Why Innovative Software Solutions Hold the Key to S2P
Source-to-pay (S2P) encompasses all activities related to the procurement of goods and services.
Essentially, it can be regarded as the end-to-end journey, from strategic sourcing and managing supplier relationships to negotiating contracts, making purchases and handling payments.
Such processes are designed to streamline and optimise procurement activities, ensuring organisations receive the goods and services required in a timely and cost-effective manner while maintaining positive supplier relationships.
However, each stage of the S2P journey needs competent, well-functioning software behind it – which is where a host of specialist solutions providers come in.
Synertrade: Evolving alongside procurement teams
Take Synertrade, a full S2P SaaS solution enabling businesses to use insight from supplier data to deliver best-in-class procurement outcomes.
Its platform, Accelerate, enables the effective management of supplier relationships and uncovers new opportunities to operate more efficiently through the digitalisation of various procurement processes. This includes evaluating new suppliers, contracting and onboarding, catalogue management and spend analysis.
Synertrade operates on a modular approach, offering coverage across the entire S2P function – incorporating supplier relationship management (SRM), supply chain management (SCM) and procure-to-pay (P2P).
“Synertrade Accelerate evolves alongside a partner’s procurement department to continuously improve data management,” explains Olivier Berrouiguet, CEO at Synertrade.
“By integrating data from various sources, Accelerate simplifies procurement, boosts productivity and ensures users have an easy-to-use, single-source-of-truth platform. This approach enhances efficiency while creating a user-friendly environment that encourages collaboration.”
Aavenir enables connected S2P experience
Elsewhere, Texas-based Aavenir offers S2P applications specifically on the ServiceNow platform.
Its AI-powered products enable RFP management, vendor onboarding, contract lifecycle management (CLM), contract obligation management and AP automation processes through a connected experience.
Aavenir's flagship product, Contractflow, not only automates and accelerates the CLM process, but reduces contract risk and vendor obligation performance risk using AI.
“ServiceNow provides immense robustness and flexibility to configure Aavenir’s applications to meet business needs across a variety of buying categories, contract types, industries, geographies and more – all with low/no code,” says Sunil Masand, SVP Product at Aavenir. “This helps Aavenir’s customers realise accelerated time to value along with lowered implementation costs.
“Aavenir further helps elevate ROI with pre-built workflows that connect processes, data and data-driven insights between Aavenir’s S2P applications and across ServiceNow’s applications on the platform.”
Gaining a competitive edge
While each stage of the wider S2P workflow tends to be handled by separate teams, Sunil contends that winning enterprises with a competitive edge consistently champion an integrated, connected experience across teams handling individual processes.
Such organisations adopt cutting-edge technology and platforms to centralise or integrate S2P processes to maintain transparency, efficiency and cost savings throughout the procurement lifecycle.
“These enterprises see greater success with spend optimisation and risk reduction and enhanced collaboration with suppliers,” Sunil continues. “They have proved themselves to be better positioned to handle supply chain disruption and business impact due to changing laws, pandemics, inflation, climate and geo-political risks we’ve witnessed in recent times.”
Breaking this down further, Sunil believes an integrated S2P experience should cover connectivity across:
- Workflows: This might relate to seamless initiation of a contract request with legal teams after a procurement RFP award or a refreshed vendor ESG compliance report request by vendor managers and contract compliance managers during the life of the vendor relationship or contract
- Information: Instant access to POs and contracts for finance teams to verify vendor invoices against contracted terms and entitlements or contracted pricing for purchasing teams to order based on contracted prices and negotiated discounts.
- Insights: For example, instant sharing of AI-identified elevated vendor risk with vendor management, procurement, contracting and finance teams, or sharing of vendor contractual non-performance and disputed payment patterns and AI-generated insights with procurement for remediation and with finance for credit and penalty recovery.
Harnessing AI to transform business value
As has already been well documented, the explosion of interest in AI – specifically generative AI (Gen AI) – has seen businesses in various industries beginning to explore its use cases.
In the procurement sector, organisations are using such technology to automate manual processes such as spend analysis, contract management and order processing to create new efficiencies.
While this does improve productivity, these uses can be classed as “automated admin”, meaning AI’s vast potential remains largely untapped, as Olivier highlights.
“AI’s functionality hugely increases when it becomes embedded throughout the S2P platform used,” he says. “When the technology connects to multiple sources of information, uses data which is continually updated in real time and proactively identifies new avenues of opportunity for this information, business gains its true value.
“Harnessing the full linkage and speed AI provides enables procurement teams to significantly enhance their capabilities and ensure procurement can truly transform business value.”
Plotting a Gen AI roadmap
Sunil, meanwhile, is far from surprised to see an “army of Gen AI use cases” for sourcing, procurement and finance leaders to evaluate and adopt – and is well placed to comment in this area given Aavenir was built as an AI-first company.
With its proprietary LLM, conversational AI assistant, Avy AI, alongside a comprehensive suite of applied Gen AI capabilities, the firm offers an embedded, intuitive experience within its S2P applications, delivering greater productivity gains and cost and risk reduction.
Sunil continues: “S2P platforms can now leverage AI algorithms to analyse vast amounts of data, identify patterns, predict trends and provide actionable insights.
“Gen AI is transforming S2P processes and platforms by unlocking new levels of efficiency, accuracy and strategic value for procurement and finance teams. It's paving the way for agile, data-driven decision-making and redefining how organisations manage their procurement lifecycle.”
He advises: “Ultimately, the impact to S2P processes in an enterprise should be all about assessing where the enterprise sees the greatest value, the least amount of time to realise the value, the digital maturity of the organisation and its ability to enable and adopt Gen AI.
“A simple scoring of a) implementation and adoption feasibility, and b) business value against each S2P Gen AI capability, can help enterprises prioritise their Gen AI roadmap for S2P.”
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