Purchase to pay by it’s nature stretches across disparate business functions – indeed – it stretches across the supply chain interface between supplier and buyer. To be really effective, all of these disparate functions need to be integrated

You make several really interesting and great points. To start, the “Future of P2P” will absolutely require strong executive leadership.

My hope is that in the future, integration considerations simply fade away with as “plug and play” P2P systems become standard, so CPOs like yourself can focus on the “business” side of technology.

The options are not easy to decide between: Either you spend the time on hard integration points between the different back end systems (HR, Accounting, Finance and Accounts Payable), or you will pay the price once you go live chasing down problems in the back end or with your user records maintenance when users “forget” to tell you they have changed locations, cost centers or managers.

Having been involved in more than one enterprise wide P2P implementation I would not always bet the farm on doing the work up front and making sure that user experience is the best possible following go-live. That being said I do not agree with the premise that this needs to take a lot of time or be expensive as long as the Procurement executive leading the effort can truly engage the internal stakeholders to a collaborative process where everyone understand what is at stake and what can be achieved.

I do not believe, at this point in the game, standalone systems (like Ariba or PNet) are at any significant disadvantage from the large ERP solutions when it comes to having hard integration points as IT departments are becoming masters at transferring content from one system to another. Some of pure P2P oriented solutions often offer significantly more flexibility and variety in the function set, which can more than make up for the ”out of the box integration” an ERP P2P module can bring to the table.

In the end of the day I think this comes down to knowing your internal organization’s environment and knowledge base when it comes to ERP infrastructure and make an informed decision about which way to go.

Either way the Procurement executive leading the change initiative has to be highly visible, which will weigh heavily on the success or failure of the initiative.