Modernization Deep Dive: Payables Agent

 

In this deep dive session see the Payables AI Agent in action inside JD Edwards. Explore how it processes and validates invoices, automatically detects exceptions, applies graduated autonomy, provides visibility into AI-driven decisions, and integrates directly with JD Edwards EnterpriseOne.

Transcript

Thank you everybody for joining.

We are going to get started here in just one minute.

So we got a short presentation.

We want to keep it short so you can get back.

So a couple things before we get started.

First off, this is going to be a little bit different than past webinars if you've been with us.

First reason is it's going to be short.

Like I just said, we're going to try and keep it to 30 minutes to get you guys out of here and go from there.

And then the other thing is I don't know if you guys can see, but we have 40 people on now.

So a little bit smaller than and then past webinars where we've had over 100 people.

And that's that's a good thing.

We're going to we're doing this every week.

So that's anticipated.

And the reason is we want to save, you know, a third of the time.

So the last 10 minutes for Q&A.

So save your questions at the end.

I'll everybody will be muted for now, but at the end you can come off from you.

You don't have to, but to ask questions for Kevin and MO just joined.

So MO will be around 2 to answer any questions you have with the payables agent or or anything we're doing here with modernizing JD Edwards.

And last thing, it is being recorded.

So it's already being recorded.

So I will send that out to you all after likely tomorrow.

We'll get an e-mail with the recording.

So with that, Kevin, if you're ready to pull up your presentation and and get go on and it's not all going to be presentation or do some demo as well.

So yeah, yeah, OK.

Thank you, Scott, and thank you everyone for spending your lunch time with me today and with us.

We very much appreciate your time.

And like Scott said, we're going to kind of get through this pretty quickly today.

I have a few slides to go through that just kind of help us set the stage for, you know, modernizing JD Edwards, right?

I mean, this is our ERP suites modernization series.

And I couldn't think of a better way to kick, kick off that series than to talk about AI and a gentic AI for JD Edwards.

So I'm going to set the stage for that.

And then we're going to get in and we're going to, we're going to look at the AP agent live and in action and then wrap it up with a few sides.

And I'll then I'll let you get back to your, to your lunchtime.

So, you know, again, theme today modernization and, and, and really this AP agent helps us go from manual processes to modern automated process, right?

Having a digital worker live inside your JD Edwards and perform and execute those manual tasks.

I'm Kevin Van Horn if you guys haven't met me I'm I'm the managing director for at ERP suites for our AI initiatives 34 years with Oracle.

I started as a customer and and then went to work for JD Edwards in 1994 and was one of those original members of the AEC team architect engineer construct.

I went on to stay with Oracle helping running the JD Edwards and cloud territories.

But now I'm, I'm thrilled to be with the ARP suites and back in the JD Edwards ecosystem.

So, so hello again.

And, and you know, I look forward to chatting with you.

So ARP suites from a, a gentic AI approach has, has, has a, has a definite approach to it.

And there's a, there's a reason behind that, right?

When we look to deploy an AI agent for you, I mean, there's really kind of three components of it, right?

And the first one is, is the assessment.

And, and I refer to that as our workforce requirements, right?

Whatever business process you're trying to modernize, we want to evaluate that process end to end, right?

We want to identify upstream and downstream roadblocks and gaps to help, you know, to help build this agent as effectively and efficiently as possible.

What we found is that, you know, as we look to modernize a lot of these business processes, the, the issues aren't necessarily JD Edwards or the software or whatnot.

It's, it's the people, right?

It's, it's the knowledge, it's, it's the manual steps that are going through that we want to capture in order for us to help, you know, build that agent to improve upon those those things.

The next step is the automate step is where we actually design and build our digital workers, right?

We build them to your specifications, right?

I mean, you know, that's the key here.

It's these are your agents.

They want, they need to understand your business processes, the way you set up JD Edwards, the way you want to execute.

And so that's how we build and deploy these agents.

And then lastly is the continuous improvement.

You know, one of the things we we didn't want to do is, is build a product and then drop it off on, you know, in your environment and then walk away and not have you get the value that you deserve out of these agents, right?

So we will continually monitor those agents.

We'll talk a little bit about the goal orientation of it, but we'll make sure that those agents are kind of fulfilling their goals.

You really kind of refilling the, the requirements needed to, to, you know, to, to process and, and modernize that, that business process, you know, in the way that we expected and anticipated.

