Here at Automation Today, we talk a lot about an organization’s “automation journey.” Typically, that refers to the end user—the company leveraging available technologies to automate manual business processes. But that journey always involves others—technology vendors, consultants, partners—who can lend their expertise along the way. Like a three-man weave drill in basketball, end users, technology providers and service providers work together to get to the hoop—implementing winning automations.
APCO, a global strategic consultant and crisis management firm has offices in 35 countries throughout North America, Europe, the Middle East and Asia. The company, which launched more than four decades ago as part of a Washington, D.C. law firm and was acquired by a global advertising and marketing agency in the 1990s, went independent 20 years ago. It is one of the largest privately owned public relations/strategic consulting firms in the world.
While APCO employs former U.S. senators, governors and other influential people who often use personal networks and a human touch to produce influential messaging and strategy for its clients, like any large organization, it relies on technology and process to keep the business running effectively. Also like many organizations, processes from different business units are managed through an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system.
Richard Doyle is the system administrator for APCO’s ERP platform. The company uses Deltek’s Maconomy, which Doyle acknowledges is very strong in international markets, especially within Europe, where much of APCO’s work originates. It was a feature of Maconomy that Doyle says got his mind thinking in terms of automation and what it could do.
“In Maconomy itself, they’ve got an engine called ‘background task’ that’s able to effectively mimic the actions a user would take,” Doyle explains. “So, you might, for example, run a check to see if you have submitted your timesheet. If you hadn’t, it would send you a notification. It’s very simple, but it’s built in. So, we already had the notion of automation within our system. It could automate some transactions, but not with the efficiency and scale we wanted. But it got us thinking.”
Doyle automated the things he knew he could with the tools his existing ERP system had, but he knew the classic first use case was Accounts Payable. For that he began familiarizing himself with RPA and intelligent automation systems that could handle the scale of APCO’s international business. Doyle notes how important it is to understand exactly what you want to focus on before you start shopping for vendors and partners. But with a well-articulated goal (automate 80 percent of all APCO’s global invoices), they set out to evaluate partners and technology.
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In 2024, Alirrium, an intelligent automation services provider based in Washington, D.C., was acquired by global consultancy Baker Tilly to bolster its digital services and automation capability. Evan Rainey and Jeff Barenz, two of Alirrium’s co-founders, are industry veterans who were valuable parts of that Baker Tilly acquisition and were instrumental before the merger bringing on APCO as an Alirrium client.
When APCO’s Doyle felt ready to search out partners that could recommend and implement an intelligent automation platform that served its goals, Alirrium’s familiarity with Deltek’s software gave them an advantage. But it was the service provider’s facility with APCO’s international requirements that were a more important factor.
“The key to success here was not just a vendor being able to deliver a functional solution, it went much deeper than that,” says Barenz. “Because of the complexity and scope, this required a partnership based on complete transparency, trust and working together to achieve a common goal. The collaboration here was a huge part of why this worked. The Baker Tilly acquisition only strengthens this relationship as they already were one of Deltek’s top partners”.
That complexity included regional accounts payable teams in the U.S., Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Those teams were dealing with vendors and processing invoices in 15 languages and 13 currencies, Barenz remembers. The company wanted to automate that process at a global level across all these regions.
The Baker Tilly team (formerly Alirrium), headed by Digital Solutions Manager John Kastenbauer, leveraged its automation expertise—especially in the area of optical character recognition (OCR)—to develop a pilot using the UiPath platform that effectively handled accounts payable data in multiple languages and generated invoices in the right language and currency. The pilot successfully showed proof of concept and APCO had an automation partner.
They first rolled out the automation in the Middle East and have successfully expanded it to every region in which APCO operates.
“Each region has an accounts payable shared e-mail inbox where all the vendors send their invoices,” Kastenbauer explains. “They then all get forwarded to a global inbox, which is actually what our automation is monitoring. Every single e-mail that gets forwarded to that global inbox gets processed by our automation. That can include people asking for payment status, credit memos, W-2s, all kinds of forms other than just invoices.”
Kastenbauer says identifying which messages are in the scope of the process and which are not is challenging enough. Knowing how to employ OCR to extract required data in dozens of languages in different formats and ensuring the inclusion of invoice number, invoice date, invoice total, purchase order number, currency, etc., adds another level of complexity.
For something that sounds as prosaic as accounts payable, automating the process is challenging. According to Doyle, the system has experienced some expected tweaks after the global rollout. Initially, it struggled with Chinese and Japanese, for example. But working continuously with Kastenbauer and Rainey has enabled them to fine tune the automation and nearly doubled the number of invoices that are successfully processed from end to end.
Success requires the right process, the right technology, the right relationships.
“Continuing to build a relationship with Baker Tilly is one of the important things I strive for,” Doyle says. “It’s important that we got the right team. When you go through due diligence with potential suppliers you begin to be able to quickly recognize teams that you might not work as well with. With these guys, there’s so much comfort that they know what they’re doing.”
