It wasn’t too long ago that most people carried around Walkmans and MP3 players. However, when Apple introduced its iPod, it disrupted the entire music industry. Market disruption occurs often with new types of business models, as seen most recently in the meteoric rise of Uber and Airbnb. These two companies have emerged as disruptors in the travel industry, pushing out taxis and chain hotels as quickly as the iPod pushed out its predecessors.

Uber has overtaken taxis as a preferred mode of transportation among road warriors in Q2 2015, according to Certify’s analysis of second-quarter expense reports. Certify examined millions of receipts between April and June, which were used to help track expense reports. While still small in terms of market share among business travelers, Airbnb, which specializes in online room rentals, had a 143 percent growth in receipts over the first quarter of 2015.

There are 53 million freelance workers in the U.S. labor force today, which accounts for 34 percent of working Americans. This pool of laborers is mostly untapped in finance departments, and has the potential to drive down costs. Employing these workers in one’s labor force is an example of narrow-sourcing, which is defined as the continued growth of work-task specialization in the attempt to move labor intensive activities to lower-cost or speedier contractors. Narrow-sourcing has allowed for Uber and Airbnb to surpass their competition due to the convenience, cost-effectiveness, and cleanliness that it brings to business operations. These “three C’s” can be mimicked in the shift towards automation in finance operations.

The convenience of Uber and Airbnb comes from the availability of their services. Unlike the taxi and hotel industries, these companies do not mass produce rooms or cars—an incredibly high sunk cost. Instead, costs occur as the demand increases. For this reason, Airbnb hires no labor force and Uber hires their drivers according to increases in demand. Senior finance professionals can learn from this model by streamlining their processes, which would then require fewer employees. Cleanliness is a core competency for both Uber and Airbnb, who rely upon user feedback to ensure their service is up to company standards. For finance departments, being “clean” means no unnecessary back-office processes.

In our recent webinar, PayStream Advisors’ senior analysts discussed The Uberization of AP, as well as Cisco CEO John Chambers’ warning that by 2025, 70 percent of companies will attempt to go digital but only 30 percent of them will succeed. This means that 40 percent of today’s companies “will not survive the next 10 years. The only ones that will survive will turn their companies into digital, techie versions of themselves, and many of these will fail trying.”

Senior finance professionals also face constant pressure from efficiency evaluations, with labor being reported as the least efficient. In fact, 62 percent of every dollar in finance departments is spent on people. These figures highlight how much finance professionals need to look out for the inevitable disruption in their own industry. It is these professionals’ responsibility to hire more valuable workers who move from rear-view accounting roles towards more budgeting, forecasting, and FP&A responsibilities.

Yet the question remains: what must be done to ensure an organization stays ahead of this disruption?

Once finance professionals realize the need for action, they can make real changes to ensure the survival of their organization. These changes involve the improvement of back-office processes and the automation of manual tasks. Finance professionals should first standardize invoice receipt so all are delivered to one centralized location. Doing this will decrease the time needed to process an invoice and minimize error, thus requiring fewer total labor hours and ultimately reducing costs and inefficiencies.

Step two of automating financial operations is to adopt an advanced capture technology to streamline electronic receipt. Once again, this will reduce human interaction with invoices.

Adopting an invoice approval technology should be finance professionals’ third decision on their way towards automation. These solutions enable upper level management to spend less time approving small transactions. Many invoice approval solutions have configurable workflows that can be integrated with current systems and do not depend on company size.

Lastly, finance departments must consider the entire ecosystem of their organization. If a company adopts a solution but the entire supply chain does not comply, it may be relatively useless. PayStream’s Ultimate Guide to Supplier Onboarding Success is a valuable resource for effectively managing the onboarding process. Supplier portals, self-service inquiries, and dynamic discounting are all examples of ways to help suppliers embrace the change.

Companies will become less competitive as the cost of human capital remains around 62 percent of spend. Companies that adopt the necessary changes will succeed in this disruptive market, just as Uber and AirBnB have. One of the hardest parts of this entire process, however, is selecting the correct solution to fit an organization’s needs. PayStream has created the 2015 Invoice Automation Navigator Report, an unbiased and comprehensive guide to selecting an AP automation solution. The time is now to adopt the necessary tactics that will save your finance department from becoming a useless fleet of taxi cabs.