There is more value there than you could ever gain from just trying to drive costs out of purchase orders and invoices. What automation really does is let procurement do their dream job: continuous strategic sourcing. It’s hard to get 10% cost savings from process automation year after year You do have to have an efficient automated process, but once you have that, there’s only so much incremental savings you can wring out. It would be a mistake to think of these platforms as simply a better breed of automation though. You get notifications in your inbox that say things like, “hey, look at this trend of people buying from the wrong supplier.” That’s the kind of thing a procurement person would probably take weeks or even months to figure out on their own. Managing transactional processing took precedence over the strategic work to drive better supplier sourcing.Īnd they have analytics and reporting to help procurement professionals determine what areas to target. Bringing together all the data needed to see the big picture was a huge manual effort, so we did not have visibility into the whole, interconnected process. But we didn’t have anything that could capture all of the spending that took place outside of the PO process.

We had tools to crank out POs, and to suck in invoices and digitize them.

Unfortunately, for many decades we were trapped chasing purchase orders and invoices that didn't match up, because we did not have good P2P tools. The main question for executives to ask was, 'How are we doing on our cost of processing purchase orders and invoices?” How can we cut costs even further?” And that was pretty much all there was to it.Įvery procurement person's dream, though perhaps not shared with executives and business leaders, is to contribute to the company’s success by finding better suppliers, conducting shrewder negotiations, and securing more favorable contract terms-terms that create a competitive advantage beyond just cost savings. When we spoke of P2P transformations, they were all about achieving process efficiency through technology. For the past few decades, the purpose of these systems has been to automate the transactional workflow of business buying, from purchase order to invoice approval. I’d be willing to bet that most senior executives today believe they know all they need to about procure-to-pay systems.

Coupa procure to pay