Procure-to-pay is an integral part of a supply chain process. However, a seemingly fair process involving selecting goods and services, enforcing compliance, receiving, and reconciling purchase orders, invoicing, and processing payment, is often not as simple as it looks.
Ideally, a procurement process looks like this:
However, in the real world, it looks something like this:
The complexity of the process, coupled with deviations and exceptions, makes it incredibly important to set up process discovery to gain visibility into the end-to-end process. In addition, since every step of the procurement process is recorded in the ERP or invoicing systems along with the respective timestamps, an effective automated process discovery can uncover opportunities for automation and standardization of processes for reduced rework and increased efficiency.
With continuous process discovery, organizations can turn procurement functions into a fundamental enabler for operational excellence. An advanced process discovery tool like SurfaceAI comes with artificial intelligence capabilities to provide deeper analytics and intelligent workflows that help the team to design and implement a more intuitive and frictionless process.
Identify inconsistent processes wasting resources and causing delays
High manual touches, unnecessary rework, multiple touchpoints between departments and systems induce unnecessary delays and gaps for inefficiencies to creep in. With process discovery, business leaders can identify hidden processes that are causing frictions and deviations. For instance, process discovery can bring transparency into order modification patterns, date changes from requisitioner and price change from suppliers, delayed order profiling based on hold time between requisition release and purchase order, and many more scenarios.
Redesign your entire procure to pay process
Process discovery provides real-time, objective insights that enable business leaders to operate from common understanding. For instance, managers can use the data to identify individuals, customers, and processes that trigger manual price change to strategically close the hidden gaps to streamline the process and reduce manual intervention. Furthermore, they can identify the factors driving both good performance levels and causing poor performance.
Optimize resource utilization
Process discovery helps to free resources from rework and gives visibility for effective collaboration. It analyzes extensive data to identify supply chain patterns and potential problem areas while enabling leaders to quickly read a situation to take necessary actions without causing much damage. In addition, the root cause analysis helps to single out non-compliant processes and workflows that could cost time and money to the company.
Identifying opportunities for automation
To get the best ROI on your automation efforts, you need to go beyond low-hanging automation opportunities and identify candidates that can close process gaps across the process. It helps you see through the areas and practices that can be improved with automation. Automation is not the best solution. Automate an inefficient process, and the inefficiency perpetuates. Therefore, it’s essential to choose only the best candidates. Automated process discovery is more powerful than traditional discovery and can scale across your global organization to collect data in a non-intrusive manner.
Forward-looking organisations like yours embrace data-driven innovative approaches to enable improvement measures and drive automation in procurement-to-payment processes. Want to learn more? Talk to our experts today.