Many companies are moving quickly to adopt accounts payable or P2P solutions so they can digitise their purchase order, payables invoices and approval processes. This is good, it's often the first step for organisations seeking to be more digital. As a decision maker, however, you should also be thinking about your digital business tomorrow and not just today.
Accounts payable is just one area that you can automate to improve efficiency. What about all of the other areas in your business?
I have a client who is still processing sales orders received via fax! Or they receive these orders in a PDF via email which still requires their customer services team to manually input these orders. Admittedly 80% of their orders are currently received via EDI which is a very efficient way of receiving orders. But the 20% of orders that are still manually keyed is where all the cost is concentrated.
We've spoken to another organisation who process thousands of Buyer Created invoices received via PDF.
Another large organisation in the Agri sector processes hundreds of thousands of documents either via different EDI processes or via PDF which they have to detach from the email and convert to digital documents using different processes and systems.
Communication and collaboration for all of these companies around these documents is via email. Which means that most of the time, it's difficult to find these conversations when needing to investigate why something has gone wrong or errored.
We also have clients who have implemented very expensive Purchase Order solutions and their users won't use them. Other clients are on big ERP solutions like SAP and for their operational staff to create or approve purchase orders they have to log into SAP to do this, user feedback has not been positive.
Businesses are at different stages of their digital transformation journey. Some are just starting and some are well on their way.
Finding a solution that can digitise your accounts payable, as well as all the other processes in your business is vital. Look at this diagram of the upstream and downstream value chain. This represents all the parts in the supply chain where you have the opportunity to add value, or create efficiency in your process. Many of these parts involve key documents that are sent or received. The ultimate objective is to digitise and improve efficiency in as many of these stages in the supply chain as possible.
This means digitising these documents and integrating all systems so that your digital infrastructure flows and interacts just like an ecosystem.
If you're in the midst of deciding which digital solution to go with for a part of your process, then have a chat to us to find out how DX2 can help digitise all of your trading relationships on both the purchasing side and the sales side.
The truth is that we LOVE talking to our clients about challenges in their business and finding ways we can help.
Contact us today for an informal chat about the specific needs and challenges in your business.
