The Continuing Evolution from Procurement to Vendor Management

Developing a centralized procurement process can mean greater efficiency and heightened visibility for your organization. Procure-to-pay software creates spend visibility and context for contract and vendor management. If you’re not funneling everything through a central procure-to-pay software, you aren’t creating any controls of embedded workflows that the procurement function is equipped to manage.

Joe Payne, of Source One Management, is back again for a deeper conversation into the role which technology now plays in today’s procurement process.

One of the biggest challenges in procure-to-pay adoption can be attributed back to its history of usage primarily among large industry players. This has made it difficult for mid-market players to adopt the technology. Such technologies have since been scaled down to where it now makes sense for mid-market players to implement these programs. In reference to trends in P2P growth adoption, Joe Payne noted, “Most major players in the industry are predicting between 40-50% growth just within the U.S. market in the next year,” says Payne, “This tells us that it’s still a new system and there is a lot of room for companies to begin adopting these technologies.”

The value from these processes comes from the centralizing of data in reference to the suppliers your organization is working with and what you’re doing with said suppliers.

A high-level overview of procure-to-pay technology follows the workflow outlined below:

1. Organization recognizes a need and creates a requisition
2. Requisition is submitted as a purchase order
3. Procurement function reviews purchase order and directs order to approved vendor
4. Purchase is either made through the vendor or goes directly into a cataloging system
5. Software automatically sends purchase order to preferred vendor
6. Organization manages the product’s receipt and any embedded supplier management activities

The above workflow follows the organization all the way to the payments made to the supplier through a designated invoicing technology. Procure-to-pay programs are a great way to connect the various points within the P2P process through technology!

For many companies, procure-to-pay software transforms a very inconsistent, paper-based process, and brings it into a central system; a system which both automates the workflow and aids in compliance and approval processes. Integrating technology into the procurement function provides visibility into the organization’s collected data and allows for deeper analysis and therefore better-informed decision-making.

Hear more from our conversation with Joe Payne on procure-to-pay technology by listening to our podcast titled The Evolution from Procurement to Vendor Management with Joe Payne Source One Management.