If you read the 1998 book “Who Moved my Cheese” you may appreciate the disruptive nature of change and just how important it is to adapt quickly to new situations. The same can be said for telecom invoice capturing tools, like the one Tangoe uses to quickly and efficiently ingest billing data. Beyond the basic operations of accounts receivable, these technologies are essential in executing timely payments that take advantage of early-payment discounts – which in case you missed it – can save companies 1-2% every month on their telecom bills.
That’s a sizeable annual savings easily jeopardized by change.
Invoices are dynamic in nature: There will never be a standard format for them, and their locations are always changing as client portals are redesigned and providers adjust websites to heighten the user experience. But these upgrades leave financial managers (and telecom expense management platforms) scrambling to find where their invoices went.
What if you had an AI-intelligent bot that could automatically adapt to change and find invoices and all the pertinent information regardless of their location and no matter how many times the service provider “moved the cheese?”
This is the type of outside-the-box thinking that happens here at Tangoe, and as you might guess, this is the innovative ingenuity behind our newest patented capability.
Self-Modifying Bot Manages Change by Proactively Searching for Invoices and Data
Thanks to AI and robotic process automation, Tangoe can process well over 370,000 invoices every month. But change can potentially make that automation come to a screeching halt. When an invoice location is moved, systems programmed to look in a specific place for data start firing off errors, calling in the humans for help with reprogramming which reverts everything back into manual mode.
U.S. Patent #12,112,274, titled “Self-Learning and Repairing Robotic Process Automation for Telecom Expense Management” solves this problem. This is Tangoe’s 12th AI-related patent for telecom expense management. Overall, we have been granted 23 patented capabilities for telecom with 15 still pending. Across our entire solution portfolio, we have 72 granted patents.
This new patent protects Tangoe’s exclusive rights to an innovative method and technology (used in our telecom invoice capture bot) that “knows” how to search for relevant information. Powered by machine learning and predictive analytics, this bot was named Fido for it’s fast fetching capabilities. It’s trained to find invoices and billing data by combing through:
- HTML and underlying code
- Metadata and alternate text
- Block identifiers
- Keywords and synonyms
- Tags and structures
Once successful, the Fido bot can reprogram itself to find that data in its new location in the future. Thus, it’s considered self-learning as well as self-modifying or self-healing. This is how Tangoe keeps invoice processing moving at machine speeds, avoiding system reprogramming and manual intervention.
What’s also interesting? Tangoe’s automation engineers turned Fido loose on an entirely new carrier portal, and it located invoices without ever receiving any initial location data. The bot leveraged its own previous experience from solving the same problems in other carrier portals. This machine-learned behavior proves Fido’s versality and high level of AI intelligence.
Protecting Early-Payment Discounts: Clients are Already Benefiting
This self-healing bot is in use today and helps Tangoe achieve extraordinary results that get passed on to our clients. Thanks to its adaptive capabilities, our AI engine takes just 8 seconds to extract key data from an invoice. That means faster time-to-payment and faster time-to-insight for the IT, finance, and procurement professionals who rely on us for IT management efficiencies and cost optimization.
Most importantly, however, our clients are adaptable to change, which allows them to more consistently profit from early-payment discounts, reducing their bills 1-2%. With the help of Fido, changes don’t threaten business outcomes – together Tangoe and our clients generate the most savings with the least amount of manual work. When they do, the efficiencies of self-healing AI technology keep Tangoe and our partners moving forward.
Learn more about how AI powers Tangoe’s IT expense management platform.