So, you know, we, we want to be part and true partner with you throughout this process.

And so these agents, you know, and you'll hear me talk about it a lot, they're digital workers, right?

They're not, they're not bits of software.

They are actually, they're actually workers that solve business problems for you, right?

And the keys that they're always on, right?

They're on 24/7.

They don't take breaks, they don't take vacations, they're always working.

They're goal oriented.

And that's critical.

I mentioned that before is that, and you'll see it in the AP agent as we launch it, that we've got critical goals that we're trying to achieve, you know, and the, the agent is perpetually working towards those goals so that it improves itself and evolves over time.

It learns and adapts, it collaborates, it works alongside your digital workers in your organization.

And they and we have a, a very scalable framework for you that you can deploy one agent or dozens, hundreds of agents all on that same that there's our same agentic platform.

So that's very exciting.

And then we have really two flavors of our agents, right.

We have, we, we've built a a number of agents particularly around our financial work or financial workforce.

So things like our AP agent, our reconciliation trial balance agents.

So we've created families of agents that that are pre built, that will be configured for your business that can be deployed rather rapidly.

AP the AP Digital workers, one of those things, but one of them more exciting, you know, opportunities that we've seen is that we we're also building custom agents that, that are purpose built for customers that solve real business problem problems, right?

You know, things around supply chain, things around warehouse, things around fixed assets or or in even some vertical industry type solutions, right?

So they can be built around the way your business actually runs, right?

We work the same process though, right?

We'll work with you, we'll determine, we'll assess that business process, we'll build into and deploy those agents to your specifications.

And then we'll work with you month by month afterwards to ensure that the agent is delivering the the results that have been promised.

So if one of our use cases, if if you're thinking of A use case for your business that is different from one of ours, that's the exact idea behind let's create the let's create a digital worker for your business.

Oops, my apologies.

So I want to set the stage, right.

So you know, let's just think about our the demo for our AP agent, right?

And we're going to call it the modernized JD Edwards Corp, right?

And they've been running JD Edwards for eight years.

They've got a small AP team of four folks.

They, they do roughly 2000 invoices a month, right?

And everything's working.

And then one day, you know, they, they, they hear from their boss and the executive team that we're acquiring a new company and all of a sudden that team is, is processing twice as many AP invoices as they used to, right?

They still only have the same number of people, right?

Month end Closings are problematic, right?

And then they start, how do we fix this problem, right?

And they they hire somebody, you know, they throw another body at it, right?

Or they look offshore to to have, you know, people that can keep punch for them.

Or they think about a, you know, a very kind of rules based tool that they can go in and, you know, put in, you know, that, you know, like an OCR or you know, a payables kind of automation solution.

But it doesn't work, right?

We've got a Of business, we've got a new acquisition, they've got new invoice formats.

It's the problem still exists.

Here we go.

So how do we solve that?

We're going to solve it with our AP agent.

So let me switch over here, pull up our agent itself.

So here's our AP agent dashboard, right?

As I mentioned before again it's very goals oriented right.

We've got on our main KPI screen we've got KP is around days payable outstanding, how much the cost per invoice, you know, what's the cycle time, what's our touchless rate or first pass yield.

You know we it looks at payments and looks at on time payments.

So it's doing all that analysis for us, you know, you know, we're, we're looking here and saying, well, you know, maybe that maybe we need to work with you on other first pass yield, you know, are the invoices being processed correctly?

And if not, you know, if our, if our target is 90% and we're at 60, then we need to do some work to pull that up to, to the right levels of execution.

But that's what the that's what the agent does, right?

So, you know, each one of our agents has dashboards, right?

But one of the things I really kind of want you to think about is, you know, the dashboard is the, is the visualization of the agent, right?

It allows you as an organization to look at into the agent and understand what it's doing, right?

Just like you can walk that into your office and see all the people that are working there.

This gives you a view of that digital worker, right?

But that digital worker is really working in JD Edwards with your people, right?

Again, this is a good way to visualize what it's doing, but it's actually working hand in hand in JD Edwards beside your workers, collaborating with your workers in real time.

OK, so let's just say now we want to get some invoices into the system, all right?

You know, there are there are several ways that we can do this right.

One of the things and I wanted to show you something real quick so you could show see that there was nothing up my sleeves here during this demonstration is I'm going to go into JD Edwards now and I'm, I'm going to look at supplier Ledger inquiry and I'm just going to say show me all my invoices, you know, between July and today.

