the various benefits, the most notable is its ability to dictate speech and convert it into texts. With its help, users can fill forms and perform multiple functions without any physical contact with the device.

Idea: A web application ‘Hello,’ which can accept the commands from users without any keyboard or physical activity(touch, etc.). It is a library which needs to be included in the code. A user can speak the highlighted