The Ultimate Guide to Procure-to-Pay SuccessYour key to buying better and saving more.

If you haven’t noticed, the global economy is undergoing a massive transition. Last year saw Brexit, the unprecedented election of Donald Trump, and governments in the heart of Europe falling due to economic issues.. The domino effect of populism and protectionism affects your organization, and your wallet. And that’s not even your biggest problem. Fortune 500 stalwarts are continuing to fall to the wayside as startups backed by billions in funding surge to the top. Your best bet - be prepared for anything.

You’ll need to work smarter, not harder. Success will require collaboration, thoughtful planning, and agility. The backbone of your strategy: to acquire and create more value for everyone  — your team, your stakeholders, your customers, yourself.

How does that translate to your procure-to-pay (P2P) processes? Read on. Because this Ultimate Guide covers the four key Pillars of P2P essential to running an effective, world-class P2P program. Packed with proven tactics garnering impressive results, this Ultimate Guide doesn’t just talk about how you can achieve your goals, it shows you how to do it.

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Table of contents:1. Pillar 1: Bringing more spend

under management

• Your supplier ecosystem

• Virtual credit cards and your bottom line

• Resources

2. Pillar 2: Can you achieve total global compliance?

• Getting compliance everywhere you operate

• The simple tool that makes compliance easy

• A single point of truth for all your people and processes

• Resources

3. Pillar 3: Removing the supplier adoption barrier

• Showing them the value

• No apology necessary

• Build trust

• Resources

4. Pillar 4: How you fuel growth, agility, and create value

• Exception resolution should be a breeze

• Your idea factory

• Stretching—budgets and expectations

• Resources

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You’re leaving money on the table—with big gaps between your planned savings and the savings that really make it into your pocket or get applied to your bottom line. A strategic player, donned procurement’s new role, knows how to stop the savings leaks that cause those gaps, has control and visibility into spend, can maximize savings, and, most importantly, make them stick.

How do you do it? What does 100% spend under management give you? Well, crucial for a myriad of reasons, including enabling more accurate reporting and avoiding lengthy manual reconciliations at the end of the month, controlling all your spend means you have better strategic decision-making and are able to capture real cost savings. As cost visibility improves, procurement is able to not only support compliance initiatives,

Pillar 1: Bringing more spend under management

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but also negotiate better pricing. The closer to 100% spend under management you are, for on and off contract, the greater your cost visibility and the more impact you have on the bottom line. You can be more proactive, more strategic. By becoming more strategic you elevate the profile of P2P practitioners, creating more opportunities for advancement.

A twofold process, capturing more spend and bringinging more spend under management requires the right tools and a central hub for all your purchasing and invoicing. The first step: getting all your suppliers in one system.

A supplier ecosystemBuying things should be intuitive and easy, consumer-like. Which is why modern P2P kills the catalog and moves all goods and services into one location — online. In a true supplier ecosystem suppliers are able to quickly and effectively onboard, have access to a wide network of buyers and a simple user interface. Compelling incentives for suppliers to get engaged, like free-for-supplier invoicing, don’t hurt either. How much do your suppliers currently pay to do business with you? Maybe the better

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question, how much are you paying for your suppliers to do business with you?

A supplier ecosystem provides more value to your suppliers, but in the end, you reap the rewards. Back to that consumer-like experience—an online Marketplace allows you and your users to search through all your supplier’s offerings easily, and with an online catalogue you always have updated offerings. With an increase in available suppliers, you get a wider base of goods and services to choose from and your employees are able to get more of what they need without going rogue. Ultimately, you have more opportunities for savings.

Occasionally, there may be times when employees need to buy things that are not in your online pre-approved marketplace, or from non-preferred vendors. They might instead wander onto ecommerce sites like Amazon. For these instances, think about virtual cards.

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Virtual cards and your bottom lineIt’s no secret procurement often struggles to rein in rogue spenders. By incorporating virtual credit cards into procurement software, employees gain the ability to buy from anywhere on the web while simultaneously getting rid of the much-abused departmental credit card.

Virtual cards enable employees to gain pre-approval for purchases (which they ask for through a simple G-chat-like chat feature), and then provides them with an encrypted code they can use to purchase against a company card once approval is granted. Sound like something from the future? Think again. Virtual credit cards are already in play. Leading global financial partners are getting skin in the game to bring this capability to the P2P scene.

