By improving your P2P process, you will increase the efficiency of your purchasing and finances. Do you want to know how to do that? In this blog, we give five quick wins that will help you improve your P2P process quickly and easily.
Quick Win 1: ensure an up-to-date replacement arrangement
Going on vacation this summer? Then arrange a replacement for your most important tasks. This prevents purchase orders from remaining until after your vacation. This is also very important when it comes to invoices. Failure or late payment of invoices can cause reminders and angry customers. Therefore, arrange a replacement to take care of these issues. Then let your contacts and customers know about this. Arranging a replacement is often as easy as setting up your out of office. So do it!
By setting up a replacement arrangement, you prevent delays and the tasks are dealt with in a timely manner. This way, you can be sure that your orders are delivered and received on time.
Has your colleague not appointed a replacement? Then contact your functional manager.
Quick Win 2: improve the content in the application
For the P2P process to run smoothly, you need good and quality content. Consider, for example, master data, contracts and catalogues.
Take a look at this content. Questions you can ask:
- Are your catalogues still up to date?
- Are the items and the associated prices correct?
- Are the booking proposals still correct?
- Are all users still working in the organization?
- Do the new employees have the correct user account?
List the answers to these questions. Take a good look at whether and which colleagues you can use to provide information or improve processes. This way, you can easily make an action plan for improving your application. The better your content, the easier it is for the user to find their way around the application. This is how you improve the quality of the process.
Quick Win 3: Call a Competitor
By improving an app, system or way of working, you can learn a lot from each other. A different perspective, fresh wind or new ideas are inspiring.
At P2P & Verder, sharing knowledge is in our DNA. From our webinars you can get a lot of knowledge, for example. We once heard someone say: nothing as practical as a nice piece of theory.
Of course, it's even more fun to get your knowledge from industry and peers. In a conversation, you can discuss and elaborate on specific cases or topics. This is how you share knowledge and experience. So call that colleague, colleague or competitor, schedule an appointment and learn from each other.
Quick Win 4: Connect new suppliers to e-invoicing
E-invoicing is a real quick win. This saves you and your suppliers a lot of time. Instead of manually downloading and signing invoices, the entire process is automatic. With just one click, you have all the information in the right place in the system.
This way, you can streamline not only your own business processes, but also those of your suppliers. Aren't your suppliers (all) connected to e-invoicing yet? Then join your five largest suppliers this summer.
Quick win 5: map out your most important P2P agreements
September and October are often popular start dates for new colleagues. This means that you can add many new buyers, budget holders and other users to your system after the summer vacation.
For all these new users, the system is probably still unknown. It can therefore be worthwhile to draw up an instruction card. This way, new users quickly become familiar with the most important P2P agreements.
In the instruction card, you can include the following questions:
- What do you order where?
- Who can approve what?
- How do you register goods receipt?
- How do you approve or reject an invoice?
- Where can you go if you have questions?
Want to know more about the P2P process?
At P2P & Verder, we love sharing knowledge. For example, via our webinars and white papers. Here you will find knowledge sessions and information about everything related to purchase-to-pay. Do you want weekly tips and quick wins? Then follow our page on LinkedIn.
Do you need a structured approach to detecting potential for improvement? Then read our white paper about baseline measurement and analysis. Here you can read everything about setting up a baseline measurement, how to best analyze your P2P process and what next steps you can take.
And finally: do you have any questions about the purchase-to-pay system? Or about the quick wins in this blog? Please feel free to contact us.
