P2P Content

Last week, I attended Tradeshift's new “Innovation Summit” series in London. It was a short event, lasting only an afternoon, and obviously one intended to test the waters to the receptiveness of both the format and the location, but an interesting one nonetheless.

From a vision perspective, Tradeshift is almost dead-on in terms of what the platform of the future has to look like, and from a marketing perspective, it makes perfect sense. But when there are still a large number of organizations using Excel and email, and a larger number still who remain on first-generation best-of-breed procurement applications, it's hard to sell a true “Procurement 3.0” solution approach when the majority of the world hasn't even caught on to “Procurement 2.0” solutions.

As our journey to world-class e-invoicing continues in this multi-part Spend Matters Plus research brief, we discuss five additional elements to diagnose the overall scope, capability and coverage of your e-invoicing deployment — and whether or not your solution provider(s) can enable you to get to world-class levels of performance. If you want to catch up on this series, we encourage you to learn about all the components of the first five elements (invoice capture, collaboration/workflow, matching, compliance/validations and mobile enablement) and a broader introduction to the topic in first installment of this series. Finally, we invite Spend Matters practitioner and consulting advisory clients to reach out to us to discuss their existing and planned deployments. E-invoicing is far more complex a solution area to analyze than e-procurement, in large part because solution capabilities and organizational requirements show so much variation compared with each other.

I spend a lot of time in product demos, discussing product features and functionality with the analyst community, digging into technology, and harassing our pre-sales team. I’ve gained a wealth of knowledge about purchase-to-pay software – more than you probably want – but what I’ve also learned is that there are some slippery providers out there. They might deliver a slick demo, but there’s quite a bit of information they’re not telling you, and only one party stands to lose in that situation: you. Keep reading for some examples of how our competitors have offered creative storytelling instead of the truth about what their product can and can’t do.

David Gustin is the chief strategy officer for The Interface Financial Group responsible for digital supply chain finance and is a contributing author to Trade Financing Matters.

As we pointed out in our last post, payment companies are looking to convert paper checks to cards, and this is drawing interest from many firms, from private equity investing into payment companies to acquisitions (e.g., Fleetcor acquiring Nvoicepay, Visa buying Earthport). The key weapon of payment companies is to leverage interchange fees to entice their clients (buyers) through rebates and extended terms to provide an early pay option for suppliers, typically with a discount from the invoice of 2% to 3%. Yet there are several reasons why a “card only” strategy from payment companies is suboptimal.

In this Spend Matters Plus series, we explore what makes run-of-the-mill electronic invoicing (e-invoicing) implementations different from those that are transformative and capable of aligning procurement and accounts payable (A/P) with broader business outcomes and metrics. In this analysis, we delve into topics that are important for procurement and A/P teams to discuss with their solution providers — and prospective providers — to enable a world-class e-invoicing deployment on their terms.

As part of this research brief, we first consider the corporate and public perspective on initiatives (aimed at the private sector), both of which involve differing goals, albeit with the need of the individual company deploying capabilities to keep in mind various sets of requirements regardless. In part, depending on jurisdiction, this dual “master” requirement — the business and government — is something that makes e-invoicing quite unique in the area of procurement technology. Next, we include a list of 10 key elements to diagnose the quality of an e-invoicing deployment and how providers stack up, as well as key e-invoicing questions to evaluate your performance and implementation, trends and value-add services that select e-invoicing providers are addressing. Finally, we provide an e-invoicing architecture framework to construct, deploy and manage a set of enabling capabilities based on your specific requirements.

A new report from Texas-based research firm Everest Group analyzes the factors contributing to suboptimal direct spend management. The report — “Is It Time to Outsource Direct Spend Categories?” — aims to provide a process for enterprises to begin changing their approach to direct spend management.

Nearly two years ago, the Spend Matters team birthed the inaugural set of SolutionMap rankings unto the world. This week, the latest quarterly update was released, showing how procurement software providers stack up against one another. So this is a good time to explore how SolutionMap came into being and to offer a Q&A on how it works.

It’s important to set measurable goals to assess the maturity of your procurement and expenses processes.

By analyzing the largest accessible source of business spend data (the nearly $1 trillion that flows through the Coupa platform), Coupa Business Spend Management (BSM) experts have identified 12 Key Performance Indicators to help you gain insight into and advance your organization’s maturity across the spectrum of BSM processes, from sourcing to procurement to payments.

Here are three of the most influential KPIs for purchasing, invoicing and expenses — and how companies with digitally mature processes are performing in these areas:

As Spend Matters is set to turn 15, we asked Founder Jason Busch to reflect on how Spend Matters began and how it has grown over the years.

One development he sheds light on is what sparked the creation of our benchmarking tool, SolutionMap, which was just updated for this quarter with rankings of 58 procurement software providers across 12 categories, like P2P, CLM and Contingent Workforce & Services. The idea stemmed from our analysts always talking about doing more meaningful reviews of procurement solutions than what the market provided — and then they stopped talking and did it.

“Believe me,” Busch said, “we were talkers for too long.”

Spend Matters today released its Q1 2019 SolutionMap, ranking 58 procurement software companies across 12 solution categories, including E-Procurement, Sourcing, Spend Analytics, Supplier Relationship Management, Contract Lifecycle Management and Contingent Workforce & Services. Click on this article to see how to access rankings for free!

The Spend Matters SolutionMap Procure-to-Pay (P2P): Provider Scoring Summary is only available to SolutionMap Members. This SolutionMap analyzes a select group of procure-to-pay solution providers. It is part of our Q1 2019 SolutionMap report series, also featuring spend analytics, sourcing, supplier management, contract management, e-procurement and invoice-to-pay providers.

Spend Matters analyst Xavier Olivera and I are attending Oracle’s Modern Business Experience event this week in Las Vegas. Procurement is well represented as a component of supply chain, with over 30 breakout sessions and other activities catering to purchasing, supply management and spend management-related areas. In addition, there are numerous sessions on blockchain, the internet of things (IoT) and related subjects that overlap with procurement.

We’ll attempt to cover as much as we can from the event this week and next. But here are some questions that we have on our mind as the festivities kick into high gear: