Today’s article continues and builds upon of our recent article which focused on predictions for the ePayables pace (2014: The Year Ahead in ePayables (AP Automation)). Today, I wanted to continue the discussion by laying out what we have identified to be the hot button issues for AP leaders in 2014.

Hot Button Issue #1 – How to better define the value AP delivers within the P2P Process (and then communicate it and improve upon it)

AP leaders in 2014 must better assess their group’s value from an overall procure-to-pay (P2P) perspective. In 2014, many enterprises still persist with a procure-to-pay process is disconnected from a process, systems, and organizational standpoint, making it difficult to get a clear, and comprehensive view of the entire P2P process.

In 2014, AP leaders together with their Procurement counterparts and Chief Procurement Officers should re-evaluate the process, systems, and organizations to identify the best opportunities to streamline and improve the P2P process and better align it with top enterprise objectives for 2014. A more cohesive P2P process has a whole host of benefits including improved spend visibility (and spend data), prevention of savings leakage (e.g., matching contracts to invoices), better use of working capital (e.g., paying faster or slower, capturing early-pay discounts, etc).

Looking for some info on AP’s value? Try this article The Value of Accounts Payable

Hot Button Issue #2 – Supplier communication & interaction

Today, more than ever before, more suppliers are being viewed as partners and an important part of the extended enterprise. Over the last decade, companies of all sizes have become more dependent on their extended enterprise in order to successfully delivery goods and services to their end customers. Global supply chains have evolved into highly complex and interdependent businesses relationships that necessitate closer connectivity between trading partners.

Managing these partnerships in a manual manner is not going to cut it anymore and AP is responsible for a critical part of the relationship with a supplier – invoicing and payment. During this part of a transaction, communication, visibility and connectivity are becoming more and more valuable and are key to ensuring a cost-effective and streamlined process. What happens during this process, however, also has an impact on procurement and its supplier relationship/information management objectives and treasury on its cash management objectives.

Hot Button Issue #3 – Is it time to outsource low value-added activities?

In the world of AP, low value-added activities include things such as scanning (or imaging) and manual data entry – this is often where a large chunk of resources are used. For most AP groups, scanning is not a core competency (nor should it be); however, there are many third-party providers whose main business (and expertise) is scanning.  Simply scanning an invoice doesn’t add much value since that would still require manual data entry. Capturing the data and converting it into an electronic format (data capture) is what adds value. Even though OCR is not 100% accurate, using it to capture information and automatically pull it into a system saves sizable time and effort which can enable more AP staff to focus on managing (and reducing) exceptions, improving straight-through or touchless processing, enhancing data for use in procurement or treasury, and other value-added activities.

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Tagged in: ePayables, P2P, Source-to-Settle, Strategy