Business Platforms – BPO meets Technology: How Source-to-Pay platform can help you achieve transformational savings?

While leading economic indicators are showing sign of slight recovery there’s still a long way to stabilization of economy and get over current uncertainty. Smart organizations are using this challenging environment as an opportunity to drive some of the tough transformation changes while outsourcing which otherwise would have been difficult to implement. Such transformational changes invariably require overhauling of existing process and underlying technology layer to achieve savings beyond traditional ‘lift & shift’. Endured by various hype & bust cycle over last two decades, organizations today are more sensible when it comes to drive the transformation changes instead of looking for panacea to the problems. Platform BPO being a new concept is going through initial hype cycle and so also need to cross the chasm of some of the glaring expectation gap. Organizations need to evaluate this as an integrated combination of both ‘process’ and ‘technology’ in a synergistic way instead of evaluating alone on just process or technology. If any one of the vital element is weak or ignored, it will fail to deliver the complete transformational savings.

Let’s examine this argument for Source-to-Pay platform, the complete transformation savings is essentially derived from multitude of factors which is possible only due to fusion of people, process and technology. The transformational savings thus can stem mainly from following key areas:

Streamlined procurement process
·    Disciplined and user friendly self service process – request creation, catalog availability, approvals, budget check and receipts would lead to increased adoption by end users
·    Standard process for sourcing, purchase order processing, invoice receipts, payment processes, vendor data management and catalog enablement would increase enablement for off shoring
·    Transparent processes through workflow and integrated processes would reflect organization policies and procedures clearly
Effective control of spend
·    Reduce instance of buying from non approved suppliers
·    Responsible buying by capturing necessary justifications through workflow
·    Enforce purchasing policies and spend channels through automated work flow
·    Enforce payment against receipts, receipt approval and negotiation discounts and payment terms
·    Contract compliance for price and payment terms
Reduce TCO for people and technology
·    Reduce people cost due to effective automation and offshore enablemento   Reduce technology cost by taking advantage of multi-tenant platform architecture
·    Get technology obsolescence and risk addressed by service providers who collaborate closely with application vendors
Spend reduction due to strategic sourcing
·    Increase spend visibility and analysis support – monitoring, analysis and reporting would help in devising effective sourcing category strategy
·    Analytical tools with multi dimensional analysis and real time slicing & dicing of data facilitates fact based negotiation and also speed up negotiation process.
·    Aggregation of demand would lead to better negotiation and subsequently realization of slab based prices
·    Usage of eNegotiation tools make the entire price & vendor selection process transparent thus lead to better savings tracking and supplier management

The integrated value benefit i.e. people, process and technology is one of the most important aspect to be kept in mind while preparing a business case for transformational savings through BPO platform.