Something to Consider October 2017 2

P2P Cycle: Smart Analytics Provide Opportunities for Greater Efficiency

The Purchase to Pay cycle and its broader cousin ‘Source to Pay’, are considered the low hanging fruit of efficiency improvement, ‘making buying simple’, driving out waste and optimising working capital.

Today’s end to end process owner or GPO has many tools at their disposal, from performance management with KPIs, optimised purchasing and payment policies, related process controls, use of P-Cards, recovery audits, e-invoicing, integrated source-to-pay technology suites, and RPA ‘robots’ to automate some of the effort sapping repetitive data entry processes. To name just a few!

Process simplification and standardisation can do a lot, as can transaction automation.

However, the reality is that most P2P process owners do not have timely insight into what the current process actually is in practice, where errors and waste occur, and how to genuinely drive efficiency, effectiveness and cash conservation. The answer to faster, better insight lies in data, and the ability to analyse exceptions, outliers and trends. Smart analytics shine a light on process, transaction, and data issues that help us ‘chase the waste’ out of the process.

We’ve summarised some thoughts to consider as you formulate your P2P strategy and determine the role of analytics in driving the outcomes we need. This will be particularly relevant to those in Shared Services, Procurement, GPOs, Financial Control and Business Management. Read here

Our ‘Something To Consider’ snippets are framed as small, digestible, ‘dashes of insight’ around the pillars of what we define as “World Class Finance” – Process Optimization, Financial Control and Compliance, and Risk Assurance, all underpinned by technology enablement and integration.