Optimizing Business Operations Through Integration

Managing costs and increasing savings in Procure-to-Pay (P2P) are prevalent concerns shared by organizations throughout the world. Though procurement, accounts payable (AP), and finance groups all strive to achieve these common goals, they are often relatively siloed in terms of efforts to improve process inefficiencies and implement automation technology. It is common for procurement and payables teams to operate completely independently from each other, each with their own centralized processes and sometimes adopting seperate, point solutions to automate specific P2P stages rather than one tool for the entire P2P lifecycle. While these compartmentalized initiatives may yield tangible benefits, they are often only short-term improvements, and do not always give organizations the chance to reach their maximum potential in P2P operations. Even when organizations report open and collaborative relationships between their teams, there is still a significant lack of visibility as separate teams manage their financial and supplier data across respective legacy systems.

Creating synergy across procurement, Accounts Payable (AP), finance, and even IT, means implementing a unified system that creates a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Streamlining back-office spend operations in a unified way, with cloud-based, integrated P2P software, renders a transformed process that adds new value to an organization. This integrated approach helps in managing spend, as well increasing process efficiency. This guide uses Levvel Research’s survey data to delve into the current state of procurement, finance, and accounting, as well as automation trends in each department. It explores the benefits of automated, integrated, cloud-based purchasing, payables, and payments technologies, as well as how to create successful synergy in the backoffice with process change.