5 Key Aspects of Procure to Pay Transformation that You May Be Missing

Organizations use an array of technologies across the P2P spectrum, including cognitive AI enabled chatbots, intelligent automation, no-touch processing, etc., but are they using the right technology that will help them achieve their transformation goals?

It is easy to get overwhelmed by the plethora of technologies that are emerging today. But, at the same time, it is also difficult to filter through the hype. You can implement a market leading e-procurement solution, but if it is not flexible enough to support your business processes, then your operations will be negatively impacted. Also, your procurement transformation objectives must be aligned with your enterprise’s long-term strategy, else the transformation will fail to achieve its full potential. That is why it is crucial to assess your business process and define a strategy before embarking on a transformation journey. 

This is where Wipro CnNXT “Discover” module comes into the picture. It helps businesses to perform a comprehensive assessment of their entire P2P process in a fast and structured program in order to arrive at solutions which are best suited to their business needs. Wipro CnNXT Discover follows a phased approach to performing this assessment:

Phase 1: Benchmarks the P2P process with top performing industry peers using a “Process Pinnacle” assessment framework that leverages Wipro’s 3+ decade expertise and industry benchmarks.

Phase 2:  Performs data-driven discovery that combines data insights with process expertise, to accurately identify the root cause of the problem. We either propose process improvements or a complete re-engineering of an end-to-end process (upstream and downstream) in order to realize the value as well as measure success in a SMART (specific, measureable, actionable, realizable and  time bound) way. Data driven discoveries are always more reliable and accurate than traditional discovery methods.

Finally, Wipro’s domain consultants standardize and harmonize P2P processes using the company’s golden process libraries from  its award-winning knowledge management tool Wipro Harmony to create a transformation roadmap/blueprint.

Lack of flexibility in P2P processes

Being agile is imperative for innovation to happen in an organization. This is especially true in the P2P space, where organizations often have a very dynamic relationship with their suppliers and often engage in procuring items which are away from the ordinary, like a new technology or service belonging to an altogether new category. An example would be when an internal combustion engine based automotive firm decides to move to an electric vehicle portfolio. The firm would need to purchase components that were earlier not on their shopping list, engaging with suppliers with new asks. Being new category purchases, these would be out-of-contract buys and would require the contracts to be updated. Updating contracts and catalogues, however, can be a time consuming activity which can delay an organization’s productivity. On the technical front, your P2P tools need to have the flexibility to scale based on the growth and changing demand of the organization.

How would you tune and scale your P2P process in a sustainable manner and still deliver an increase in savings while maintaining 100% adherence to contract and buy channel compliance and a healthy innovation environment?

Wipro CnNXT helps you overcome this challenge and manage your P2P processes via:

Dynamic bidding process: With the CnNXT dynamic bidding process, buyers can set up a competitive bidding event to source the right product from the right suppliers, thus minimizing risks and unlocking the benefits of competitive pricing, and positively influencing time, schedule, and cost.

Flexibility to scale: CnNXT is fine-tuned to scale and adapt along with the organization, enabled by plug-n-play connectors to connect to multiple sources for a seamless P2P process.

Proactive insights: Our analytics engine is deeply integrated with processes that help us identify the marquee elements of potential purchases, drive decision making, and identify the items that can move from a non-contract maverick purchase to a contracted / preferred supplier.

Not hedging your procurement risk

Manufacturing leaders often underestimate the need to hedge their sourcing for various factors. While consolidation of suppliers definitely gives us a benefit of scale, it also empowers suppliers with more negotiating power. 

However, the right proportion of supply distribution between various vendors can de-risk your procurement and also generate savings from a highly competitive environment. How we can help:

Optimal consolidation: The insights engine focuses on internal metrics like payments terms, discounts and supplier performance along with external factors like category insights and customer feedback on quality, to help strategic sourcing leaders arrive at the right proportion to de-risk and consolidate your supply.

Contextual insights: CnNXT provides all contextual information to buyers at one place, thus maximizing error free and strategy linked procurement. The analytics platform also recommends the best fit suppliers based on the purchase history.

High touch processing 

According to a leading research agency, only 36% of organizations automate invoice data entry, while about 50% automate invoice routing .

In an increasingly digital world, what if the process of placing a request to payment has no human interaction at all and still manages higher savings and compliance? With integrated automation, transactions can seamlessly move between applications to ensure maximum straight through processing. Also it is a must to have a swiftly customizable system, to help customers adapt to changing needs.  How we can help:

Dynamic no code-low code framework: Easy to use and implement changes from a central location without any technical intervention. 

Touchless invoicing with e-invoices and  OCR: By simply flipping the purchase order to an e-invoice, CnNXT eliminates the need for a physical invoice copy. Further,  the template less digitization (OCR) of paper invoices eliminates the need for manual processing and its associated errors.

Auto buy: With CnNXT triaging, we can automate end-to-end processing from approval to payment based on business rules at a BU, category, and sub category level. This will drive the process from high touch to no touch, and, therefore reduce the overall cycle time.

Untapped upstream and downstream synergies

A unified source to pay suite with e-procurement, e-invoicing and  no-touch  invoice processing modules is a very recent trend. Even now enterprises are trying to work with different systems to create requisitions, processing requisitions to PO and raising invoices. This often results in a convoluted procure to pay process with low end-to-end visibility and transparency. How we can help:

Modular platform: CnNXT addresses by deploying a suite of plug and play modules for Order, Finance and Vendor. The underlying systems are seamlessly integrated with each other.

Persona based analytics: CnNXT Insights acts as an integrated analytics platform across these roles to maintain transparency from requisition creation till the payment of invoices.

Value Realization with CnNXT 

Based on Wipro’s experience in working with multiple customers in the S2P domain for the last few decades, we have noted that 8 to 12% value of your process is hidden behind non-obvious inefficiencies in the system. When talking about value realization, organizations often look at just the employee productivity aspect and fail to see that there are many other opportunities available to unlock savings or cut costs.

We help unravel hidden inefficiencies like ineffective invoice routing (number of approvers), high PR fallouts, poor MDM, etc., by approaching discovery with a fine toothed comb. This helps you move from a purely FTE efficiency focused improvement to a more strategic end-to-end perspective, thereby unlocking higher value realization across the value chain.

With our proprietary rapid discovery methods, we can identify the right pain and gain points in your process. This enables us to further identify key improvement areas along with transformation targets.

Overall, CnNXT adopts an integrated approach, a P2P ecosystem that provides a centralized control room for managing all plug and play modules: CnNXT Order, Finance and Vendor, as well as leading third  party tools that best fit your organization. Our comprehensive discovery combined with modular solutions help enterprises realize value across productivity, spend, working capital and compliance without compromising on agility and scalability. 

There are plenty of ways your enterprise can benefit from leveraging Wipro CnNXT, our intelligent procure to pay platform. To learn more, connect with us.

About the Authors

Fawas Mudar

Deputy Product Manager – Wipro CnNXT, iCore, Enterprise Operations Transformation, Wipro

Padam Raj Daftary

AVP, Products, IP & Solutions– Wipro CnNXT, iCore, Enterprise Operations Transformation, Wipro

Mayank Mudgal

Senior Manager, Digital Process Advisory, iCORE, Enterprise Operations Transformation, Wipro