Purchase to Pay

The purchase to pay (P2P) process is one of the core financial processes of a company and comprises the entire process from the requisition to the payment to the supplier or service provider. In many companies this process is broken down into individual, independent steps, which are often carried out in different organizational units. The current use of specialized software for a partial automation of individual steps in the process results in a heterogeneous system landscape and information silos. A siloed approach prevents processes from being carried out completely from end to end, resulting in gaps in automation and a high level of operational effort.

In the past, attempts were made to counteract high operational costs by nearshoring and offshoring shared service centers. However, neither the efficiency nor the effectiveness of the overall process was improved - process quality was neglected, and as a result, the fundamental problems in the process still exist today.

Based on digital process automation we design the purchase to pay process of the future. Together with our customers, we move away from looking at the necessary steps within the purchase to pay process individually, rather we consider a single end-to-end process and optimize it along the entire journey. We pay attention to the integration of dynamic approval processes as well as intelligent information enrichment and validation in the purchase order process. We combine these with intelligent verification rules as part of the invoice processing. From our experience, this allows a fully automated verification and processing of more than 90% of the incoming invoices. In addition to an increased automation rate, an end-to-end view of the process can also eliminate media disruptions and break down information silos. This significantly improves process quality and increases effectiveness. At the same time, both the processing time of invoices and the need to involve experts are significantly reduced.