AGOS Asia: Time to embrace digitalisation and automation

Digitalisation and automation of finance-related transactions and processes should become an integral part of businesses, in modernising and simplifying their operations.

AGOS Asia, which primarily facilitates the adoption of technology in finance functions and global finance shared services, believes that companies should embrace digitalisation and automation in their bid to establish effective business operations both internally and externally.

This, is turn, will be a key enabler for the rapid growth of a business.

Aside from digitalisation and automation, AGOS Asia also utilises robotics to execute the boardroom agenda.

AGOS Asia chief executive officer Joon Teoh tells StarBizWeek that the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) to deliver its services is also on the cards, within the next two to three years.Teoh says that an increasing number of companies in Malaysia are adopting digitalisation and automation in their shared services units.

“However, a seemingly high-tech solution will not automatically give you the business benefits. The key to realising these benefits is an effective implementation process,” she says.

Shared services typically refers to the consolidation of a business’ support operations that are used by multiple divisions or companies of the same group.

Teoh points out that businesses could achieve cost-savings of approximately 20% to 40%, by revamping their manual finance and procurement-related transactions into digitalised and paperless transactions.

“At AGOS Asia, we help the board of a company to execute their agenda by improving the efficiency of their business, finance and shared services functions.

“Traditional businesses and even large companies may find it difficult to adopt techonology-driven changes, particularly due to inadequate expertise to undertake changes. So, we will design the best approach to digitalise and to automate the companies’ finance transactions, apart from training the employees to carry out the revamped tasks,” says Teoh, who is also an accountant by training.

Established in August 2015, AGOS Asia’s clientele includes several multinational corporations, Malaysia-based public listed companies, small and medium enterprises as well as non-governmental organisations, across various industries.

Currently, apart from its domestic operations, AGOS Asia has also served clients in Singapore, China, Vietnam and Indonesia. Singapore represents its second biggest market after Malaysia. In elaborating about AGOS Asia’s services, Teoh says that by digitalising finance-related transactions such as signing on invoices and payment vouchers, companies could complete the transactions with much ease and substantially reduce manual works which are usually time-consuming.

“Not only that, digitalisation allows businesses to draw analyses related to the financial transactions immediately with only few clicks. Automation, on the other hand, is an extension of digitalisation whereby it helps to reduce margin of error in undertaking financial transactions.

“Automation does away with repetitive work to find error in transactions and it will automatically identify the error, unlike the manual practice, where an employee must do it by counter-checking each transactions one by one.

“As for robotics, it is helpful in facilitating the “procure-to-pay” tasks. For example, robotics in the form of software, will help in matching an invoice with its related purchasing order immediately, without the effort of a human being. Imagine, how beneficial this would be for businesses which deal with thousands of such documents monthly,” she says.

In addition to its consultancy services, AGOS Asia offers training to the employees at the operational level of businesses, in order to upskill them and to simplify the adoption of digitalisation, automotion and robotics among their clients. Currently, about 15% of AGOS Asia’s top line comes from the trainings offered.

Moving forward, Teoh plans to expand the firm’s clientele base, particularly in Malaysia. She remains upbeat on the country’s potential in the area of financial shared services over the long run. “We have doubled our revenue since inception, and going forward we hope to be to work together with a sizeable Malaysian organisations which are looking for rapid growth and global expansion in their business footprint,” says Teoh.