Are you confused by the virtually identical marketing messages that dozens (if not hundreds) of firms are spinning around EIPP, P2P, e-Procurement, and e-Payment? Do you want to know the difference between EIPP, P2P, e-Procurement, e-Payment and end-to-end e-Procurement? (They’re not the same, by the way. Not even close!) Do you want to know how you could be saving 4.8% across the board? Do you realize that an average savings of 4.8% across the board could, depending on your financials, translate into an improvement in EBITDA by as much as 100% (and likely 8% even in the worst case)? Do you just want the facts and not the spin?
Then you should download “End-to-End e-Procurement: The Foundation of Spend Management Success”, a new Sourcing Innovation white-paper, sponsored by Enporion (acquired by GEP). This white-paper defines what integrated end-to-end e-Procurement is, why it’s important, and how it enables the efficiencies and savings that e-Procurement was supposed to provide in the first place.
Integrated end-to-end e-Procurement is the implementation of e-Procurement technologies that support each step of the various procurement cycles of your organization in a tightly integrated fashion. It’s critical because anything less than end-to-end e-Procurement can result in these types of problems, just to name a few:
- inability to capture the manpower savings that only materialize when data no longer needs to be re-keyed in multiple systems
- unrealized cycle time reduction because errors are not caught before they cause problem, as happens when an order gets lost in system A when it should be in system B
- failure to ensure payment at contracted rates because the rates weren’t captured during requisition creation
- not knowing if the item you paid for as actually the item your buyer ordered, or if the item the warehouse received was the same item your buyer ordered because there is no multi-way match between purchase order, goods receipt, invoice, and contracted rates
The white paper defines the ten core capabilities of an end-to-end e-Procurement platform; the five most critical features (from a usability, efficiency, and effectiveness perspective); key integration points within the system and with associated systems that implement your sourcing, inventory management, and supply chain processes; a ten step process to make e-Procurement work for you; and an end-to-end e-Procurement checklist that you can use to evaluate a potential system to find out whether or not it is going to meet your needs. Finally, it defines over 20 benefits that can be realized with an integrated end-to-end e-Procurement system.
With over 20 pages of solid content, it’s worth the download. Enjoy!
And if you want more information on basic e-Procurement, I highly recommend checking out the e-Sourcing Wiki wiki-paper [WayBackMachine], if you haven’t already.