Interesting data from Spend Matters and American Productivity & Quality Center,
If we’re crunching the numbers correctly, automating your procure-to-pay process can:
As if you needed even more motivation to implement our Free Purchase Order Software.
Managed Care Systems (MCS) was struggling to control their Purchasing, inventory and budgets with a patchwork of outdated systems. Having grown to over 300 employees, MCS was overdue for an upgrade. Unfortunately, there was no budget for a new e-procurement system, but that didn’t stop Eric Jeffers, who is responsible for the Purchasing Department at MCS.
“Our old system was written in-house a bunch of years back and it was starting to fall apart,” says Eric. “The IT Department didn’t want to invest resources to fix it, so we kept limping along. Plus, as an add-on to the Help Desk system, it was really just an over glorified word processor to start with; it could print a PO and keep some history, but there was still a ton of manual effort and duplicate data entry for each order, and it didn’t track inventory or provide any budget controls, which were big problems. We were constantly going over budget because the managers who were approving orders couldn’t see the status of budgets real-time. And we were running out of stock all the time, which meant a big panic, rush orders and extra charges for expedited deliveries”.
So when Eric found SpendMap with its real-time budget and inventory controls fully integrated with its world-class Purchasing functionality, he was optimistic to say the least. “I have been working in Purchasing departments for 15 years and this is by far the best purchasing software I have ever seen,” says Eric. “You can’t imagine how disappointed I was when I was told that we had no budget left for a new system and I had to wait until the following year”…
We’re positioning the Free-Procurement Project as free “Purchase Order software” for a bunch of reasons that I won’t go into here but the free version of SpendMap actually includes all 12 modules, including requisitioning, receiving, supplier invoice approval, even inventory control and asset management.
If all you want to do is automate your Purchase Orders, that’s fine – just stick with the Purchasing Module. The functionality is compartmentalized, so you don’t need to use all features/modules if you don’t want to.
But if you’re up for it, you can use SpendMap to automate everything from initial requisition all the way through to the approval of the supplier’s invoice and integration with your Accounts Payable system. This is commonly referred to as “req-to-check” or “purchase-to-pay” (P2P for short).
If you intend to branch out into these other optional areas, however, you should be prepared to present a business case to decision makers and other departments that will be affected, such as the folks in Accounts Payable, department managers who will be approving orders online, perhaps even end-user staff members (requisitioners).
To help you get started building a business case, here’s a list of how e-procurement software can improve your business results at each step of the procurement process…
The Free-Procurement Project 