Technology is having a moment. It’s been accelerating for years, and now it’s upending industries across the board. As tech advancements in other business areas bask in the spotlight, technology has been quietly transforming the procure-to-pay (P2P) process—and it’s poised to redefine how procurement and purchasing professionals do their jobs.
Are you ready to peer into the future?
Here’s a look at four disruptive technologies transforming the P2P process and redefining what purchasing and procurement teams can accomplish.
Why P2P is Due For Upgrades
Most procurement professionals know conventional P2P processes need to be refreshed. Here are a few problems that are springing up out of the traditional P2P process:
- Manual input is causing mistakes: With manual processes, it’s easy to make errors that delay the procurement and payment cycles. Everything from lost documents or entry errors to miscommunications and overlooked figures leads to extra problems, and your team is distracted each time they have to put out these fires.
- Purchasing intake is complicated: Managing new purchase requests within a complicated system takes extra training. That means fewer employees feel confident using your approved software—and more people purchase through unapproved suppliers.
- Exception resolution is a nightmare: Exception processing is inefficient and cumbersome in traditional P2P processes. Manually fixing exceptions eats into work hours and distracts employees from more specialized work.
- Uploading data by hand wastes time: Every second an employee spends fixing a PO or invoice, entering data from a physical document, or creating new documents by hand wastes time. That delays payments and pulls attention away from strategic work.
- Spend data is slipping through the cracks: Rogue purchases and manual entry block procurement’s spend visibility. Without knowing how and where the company is spending, it’s difficult to build an effective procurement strategy.
- Procurement is losing sight of strategy: Every second spent completing tasks or fixing mistakes is pulled away from planning and executing a sound strategy.
Groundbreaking Technology Disrupting P2P Processes
Advanced P2P solutions digitize the P2P process and automate tasks. Here’s how new technology is supercharging these SpendTech™ systems and streamlining the P2P process:
1. Automation
Automation technology completes repetitive tasks, freeing you for more strategic work. For instance, automated P2P solutions will automatically conduct two-way or three-way matches. It will automatically create purchase orders (POs) and can complete the invoice-to-pay-to-reconciliation process for you. As a result, teams speed up the P2P cycle, cut down on errors, and drive down labor costs.
2. AI and Machine Learning
Artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning can learn to knock out human tasks at a superhuman rate. They uncover patterns, make predictions, and learn to complete work without being programmed.
Within P2P solutions, these technologies can identify errors and learn to route documents to the best person for approval. Here are just a few examples of how AI and machine learning cut out work:
- Match documents: AI can identify line items and match them to POs, saving procurement teams loads of time.
- Eliminate fraud: AI detects procurement fraud and can alert leaders before criminals cause catastrophic financial damage.
- Ensure accounting accuracy: AI can automatically code invoices and purchase requests. That increases spend under management and makes it easier to identify smart strategic moves.
- Limit human touches: In the future, AI could create a “zero interface” digital experience, in which a leader simply speaks into their device, and technology finds the best purchasing choice for them. This technology could complete all types of P2P tasks in seconds without human touch. For instance, you may someday simply say, “Set up a new employee’s office,” and AI could tie together a purchasing package that includes every item you need for new hires to start work.
- Easily resolve exceptions: AI can scan invoices and POs, identify mismatching documents, resolve exceptions, and complete straight-through processing.
3. Big Data Analytics
Big data analytics gathers real-time data and packages it into reports you can use to make smarter strategic decisions. In advanced P2P solutions, this technology feeds off of a digital marketplace where employees can easily browse products or services and purchase with an approved supplier.
When employees buy through this intuitive marketplace, the system captures spend data. Then it generates spend reports and forecasts that procurement teams can use to see spending opportunities.
Big data analytics also makes it possible to read in-context analytics. This is where AI considers the time, location, and other factors influencing data and uses those details to make inferences. As a result, procurement leaders can see real-time figures, predict shortages or product surpluses, and sidestep supply chain disruptions.
4. Intelligent Content Extraction Tools
AI is also sparking intelligent content extraction tools. For instance, optical character recognition (OCR) can pull information off PDFs or handwritten notes and transfer it into your digital payment system. That means you can easily turn any paper invoice into a digital one—without spending extra time typing out lines of info.
Unlike some earlier technologies, intelligent contact extraction does not rely on templates. Instead, it uses AI to read the words on a page, recognize them, and transfer information. Because AI learns to recognize data on the fly rather than following a set template, nobody needs to train this technology to follow a set of rules, and it doesn’t rely on templates that may go out of date.
See Disruptive P2P Technology in Action
New technology is already disrupting P2P and could help your teams achieve their goals faster than ever. Want to see how it works? Take a product tour here for an inside look at how this technology could help your teams excel.