How it works. Say, for example, you have a corporate credit card with a $100,000 limit. As requests come in you can parcel that card out in preset amounts—i.e.100 cards for $1,000. But you’re not limited to set denominations. You set the amount down to the penny. (Jane needs a new laptop for $1,000; Bob is ordering

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printer paper and needs $670. You get the picture.) You set the expiration date — a week, a month, recurring — whatever works for you.

You get control, they get what they need. You capture the long tail of spending up front. The procurement police no longer exist. Users have flexibility but without the Expense Report and P-Card reconciliation process that plagues us all.

Ultimately, the management of all aspects of P2P through simplified solutions for online catalogs, shopping, purchasing, invoicing, and payments enables improved collaboration between buyers, suppliers, and employees, and greater visibility into your spending.

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How do you do it?Start thinking about what would drive cost efficiencies throughout your organization. These two heavy-hitting resources show you how you can bring more spend under management and capture more savings.

Disrupting Finance: How to Save the Fortune 1000 As FinTech innovations, like virtual credit cards, quickly transform the P2P landscape, see how you can leverage them to counter the disruption and retool your processes and infrastructure.

Maturity Models Procurement, AP, and Supplier Management maturity sketches from Jason Busch (Spend Matters) outline how you can: 1) drive departmental cost efficiencies, and 2) efficiency and value throughout the entire organization.

Bonus resource: Fact or Fiction (Webinar) Silos and how you eliminate them.

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Consider the global nature of supply chains and large corporate P2P software, and it becomes clear that compliance is at the core of finance and procurement functions. Now consider them within the current state of the globe and trade—Brexit, Trump. Just got a little scarier didn’t it.

Without flawless execution, the risk to your business is staggering. Poor compliance exposes businesses to all three major categories of risk: regulatory, competitive, and market.

Pillar 2: Achieving total global compliance

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Getting global compliance everywhere you operateThe headline above sounds obvious. For example, China had initiated the largest corporate tax overhaul in a generation, moving towards a VAT model. Yet, many finance departments were unaware and left woefully unprepared, scrambling to comply. What’s your China strategy?

What you need is baked-in best-in-class compliance, not only for China, but for all countries you currently, or potentially could do business.

At the core, total global compliance is about giving you, and your c-suite a little piece of mind. Avoid fines and audit risk, all while are reducing the cycle time of your invoice processing. You free up resources for more strategic initiatives. Putting in place auto checks and balances gives you a local compliance level but at a globe-wide approach.

You know what’s helpful to implement this total global compliance? Collaboration.

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You avoid fines and audit risk, yes, and all the while are reducing the cycle time of your invoice processing.

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The simple tool that makes compliance easyCommunication with your suppliers is of utmost importance. You need real-time updates on what’s happening so you can react the moment something happens. With the ability to collaborate seamlessly with your suppliers you can not only quickly react, but the unpredictable becomes predictable. You know about issues before they happen and can plan accordingly.

Maybe you have Slack, Skype, or some other external communication tool. How safe do you feel sending documents or information over them? Communication done outside of your secure system, between your users and your suppliers, creates a non-compliant environment. To avoid this, implement collaboration that is easy to use. Implementing a tool that records all messages in context with the document history, you get closer to bulletproof compliance and increased visibility.

In a nutshell, compliance means more gains to your bottom line. Go next-level and do it all in house. Yes, even.

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Your single point of truthHow many systems are you using just to do your daily tasks? What do you think the chances are there’s an “oops” with all those passwords and information all over the place? A one-and-done system can put all your people and processes in one manageable, easy to monitor place (easier for everyone, not just you). It can also lock down your invoice compliance.

Picture this. You set all the must-haves and then with a document firewall you can block non-compliant invoices based on the rules you’ve dictated. Power. For most suppliers, you’ll likely choose to accept only 100% compliant invoices. However, for unique cases and strategic suppliers you have the ability to adjust the rules to whatever you deem acceptable.

Document validation capabilities protect AP from non-compliant invoices that slow you down by checking fields against correct data and validating against the custom rules mentioned above. The system stops suppliers from sending invoices with errors, preventing exceptions before they’re sent.

Top-rate compliance is the bedrock of successful P2P, and a core function for AP. It’s just one more spot where you’ll pass

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audits with flying colors and enable your organization to land more (and bigger) deals.

How do you do it?These actionable reads evaluate your current SCM approach and highlight where you can focus attention to become 100% confident in your compliance.

Supplier Management Checklist A 2-page checklist outlines how to set up a baseline and establish success metrics, the 4 phases of a comprehensive supplier lifecycle management program, including risk management and compliance.