And I've got five of them out there because I ran some of this this morning to make sure everything was working perfectly and to give our KPI some, some details behind it.

So I have, you know, a number of different vouchers that have been automatically added.

And we'll, we'll look at that in a second.

But let's just say your, your suppliers, you know, will send you invoices to a dedicated e-mail mailbox.

So I'm going to go out to my Outlook, I'm going to say I want to create a, a new and I'm going to send it to my AP invoices.

And I'm going to call it, you know, my August invoices.

And think of this, think about, I'm a supplier now and I'm going to send this into you.

I'm going to attach a file.

Now I'm going to go and I'm going to grab a couple of these invoices and I want to go down to Universal and grab a couple.

I want to go back up here.

I forgot to hit the command, so I'm going to pull in six invoices.

OK, I'm going to say open, bring those into my e-mail.

OK, it's in there, right?

And I'm going to send those on their way.

So they've been sent now I'm, I'm back in the AP dashboard and this is, you know, and when I mentioned before that this is really that the view of that AP agent.

So I'm going to go over here to the observability tab because I want you to look at the activity feed, right?

Because I just sent those, those, those AP invoices to a dedicated mailbox.

My agent is monitoring that mailbox.

That agent is just saw that that in that inbox got a bunch of invoices and it's starting to process them right.

And you can see response time here.

You can see the operations per hours, but you can actually see the live activity now the agents thinking right, its reasoning, what is it doing?

It's it's generating it.

You know, it's getting recommended GL coding for it.

It's doing it's searching for duplicates, it's getting PO details.

It's doing it, it just automatically exactly two way matched or three-way matched the invoice, right?

So it's working in real time right now, right?

And now you can see you can get notifications that we've, we've just auto matched 34.

Now we're up to five.

I think we've got one more left because I think then there it is.

So we've just actually matched 6 invoices, right?

If I go back here now, if I go over to the notifications tab, you can see now that, you know, in the last 15 minutes and you can see it's actually the last 32 seconds.

I've got 123456 invoices that that have come through.

And I had auto matched them.

And I could actually go in and say, you know, if I wanted to see the detail and the reasoning behind it, I could say, Oh yeah, it there was no duplicates.

It found that PO match line on number 1.

You know, it did a two way match.

You know, it could do a three-way match as well.

It passed the tolerance check.

There were no exceptions.

So the voucher was automatically created, which is great.

I did some earlier today where there was some more there was there was more problems with it.

And I looked at it and said, oh, you know, what's the reason this?

And said, well, you know this one, the invoice matched me.

Oh, but the invoice quantities below.

And if I went and said, well, what are the details behind that?

The agent could actually go out and do some thinking for us, right?

It can actually go out and say, what is it about that, that, that invoice that, that, that is causing this, this, this issue.

I believe this one I had already paid earlier, right?

So I could ask the agent to do something.

I could say, can you get rid of this?

Could could you get rid of this invoice because we've already this is a duplicate or the PO line has been closed originally.

It could be something like the we couldn't reconcile the invoice date from the invoice.

And you could say, you could tell the agent to please make the invoice date.

This, this one said, this one was saying it was missing an invoice date, right?

The the PO itself is valid and it passed tolerance but the invoice date is missing and it can't match it.

I could say thanks please make invoice date excuse me invoice date today 8/11/26 and now the agent can work.

Right now the agents thinking and saying, OK, I promise you it's thinking and now it'll actually go out and update that agent with a proper POD.

And now that it does did that, it actually said that it matched it successfully.

And it, and you can see here now if I get out of here that it was in manual, but it was resolved by me at this time and it made the invoice date 811 because I asked it to, right?

So it resolved those problems right to JD Edwards in a second, because remember, I've invoices out there.

If I went and and did an inquiry.

Now we've got 11 invoices out there.

So our AP agent ingested those emails.

Those the, the PD FS that were attached to that e-mail.

The agent processed those.

It thought about those, it reasoned those, it found issues with those.

Actually they should be 12 because that other invoice was from before, but it hadn't created the invoice yet until I gave it the invoice date plus the six ones we just did.

So we just added seven, but it reasoned and then ultimately it acted, you know, autonomously because we told it to and it went back and entered those that information directly into JD Edwards.

