P2P implementations: Why you’ll have to rock the already rocking boat

These days, most websites will immediately prompt you to f ill out your information. Want a 20% discount? Give your name and email (and number). Want to see the food menu? Name and email. You want to make this one-time-ever purchase? Create an account. Having to fill out forms takes you off course — and it’s annoying.?The same frustrations apply to the P2P and supplier onboarding process.

It’s easy to empathize with a supplier faced with having to manually fill out multiple RFPs and RFIs with hundreds of questions on a daily basis, plus learn how to navigate unique supplier portals for hundreds of buyers in order to win business. Suppliers will often bypass supplier portals altogether, resorting to phone calls, emails and sometimes even fax to send information in the format they prefer because they’re tired of being taken off their course. As mentioned, it’s annoying. From then on, any orders, RFXs, invoices, payment details, shipping notifications and more get manually processed into ERPs or lost in emails, leaving everyone susceptible to error, deliberate fraud, wasted time, added work and failed partnerships. In effect, supplier onboarding is the dreaded administrative work of supply chain, and the less “annoying” that a supplier onboarding solution is, the better.

It’s all about supplier onboarding

Even if a procure-to-pay (P2P) solution is touted as having best-in-class supplier onboarding, procurement organizations often avoid P2P deployment because they’re aware of implementation challenges. It’s expensive to hire a consultant or exhaust employees’ time just to get a solution off the ground. Plus, if there’s no guarantee the supplier portal will be adopted anyway, and given suppliers’ varying preferences, digitizing the P2P process might seem like a lost cause. Time-consuming implementation challenges are particularly undesirable when you take into account the current labor and material shortages. Businesses are already facing plenty of disruptions, and no one wants to “rock the boat” that’s already rocking.

Nevertheless, the boat must be rocked a little — organizations should implement P2P solutions and for many reasons. To name just a few:

• Labor shortages combined with growing supplier networks necessitate P2P automation (e.g., requisition-to-order, receipt-to-pay) so suppliers can be paid on time.
• P2P solutions cultivate reliable procurement data (unlike manually entered, fragmented spreadsheets) and data will continue to be the Holy Grail of business decision-making.
• The operational and savings benefits extend beyond procurement; finance, accounts payable, treasury, operations, IT and even sales are positively impacted. Consumers should take advantage of modern P2P technology.

So, definitely consider a P2P implementation, but make sure your provider offers an optimized supplier onboarding experience, which means the solution should:

• Not consume all of employees’ time during implementation; always seek customer references to learn the deployment experience — ideally, customers with similarly sized organizations.
• Rapidly demonstrate ROI; implementation should be cheap, and the ease of supplier adoption should be obvious (>90% of your suppliers should readily send invoices through the platform).
• Have AP capabilities that serve all required geographies.
• Provide process governance to suppliers; suppliers should be prompted to take all necessary steps leading up to engagement (e.g., “approve the timeline for this order”) to eliminate guesswork and back-and-forth emails/calls.
• Leverage existing technology investments and easily integrate with suppliers’ cloud-based B2B platforms or on-premise interfaces.
• Seamlessly integrate with other procurement solutions and/or support peripheral procurement processes for a more cohesive experience. For example, when suppliers can manage their responses to an RFX in the same platform that they’ll be paid through, they’re more likely to adopt the platform altogether.
• Quickly process supplier invoices so suppliers can be paid quickly and immediately trust the platform; this requires tried-and-true AI and ML capabilities (e.g., data auto-filling, at least two-way matching).
• Offer features that are mutually beneficial to buyers/ suppliers (i.e., financing options and dynamic discounting).
• Come with a network of pre-onboarded suppliers in all necessary spend categories.

“Supplier participation and onboarding need to be easier than what’s mostly available in the market today,” said Ilan Friedman, of Nipendo, a Source-to-pay Automation platform that focuses on the needs of both suppliers and buyers so that implementation and adoption happen quickly and smoothly. “We focus our technology and a support team on ease of use, and we can achieve a 90+% supplier onboarding for customers.”

Whether you learn about Nipendo or any other P2P provider, it’s essential to understand a solution provider’s supplier onboarding experience before getting fixated on its other offerings. Otherwise, you can end up investing in a P2P solution without reaping the full benefits.

Originally published by Spend Matters on April 28, 2022