3 Must-haves to improve supplier information management [Infographic] The 3 things you need to improve supplier information management, clean that dirty supplier data, and prepare your company for compliance and risk challenges..

Bonus resource: Essential Guide to Supplier Management

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Have you thought about how your P2P process as business commerce? Because business is never just a one-way street. You are never just a buyer. You are never just a supplier. You are often a customer. As a business commerce platform we think commerce should create value for everyone. Think about that when the conversation comes up around supplier value — like now.

Let’s face it, we all get excited about the latest and greatest. The same is true for procure-to-pay technology. But as most already know, the value generated from P2P solutions is closely tied to adoption. Yes, you need to be innovative and agile, get more spend under management, and drive process efficiencies, but without supplier participation, it’ll be an uphill battle.

Pillar 3:Removing the adoption barrier

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Supplier adoption makes or breaks the business case on the buy side. Companies who onboard 70-80% of their suppliers to their solution and roll out key supplier-facing tools and services see a much higher ROI than those who convince only a handful of suppliers to onboard.

The difference comes down to suppliers’ willingness to onboard and adopt an application. Suppliers won’t use something that provides them little to no value. Can you blame them? Supplier fees, poor user experience, multiple sign-ons, slow processing times, difficult-to-manage catalog publishing experiences, and watered-down portals have for years left suppliers feeling a little burned.

Suppliers, sadly, have become accustomed to being required to pay to do business with you, and often perceive technology as an expense rather than an investment. Change, which sounds to suppliers like a disruption in cash flow and another learning curve for their users, can make the perceived value low. It’s no wonder, as painful as they are, many suppliers have a preference for their legacy tools and older approaches. You might be feeling the same.

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Showing them the valueIf you want leading supplier onboarding rates there should never be a fee. Ever. If you have solution with an intuitive nature and high value return for them it makes adoption easy and the solution naturally sticky. There’s no need for you to charge suppliers to pad margins or force them to feel invested.

With value like that you’ll have a rock-solid customer number 1 position, which comes with things like first access to products/services in case of crisis or disaster, and strategic relationships that pay you back in more folds than you can count.

There are four components that directly affect adoption rates: perceived value, confidence, accessibility, and trust.

Perceived ValueTo help suppliers see what’s in it for them, you must ensure your chosen solution offers a clear and compelling value proposition. Suppliers need to have confidence it will actually provide value without a great deal of difficulty.

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Suppliers should be able to publish a product or service offer one time, then easily manage the products or services they want to share with each of their customers individually.

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In pillar one we talked about catalogs. Get ready for this. Suppliers should be able to publish a product or service offer one time, then easily manage the products or services they want to share with each of their customers individually. There is one place where everyone exchanges key transactional data, like invoices and POs, receives and fulfills orders, manages e-invoicing, and, here’s where we double down on value, they get more supplier financing options creating more working capital. Plus, with a user profile they can publish products publicly so it’s easier for prospective customers, like you, to search and connect.

No apologies necessary Validating invoices prior to suppliers submitting them to customers seems like a no-brainer. Yet, it’s not. With it any potential issues are caught before invoices make their way through the customer’s approval channels, and reduces any payment delays that may result from invoices being rejected and resubmitted.

By moving invoicing processes online, suppliers are able to create, flip, request, track, and receive payments all by clicking a

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button. It doesn’t get much easier. This enables suppliers to simplify and streamline invoicing, while gaining transparency and visibility into their entire invoice and payments process. And there’s your reduced cycle times.

A secret trick to rapid adoptionUse the transaction. Offer the option early on to scan paper invoices. Then the switch from paper or email to electronic invoicing is made much easier for suppliers. This leads to a higher rate of “full” onboarding and more rapid adoption. Incremental changes are the fastest way to overcoming hurdles for suppliers resistant to change.

An easy idea to implement — onboarding campaigns. Use the transaction as a gateway to trigger email campaigns encouraging engagement and showing the benefits of e-invoicing for faster adoption rates.

Build trust through collaborationThe relationship between buyers and suppliers can be complex, but it doesn’t have to be. Maintaining a positive buyer-supplier

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relationship is nearly impossible when suppliers chase payments and are left to phone calls and emails to get the correct orders and information. Who can blame them?

Suppliers should be able to manage their own compliance, giving you, the buyer, instant notifications of compliance issues or updates to supplier information. Able to communicate in real time, collaboration becomes a breeze, suppliers become more efficient, and relationships improve.

