AI Automation: Less Routine Work in Your Back Office

Processes with clear rules and high volume work best: classifying and routing inbound email, capturing invoices and delivery notes via OCR, maintaining master data in ERP/CRM, preparing quotes and reports. Rule of thumb: anything a person can grind through after a short briefing, an AI agent can take over.

• Email routing and automatic reply drafts
• Document capture (OCR) handed to accounting
• Automatic ERP and CRM entries without media breaks
• Workflow automation between your existing tools

At ArkeonTech you receive a fixed-price offer for an automation agent after a free potential analysis: a one-off setup for process analysis, build and integration plus a monthly service for operation and maintenance. Start with the free potential analysis: we identify the process with the fastest return on investment.

Multiply hours per week by hourly rate: a process consuming 10 hours weekly costs about €23,400 per year at a €45 rate. Whether and when automating it pays off depends on the share of cases it takes over and on setup and running costs. In the free initial call we work through your specific case.

Four steps: (1) free potential analysis with process prioritisation, (2) concept with a measurable target KPI, (3) build and integration into your systems within 3-5 weeks, (4) go-live with monitoring and ongoing optimisation in the service plan.

Companies with 5 to 250 employees where a recurring back-office task permanently ties up staff - typically manufacturing, technical wholesale, financial advice and service providers with high document volumes. What decides it is not headcount but the individual task: the more often it recurs, the longer it takes and the rarer the exceptions, the sooner automation pays for itself. You can gather those three numbers without a consultant, and we work through them with you in the free initial call. Small teams benefit too: if three people each spend five hours a week on routine, that is close to two full working days.

• Company size: 5 to 250 employees
• A task that recurs often and costs time
• Mostly rule-based; exceptions stay with a human
• Typical sectors: financial advice, industry, retail, healthcare

When the process itself is unsettled. A workflow two departments disagree about does not become unambiguous through automation, only faster at being wrong - what is needed first is a decision, not a project. Tasks consisting almost entirely of exceptions are equally unsuitable: there you end up maintaining more special cases than you save time. Where a wrong decision would immediately endanger people or money, we automate the preparation but not the approval - the final signature stays with a human. And it takes systems with an interface: software without an API and without an export path can only be connected at a cost that usually eats the benefit.

With back-office processes, almost always. What the process description says and what actually happens rarely match: the spreadsheet running alongside the ERP, the folder of exceptions, the colleague who keeps three special cases in their head. Those deviations decide whether an automation works, and none of them appear in a document. So we start at the desk where the work happens. ArkeonTech is based in Aalen in Baden-Württemberg, and before founding it Michael Kaiser worked in ERP consulting for the region's mid-sized manufacturers, so these processes are familiar from practice rather than from theory.

Michael Kaiser, owner of ArkeonTech: business informatics (DHBW Heidenheim), B.Sc. Business Analytics (Aalen University), several years as an ERP consultant for mid-sized clients in mechanical engineering, retail and healthcare. He sits at the desk during the process walkthrough, builds the automation and maintains it under the ongoing service. You discuss your exception cases with the person who then models them - there is no sales or account layer in between.

Email: m.kaiser@arkeontech.de