Procure-to-Pay Process
Digitizing your procure-to-pay (P2P) process with “real-time, out-of-the-box” BPI solutions like ISS Group’s iPurchase™ and iVoucher™ optimizes your company’s P2P process and streamlines your operations. These cloud and web-based solutions integrate with most leading ERP systems and comes standard with QAD Enterprise Applications to take your organization to the next level in purchasing compliance, efficiency and productivity. You can access your P2P process anywhere, anytime, from smart devices using IOS or Android operating systems, transforming your workflow, saving your company time and money over the procurement life cycle.
Is it beneficial for your company to keep to its traditional P2P process? Or is it time to automate?
What to Ask About Your Current Procure-to-Pay Process
The over-arching question is whether your procure-to-pay process is functional and cost-effective for the needs of your company:
- How much does your company pay in ‘direct’ and ‘indirect’ spending for your procure-to-pay process?
- Is that process centralized or decentralized (if you have more than one location)?
- Or is that process departmentalized, led by team leads, manufacturing professionals, or other departmental heads?
- Who signs off on purchases? What happens if they aren’t available?
- Do you send purchase orders by email? Do you call your order in without a purchase order?
- What are your purchasing controls? Could you audit your procure-to-pay trail if you had to?
- If you’re a manufacturer relying on traditional P2P processes, do you have full supply chain visibility?
- Do you understand the difference between procurement, sourcing and purchasing? Is it all the same to you?
- Does your current system perform E-Invoicing/OCR Invoice Capture?
- Do you process both PO and non-PO Invoices?
- How do you handle 2-Way and 3-Way PO/Receipt/Consignment/Invoice Reconciliation?
- Do you integrate with your MRP system?
If you can’t answer the questions with any certainty, the room for error widens within your organization and does nothing to build trust among vendors and suppliers. Automating your procure-to-pay process would circumvent errors that traditional procure-to-pay processes tend to incur. Let’s look briefly at both to see why.
The Traditional Procure-to-Pay Process
Think of the five basic tiers that traditionally make up the manual procure-to-pay process:
- Meetings in procurement planning, inventory management, vendor selection
- Approvals/purchasing from selected vendors/suppliers and managing supply chain accounts
- Receiving from selected vendors/suppliers
- Invoice verification
- Payment through accounts payable
Procurement involves purchasing, but they are two different processes. Procurement is the umbrella term that deals with all facets of internal sourcing and the value vendors have to your organization. Purchasing falls within that procurement umbrella and deals with specific ordering, pricing, and external supplier relationships. The terms are not synonymous. They are not interchangeable. Additionally, the traditional procure-to-pay process can be stalled by long waits for purchasing approval, even under tight deadlines. Your return on investment slows as there is less control over the procurement life cycle.
Why Automate the Procure-to-Pay Process?
iPurchase™ and iVoucher™ BPI solutions help you achieve operational optimization by manual entry, approval processing and eliminating paper, giving you the ability to view scanned .pdfs of all invoices and electronically importing data into your company’s AP system. When you synthesize your BPI solutions with the cloud, your P2P process becomes both user and process configurable. When all the players are on the same page, figuratively and literally, you have:
- Less maverick buying because inventory is digitized line by line
- Catalog punch-outs
- Real-time requisition approvals
- Automatic data population
- Aggregated data from every procurement level
- Advanced reporting tools meaning more control and compliance
- Early pay discounts figured right into pricing
- Cost reduction
- Decrease error
- Timely reconciliation and record-keeping on all levels procurement
Automating speeds up the P2P process, which in turn leads to greater and faster ROI.
Contact us about empowering your organization with iPurchase™ and iVoucher™ BPI solutions for real-time functionality that goes beyond the human-centric, traditional “When can we get this? We need it yesterday.” calls for help. Operational efficiency and productivity is keystrokes away. What benefits your company?
If you haven’t done so already, you’ll want to check-out our 3-part series on Electronic Procurement: Click here for Part 1 of 3.
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Who is ISS Group?
All of our Solutions are ‘seamlessly’ integrated with QAD EE and SE, and are 100% Web-based providing (24×7 access)
ISS Group delivers Solutions which Digitize Business Processes to Connect People and Processes via the Cloud, Mobile devices, and Social Networks
55 Madison Ave, Suite 400
Morristown, NJ 07960
Toll Free: 888-547-7476
Direct: (973) 729-0013
www.issgroup.com