When it comes to adoption, the defining question is always: Will people use it and how does it benefit them? Fast adoption, presenting a massive opportunity for accelerated economic growth, makes bringing your suppliers and users into the fold mutually beneficial. There’s an art to supplier onboarding. Our supplier success team offers integration as a service, which melts away the barriers to adoption for suppliers and delivers industry-leading onboarding rates to our customers. This support is predicated on technical flexibility, rather than a prescriptive “one size fits all” approach. So, think outside the box, and make success a two-way street.

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How do you do it?How do you switch from a transactional to a collaborative approach? These resources will help you start thinking about how to create value for your suppliers, and yourself, in surprisingly easy ways.

10 Hard Truths About Supplier Onboarding Are you focusing on the wrong things when it comes to your suppliers? If you are you could be suffocating your supplier relationships and your biggest competitive advantage.

Collaborating to Achieve Seamless Source-to-Pay in 2017 K.I.S.S. Collaboration. Make an impact, and achieve seamless, connected source-to-pay through collaboration, both internally and externally. This webinar shows you how.

Bonus resource: HRG (DHL supplier) used Tradeshift to help both (DHL and HRG) maximize their time, resources, and investment.

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The dawning recognition that bringing the back office forward is crucial to organizational agility has created both a shift in responsibilities and a wealth of opportunities for those willing to step up and grab their piece of the pie. These quick tidbits are what you need to get ahead in 2017 using some things you likely already have.

An effective, efficient procure-to-pay process is a must to running a successful organization. Pete Loughlin, from Purchasing Insight, agrees, “Purchase to pay processes sit squarely behind processes that serve the customer most

Pillar 4: Fueling business agility, growth, and creating value

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effectively.” It shouldn’t stop there. P2P success depends on your organization’s ability to use it to help renew and adapt in a rapidly changing environment. That agility is enabled by two things: 1) dynamic capability—speed, nimbleness, and responsiveness; and 2) a stable core with automation and standardization. The trick is to strike a balance. Do you really want a “no PO, no pay” mentality where it may not be needed?

Instead of rigid, controlling software and processes that stifle communication and innovation, choose technology that can be flexible and support your business requirements and your processes naturally, yet ensures control and compliance. To get specific, here are three aspects of P2P that promotes business agility and growth, rather than slow it down:

1. Exception resolution is a breezeFrom purchase order to payment, your AP team, suppliers, managers, and employees should be able to chat and collaborate in a system about any document or processes. No more emailing, faxing, or waiting and wondering. Exception resolution should be a breeze. While straight-through processing should be the goal, in cases where it’s not possible, it should still be easy to get transaction flows completed in any number of ways with lightning-quick processing times.

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2. Your idea factoryGood suppliers want your company to be successful and want to help you by sharing innovation and insights. They are there to understand your business needs and help you select the right product or service to meet your purposes. Modern, embedded procure-to-pay collaboration tools ensure that buyers and suppliers can have a dialogue about what the buying company needs, enabling the supplier to help provide the right solution. As strategic partnerships form and supplier engagement increase, you gain unique benefits, like access to your supplier’s best people, to the resources required to serve account relationships, get preferred access to your supplier’s latest technological advances, more favorable terms, share risk, and priority over resources or production capacity in times of scarcity. In all, a vital strategic advantage.

3. Stretching — budgets & expectationsInstead of investing in multiple solutions, why not go with one that has an intuitive user experience, provides value to your suppliers, and is open and extensible? A one-and-done you might call it. Go for a platform that offers third-party applications

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allowing you to extend your procure-to-pay processes as they evolve and pivot to continually support your company’s product and/or service roadmap.

How do you do it?Where does your P2P rank? These powerful resources show you where you are and how to get started on your road to P2P success.

P2P Agility Checklist How agile are you? What can you do for some quick wins? Get this checklist. It covers all your key areas: organization, process, strategy, performance, and technology.

Hackett Enabling Agility The Hackett Group is known as experts within the procurement space. They created this report (and this webinar) on how world-class procurement organizations enable agility and drive greater business value.

Bonus resource: Ardent Report Achieve success in our current business environment

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The key takeaways for successful P2P:

• Bringing more spend under management can be done simply through free tools like virtual credit cards and improved collaboration

• Total global compliance is easy if you have all your people, including suppliers, and processes in one place, and real-time communication is key

• Removing the adoption barriers isn’t complicated. Offer value for them and you’ll create more value for yourself and your organization.

• Fueling growth and agility can be done by tapping into resources you already have. Use them.

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Let’s talk about how you can create value and compete today’s global stage. Contact us at +1.800.381.3585 in the U.S., or --- in Europe, for a demo or consultation.