When Pete Townsend of the Who penned their 1971 hit, “Going Mobile,” he most likely was not talking about Procure-to-Pay (P2P).
More than forty years later (and in a completely different context, I’m sure), enterprises struggle to recruit and retain top procurement talent in the geography where they are needed. Indeed, Ardent Partners’ recent survey of more than 300 sourcing and procurement leaders shows that 60% of enterprises remain challenged by staff or talent constraints, including labor/worker mobility. This is a top challenge for sourcing and procurement leaders in 2015 and it surely will remain a top challenge moving forward.
Labor/worker mobility is the geographical and occupational movement of workers;[1] it is best gauged by the lack of impediments to such mobility. Increasing and maintaining a high level of labor mobility allows a more efficient allocation of resources, and makes recruiting and retaining top sourcing and procurement talent that much easier.
Moreover, labor mobility has proven to be a forceful driver of innovations – in this case, the confluence of mobile platforms, mobile applications, and cloud-based Software-as-a-Solution (SaaS). If necessity is the mother of invention, innovation is the mother of mobility. As a result, we can now enable a truly mobile workforce – something we did not have forty years ago and barely had five years ago. Let’s dig deeper on this.
Mobile devices have been the one of the most significant advances to hit the modern business world, and they have fueled the modern, mobile P2P worker. The Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) of the nineties and early 2000s gave way to the Blackberry, which in 2007, gave way to the iPhone and Android smartphones. Small, sleek, and WiFi-enabled, users could access the internet, check and respond to emails, and deal with sudden out-of-office emergencies all from their phones. If these were not enough, iPhones and Androids were joined by iPads, notebooks, and tablets – part laptop computer and part mobile phone that feature the touch-screen/swipe functionality of a smartphone but with the display of a small laptop computer, making it easier to perform larger, more complex tasks.
Mobile applications have allowed end users to turn the page with mobility, but only after being purpose-built or simplified for mobile platforms. With small, user-friendly, touch/swipe-screen wireless devices, end users could perform several crucial daily functions from wherever they could find a Wi-Fi signal, but they were limited by applications optimized for traditional desktop computing. Over time, P2P solution providers have developed mobile-enabled P2P applications and suites of applications that allow more of the P2P process to be performed on mobile devices, particularly tablets and iPads. Dashboards, workbenches, and Amazon-like buyer networks allow end users to perform the full P2P cycle from these devices rather than remain tethered to their desktops or even their laptops. Something else was missing, though, that needed to elevate the modern, mobile P2P process to a truly virtual capability.
When the cloud appeared on the horizon in 2010, few people knew that it would revolutionize the modern business world. Moving data, files, processing, software, and other elements to the cloud – a virtual computing network that has created on-demand software solutions (SaaS) – has become one of the best things since buttered bread. Whereas before, companies had to house everything on premises and on the workstations where their people worked, they can now centralize them on the cloud to create a virtual, shared computing environment that is on-demand at virtually any time and any place for anyone with the right credentials and a signal.
As a result of this collective innovation, procurement and sourcing professionals can now manage virtually any part of the P2P process in real time from their mobile devices. This has pretty significant implications for the modern business world:
- Location no longer a constraint: Enterprises can now find, recruit, and retain employees in distant talent pools. Now, a job requirement in Boston can be filled by a virtual worker in Beijing.
- Talent migrates to the best opportunities: Conversely, top talent can seek employment outside of their geographic location, and open themselves up to opportunities that were previously unavailable to them.
- Procurement staff productivity: Now that P2P has gone mobile, procurement and sourcing professionals do not have to be in the office to be on task. Mobile P2P solutions can create entirely virtual workforces that can work offsite and on their own time, improving worker productivity and work-life balance. And in those (hopefully) rare after-hours emergencies, they can solve problems faster and more easily, since most of the needed resources are already at their disposal.
- Early movers will be positioned well when mobile becomes the standard: By adopting mobile-friendly P2P solutions now, enterprises can get a jump on the competition that continues to largely leverage on-premise P2P solutions that inhibit their staffing/recruiting efforts, as well as their employees’ maneuverability.
P2P suites, when leveraged via mobile devices, mobile applications, and cloud-based SaaS, are revolutionizing the way that procurement teams conduct business today. By going mobile in the P2P space, enterprises can find regional, national, and even international solutions to their labor/worker mobility challenges. Closer to home, mobile P2P can make life a little easier and more flexible for the modern procurement staff.
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