Digging into the S2P Tech Foundations

In our post yesterday in what makes a good foundation for S2P Tech, we noted that if you wanted to have any hope of “future-proofing” your platform, then it was critical that you acquired a platform with the following four capabilities.

  • Configurable Workflow preferably with RPA support
  • Open / Extensible API that supports integration into and out of your platform
  • Dynamically Extensible Data Model that can be extended by the customer
  • Globalization Support for language, currency, data location, and more!

And we gave some preliminary reasons, but today we’re going to dig into some of the issues that really concern us.

  • Changing Governmental Regulations as governments introduce e-commerce, they are introducing e-invoicing requirements that can change your P2P flow (like requiring invoices to be sent through government servers or payments sent through government servers) and as governments introduce more regulatory compliance, the ability to report the complete origin story of a product, to the source of each raw material, is going to require more cross-platform and cross-enterprise data collection
  • Data Bifurcation as more and more platforms proliferate across the supply chain, the data will continue to proliferate as well … and without the ability to connect all the platforms, the data will exist in separate islands
  • Increasing Supply Chain Segmentation across more and more companies across more and more companies across more and more global users
  • Platform Obfuscation because the platform can’t keep up

These issues are the main drivers for the foundational platform requirements we outlined yesterday. Without

  • Configurable Workflow
    the platform won’t keep up with changing government regulations as it won’t be able to adapt the process
  • Open/Extensible API
    the platform won’t be able to manage the data bifurcation or prevent platform obfuscation as it won’t be able to adapt as required to manage the data tracking or integrate with new modules as they come online
  • Dynamically Extensible Data Model
    as future data requirements dictated by future regulations and future applications can’t be predicted in advance
  • Globalization Support
    as your next supplier could be in a different country, on a different continent, with a workforce whose primary language is one you haven’t dealt with yet … and that could be tomorrow!

Now, these aren’t the only issues we’re worried about, but they are big ones and they are guaranteed to materialize — soon (and before your contract comes up for renewal) — which is why we’re really concerned about them, and about insuring you get the right platform for the long term.