Nobody touched it right back at the AP agent.

You know, you can see that there was 16 in there and and and 14 were auto matched correctly.

If I go here to invoice processing, we have, you know, an exception queue analysis that you can see different exceptions.

So if they truly did come out, you could say that hey, here are my exception types, the which ones are open, which ones have been resolved, which ones have been dismissed?

All these have been resolved, right?

But if they were ones that I needed to work on, I could have done that from the notification tab.

But here's a little workbench for you to kind of manage those, those exceptions.

And this is really want what we want your people doing now, right?

We don't want them manually keep punching invoices into the system.

We want them to be able to resolve any problems with invoices quickly right here from a workbench.

And you can we can resolve these issues by talking to the AP agent and having them help us resolve those as well.

So we saw the observability tab now one of the now one of the things that I wanted to talk about.

So, so now all of a sudden we have more information, right?

So our KPIs get updated.

You can see, you know, more targets, you know, we can see our aging since I've just did them today, there's really no aging, but you can see, you know, rates, you know, you know, KP is versus targets.

And then you have this thing called cash flow projections, right?

So it was one of the things we were thinking about as we did this.

And, and you know it, it's great getting invoices, invoices into the system, right?

You know, if, if we have a digital copy of an invoice, we can ingest that.

It doesn't have to, it could be whatever invoice format that it needs to be.

It could be APDF file, it could be an Excel spreadsheet.

It could be be a Word document, it can even be an e-mail that our system can, our system can ingest and update into our system, right?

It doesn't have to be APDF and it doesn't have to be in any format, right?

Our tools, unlike OCR tools, can look at the complete picture of an invoice and determine what fields are within that invoice, wherever they are on that invoice, right?

And determine what fields they need to be and, and create that, that, that check for us to ensure that it's getting the right information into the system.

But we figured, hey, you know, what else would be great for this agent would be to do, you know, some cash management, right?

So we allow you to we, we have a dashboard that allows you to go in and see those open invoices that we just put into the system and actually create, even create some payment scenarios that allows us to look at, Hey, I've got some overdue invoices down here.

And but I got also a couple here that and would give us a give us a discount and I could assign those to it.

And you could see kind of what if scenarios, right?

And say, Oh yeah, this is what they get cash will impact would be for this payment group, this payment, you know, this scenario.

But if I go back, I can go to payment recommendations and it can actually go out and think and reason based upon goals of your organization, right?

You would tell the system, what are your cash management goals, right?

To stay, you know that that to be, you know, 20% below expected cash intake and to maximize discounts and to minimize overdue payments at all costs, right?

And the system then would reason and help create payment groups for you.

So here it could go out and say, you know, what's my record do recommended plan, pay 2 overdue vouchers, capture $1000 in discounts across those.

And you can go in into, you know, payment advisor to say, you know, what is my recommendation?

We know what group should I should I be thinking about here?

And from here you could even say, yeah, go ahead, you know, this one's, you know, check payment status or view available vouchers or, or, you know, think about a certain supplier that you might want to include in this payment group as well.

But the system then could even allow you just to say, all right, I agree, create this payment group for me, right?

And it would actually go out, reach back into JD Edwards and create the payment group for us and then allow that to run in, in all of our check runs.

Right.

Let me see the time check.

I'm getting a little late.

I was just going to say, Kevin, we got questions coming in.

So I know there's about a few minutes left.

So I'm going to questions or show anything else.

Yeah, I want to go real quickly.

I'm going to go back.

If I go back to my KP is I'm going to go back to the come on.

I'm going to go back to the PowerPoint real quick if I go here.

So, you know, so, so our invoices came in.

Nobody ever cuts the keyboard.

The cost per invoice was driven down.

Our, our through rate was increased.

We managed duplicates.

We, we disallowed any duplicates.

We maximize discounts.

We went from PDF to voucher in eight seconds.

No one on the the AP team had to touch it, right?

And you know, that's all because now of this our AI foundation, right?

And I'm not going to get into this too much, but the real point and what I mentioned before is that once we have an agent out there working with you, we've built this kind of the, our AI foundation and your agentic platform, we can plug additional agents into that process.

And with minimal, you know, to, to minimize the effort and cost because these agents work on top of those latform, right O you.

Once you have the your agentic latform, if you wanted to lug in a reconciliation or a monthly close agent, it would be easy to do at that point.

