Supplier relationships often dictate how effective your business actually operates.
When you have sound and efficient supplier relationships, you get the supplies and services that you need quickly and affordably. When you’re relationships are on shaky ground, it results in bigger problems for your operations. Many of these problems will also start to impact your clients.
Your goal should always be to improve supplier relationships. One of the best ways to do that is by making sure that you pay in a timely manner. When your suppliers have to wait too long for payment, they are less likely to help you throughout the procurement process.
Improve Your P2P Process
Your procure-to-pay (P2P) process has to run efficiently. If you don’t have a proper workflow, it is going to upset various components.
The P2P process should look something like this:
- Receive invoice
- Verify invoice
- Process invoice for payment
- Execute payment
- Reconcile and report
- Close period
If it takes too long to verify an invoice or too long for a payment to be executed, the supplier relationship is in jeopardy.
This is when it is critical for you to digitize your business processes. If you are still using a paper trail, it’s easy for certain invoices to get lost.
Improve Client Quote Generation
Once you get supplier relationships where you want them to be, you are going to notice several different benefits. The first is that you can obtain better pricing because you are known for paying invoices quickly. Many suppliers will offer discounts if you can provide faster payment. You will also be able to improve the supplier turnaround time because there won’t be any outstanding invoices.
By having better pricing and faster turnaround, you can also start to speed up the quote-to-cash process. You can improve the quotes given to your clients throughout each quarter. Some of the savings that you acquire from suppliers can also be passed to your clients. This will allow you to turn more quotes into cash, having a direct impact on your bottom line.
How do you digitize your business processes?
It’s easy to say that you need to digitize your business processes and it’s also easy to look at the benefits. The difficult part becomes actually finding a solution.
ISS Group connects you to the cloud and with the implementation and integration of Supplier Relationship Improvement (SRI) solutions will provide you with global process standardization. You have the ability to reduce the process cycle time and improve process visibility.
Everything can take place in your web browser so that everyone in your operations can explore the workflow. They can view from a computer or a mobile device so that they know where an invoice is within the approval process. If they are waiting for one person to sign off on payment, it can be identified quickly.
Advanced Approval Routing Technology (AART) is a core component of SRI solutions, which are seamlessly with QAD EA to streamline transactions and improve the various controls that you have in place. You can say goodbye to the paper trail and improve employee productivity throughout the accounts payable department.
Once you have the various SRI solutions in place, you will be able to benefit from all the digital processes implemented. This includes being able to pay invoices faster so that you can improve supplier relationships as well as digitizing customer sales quotes. All processes synergistically work together so that your operation will be streamlined considerably. You will see cost savings as well as the benefits, translating to increased revenue.
Using BPI Solutions such as our iBundle SRI portfolio, iApprove, iPurchase, iManagePOs, iQuote and iVoucher, along with your chosen workflow saves time and money while breathing new life into old processes. Contact us for solutions that fit your workflow.
