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Integrated Procure-to-Pay Measurement to Drive End-to-End Improvement

Ask any leader of a Shared Services organization what their key measures are for Accounts Payable and they will most likely know them, as well as how much they have improved year over year. However, ask them the same question regarding the full scope of the Procure-to-Pay process (“P2P”) and, often, neither they nor anyone at their company will know the answer.

A Peeriosity PeercastTM in the Accounts Payable research area [1] featured a global company that has developed a comprehensive measurement and improvement program for their P2P process, which has helped them identify priorities, organize appropriate resources and optimize the value of P2P across regions and functions.

As with all Peeriosity PeercastsTM, participants answered iPolling® questions that helped frame the discussion:

Status of Integrated Procure-to-Pay Measurement ipolling

While there is no doubt an abundance of measures can be found throughout the P2P process, the poll would indicate that there has not been a great deal of integration of measures across geography or functions. In addition, without this integration and alignment, it would be difficult for an organization to truly optimize the end-to-end process.

The PeercastTM feature company has been extremely successful in implementing Shared Services globally [2]. They have recently redeployed resources from implementation mode to an end-to-end process improvement model [3]. Three critical resource groups have been empowered to:

  1. Assess Process Performance
  2. Plan and Implement Improvements
  3. Manage Change

The three critical resource groups that have been established within their company to drive the end-to-end process improvements are:

The feature company went on to outline some of the initial steps they took after the Business Process Owners and Process Management Teams were established, as well as the Superuser Groups were identified for the P2P process:

In 2012 alone, the new focus on the end-to-end P2P yielded exceptional results, including:

The total cost of the P2P process is coming down and, just as importantly, the overall effectiveness is getting better. The alignment to a common set of measurement targets and initiatives to drive the improvement has brought the stakeholders together on the agreed priorities for the entire process rather than their individual components.

The PeercastTM  closed with a discussion on lessons learned in implementing P2P measurements and continuous improvement initiatives across the entire process. Some representative comments include:

How are you measuring the P2P process at your company and what steps are in place to improve it?

Who are your peers and how are you collaborating with them?

1 “PeercastsTM” are private, professionally facilitated webcasts that feature leading member company experiences on specific topics as a catalyst for broader discussion.  Access is available exclusively to Peeriosity member company employees, with consultants or vendors prohibited from attending or accessing discussion content.  Members can see who is registered to attend in advance, with discussion recordings, supporting polls, and presentation materials online and available whenever convenient for the member.  Using Peeriosity’s integrated email system, Peer MailTM, attendees can easily communicate at any time with other attending peers by selecting them from the list of registered attendees.

Peeriosity members are invited to log in to www.Peeriosity.com [5] to join the discussion and connect with Peers.   Membership is for practitioners only, with no consultants or vendors permitted.  To learn more about Peeriosity and the Senior Executive offering included in the membership Click here [6].