Daily Archives: April 4, 2007

Supplier Performance Management Webinar

Hopefully after reading yesterday’s post which pointed out that only 49% of organizations have bothered to implement a supplier performance measurement and risk management program, you’ll want to do something about it. If you do, you might want to take advantage of Procuri‘s well-timed webinar on Jumpstarting a Supplier Performance Management Program. Moderated by Tim Minahan, editor of Supply Excellence, the featured speakers include Chris Herbtst, Supply Chain Program Manager of Constellation Brands, and Dawn Tiura, Partner at Denali Consulting.

According to the messaging, this webinar will cover:

  • How to organize for effective supplier performance management
  • The right supplier performance metrics for cross-company measurement
  • How to assess and select the right solutions to help your company achieve its supplier performance measurement and improvement goals
  • Sure-fire approaches to speed performance management program system deployment and adoption

All very important topics.

You’re Losing Money on Your Invoices

Those who follow Aberdeen Research will realize that there are three levels of publication frenzy: ( a) end-of-the-month, ( b) end-of-the-quarter, and ( c) end-of-the-year. Well, end-of-the-quarter just passed, and a slew of new reports just hit the Aberdeen website. In addition to the Supplier Performance and Risk Management Benchmark that was the subject of yesterday’s post, the E-Payables Benchmark Report also hit the e-waves this week.

The report found that Best-in-Class enterprises that utilize automation to drive performance report the following advantages:

  • 91% lower invoice-processing costs
    ($1.50 to $2.00 compared to $10.54 for industry average and $58.09 for laggard)
  • 46% shorter process cycle time
  • 12% fewer late payments
  • 30% less time responding to inquiries

The report also gives some advice to organizations that want to become Best-in-Class. These recommendations include:

  • Moving toward a fully automated environment that integrates A/P with existing procurement and financial systems
  • Establish a linkage between your A/P goals and objectives and the broader goals of the finance and procurement groups
  • Develop disbursement strategies in concert with your treasury and finance teams that seek to optimize working capital
  • Leverage data visibility to drive performance improvement across the enterprise
  • Increase collaboration with IT to assist in the development of a portfolio strategy to best manage an array of electronic receipt and payment methods

These recommendations are important because over 60% of enterprise lack visibility into the primary A/P spend and invoice data and paper invoices cost 74% to 89% more to process than electronic invoices. This lack of visibility cascades into lost opportunities across the enterprise, including treasury, procurement, and supplier management. Treasury is unable to make optimal working capital decisions, procurement is unable to identify opportunities for leverage, and supplier management is unable to even answer the simple question “have you received my invoice?”.

The sad thing is that getting to best-in-class is not very hard, especially compared to risk management or strategic sourcing. The enabling technologies are straight-forward, have existed for a while now, and include:

  • E-Invoicing
  • Document Scanning, Workflow, and Management
  • Spend Analytics for Invoices and Compliance
  • Reporting Capabilities
  • Invoice Dashboards
  • Payment Networks

Moreover, Aberdeen lays out a straight-forward e-payable framework to follow. The framework is a four-part solution that progresses from receipt through approval and inquiry to validation and reconciliation, and finally to settlement. After all, in addition to significantly lower invoicing costs, A/P automation also allows for improved resource productivity, stronger controls, fewer errors, better payment performance, reduced cycle times, and improved visibility into spend. This is another report I’d make time for if you’re not best-in-class already.