And some of the use cases that we've already built, right.

And I talked about you know AP agent, monthly clothes reconciliation, financial planning, some of those I'll be demoing later on in this modernization series.

But we're working on supply chain for sales order intake and inventory allocations and even some industry specific stuff, right, that we can build out.

But really the ask and the call was is to let us help you map out your process, right?

We'll spend 90 minutes with your team, no cost to you, no obligation to kind of map to understand your AP process where the bottlenecks are.

We'll do a technical deep dive with you to understand your integration requirements and security requirements.

And then we could do a, a pilot of this very quickly in your organization, you know, in a very short order so that you can really start seeing benefits real quickly.

So thank you.

You know, I, I, I know we heard this one through.

It was kind of unlike our normal ones.

Also, we love to see you on our, our, our modernization sessions coming up.

I'll be on September 8th and the 29th doing some more AI agents, the reconciliation and child balance.

But I love that we'd love to see you on the widgets and and user experience, you know, as well as some of these other our advanced automation techniques with our orchestrator.

So thank you.

You know, I, I, I know we heard this one through.

It was kind of unlike our normal ones.

Also, we love to see you on our, our, our modernization sessions coming up.

I'll be on September 8th and the 29th doing some more AI agents, the reconciliation and child balance.

But I love that we'd love to see you on the widgets and and user experience, you know, as well as some of these other our advanced automation techniques with our orchestrator.

So thank you.

Yeah.

And over Scott, I'd love to answer any questions.

Yeah, if anybody has questions, if they use the raise their hand feature, I can add you so that you can ask directly or we can continue going through the chat.

I know, I know you've been answering a bunch of them.

So if you want to, while we wait for the next one to come in, elaborate on any of these answers, feel free.

Like I said, yeah, use the chat or raise your hand and I'll, I'll unmute you and you can come in and just talk with Kevin directly.

So Yep, MO answer.

Yep.

Go ahead, Mel.

Thanks everyone for for, for joining.

Also, like, like we said, there's a lot of we're trying to do a lot of these modernization series just to showcase some of the modern capabilities that JD Edwards has and, you know, fight a lot of that, that stigma, that stare that JD can't, you know, can't teach an old dog new tricks.

When in fact, we know for for a fact, and we do it all the time with our customers where you are doing really cool things like AI and and widgets.

Widgets are really, really interesting one too.

So please do attend that as well if you if you get a chance.

So no more questions.

We are actually right at the time.

We are right at our time, right.

Yeah, Kevin, I did that.

The poll we talked about how many hours a week did your team spend chasing down invoices.

Most people said they have no idea and spread out between, you know, under 2 hours, 2 to 5, five to 10 or 10 or more.

So, yeah.

And it was interesting.

So one of the people that we companies we've been working with right now, you know, they, the lament to me was Kevin, we're spending $500 to chase down a $20 invoice, right?

And that's what we're trying to resolve, right?

You know, part of that is key punching.

Part of that is making phone calls.

Part of that is trying to look up stuff in JD Edwards where this, this AP agent can do all of that for you, right?

So instead of instead of spending $500 to chase down a $20 invoice, you can spend a dollar.

So Shravan asked if a orchestrator was used to build the agents at work.

No, the agent is built entirely using our own proprietary, you know, coding tools, right?

There are orchestrations use that the agent uses to do things inside of JD Edwards.

But so the orchestrations are a big part of the agent, but they're not used to actually build the agent itself, right?

Yeah, the orchestrations helped put the put the invoices into JD Edwards, but they also help do things like two way, three-way matching.

They help do you know, stuff like that data retrieval from JD Edwards, credit checking, you know, credit holds all those different types of things that it can do.

Orchestrations are used.

The agent uses orchestrations.

It's not built on orchestrations.

Awesome folks.

Well, thank you again.

You know, this is only, you know, this is, this is webinar #1 in our modernization series.

So, you know, I think all the rest of them are going to be just as exciting and just as informative for you.

So we'd love to see you there as well.

We'd love to have lunch with you next Tuesday and and Tuesday's going forward.

Thank you again for your time.

We really appreciate it and have a wonderful day.

Yep, if you sign up for next week, you'll get a Webex invite here at the end of this week or potentially early next week.

And if you haven't, go to the website & up every Tuesday at 12 Eastern.

Thank you, everyone.

Thanks, Kevin.

Thanks.

Thank you guys.