[eBook Excerpt] 4 Steps to Remove Friction from your Source-to-Pay Process

A single platform for automated requesting, sourcing, supplying, and paying for goods and services.

The frustration of today’s high friction source-and-pay systems How many hoops must your employees and suppliers jump through just to source, procure, and pay for the goods and services your business needs to operate?

For most companies, these essential functions are built on layers of complicated manual processes and systems that leave both internal and external stakeholders unsure of where to go, how to comply, or what their request status is.

This splintered source-to-pay (S2P) environment can have very real impacts on procurement:

• High labor costs that support multiple low-level and redundant tasks across dozens of systems.
• Frustrated, overloaded employees create rogue workarounds that break cumbersome company policies, creating blind spots for monitoring costs and risk.
• Supply shortages and disruptions from a lack of both visibility and coordination across procurement and supplier processes.
• Transformation initiatives that ignore investments in your existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) platform and transactional systems require expensive rip-and-replace or customization projects that can take months or even years.
• Environmental, social, and governance (ESG) and risk management as one-time, manually executed, or even ad hoc activities disconnected from the broader organization, leading to missed checks and compliance reviews and failure to hit.
• ESG goals and track risk/fraud Lack of procurement team bandwidth to focus on generating satisfying user experiences.

There’s a better way to run procurement. Keep reading to learn how ServiceNow Source-to-Pay Operations can bring together all the parties—from external vendors to internal procurement, receiving, and accounts payable—into a cohesive, automated workflow experience.

Simplifying the Source-to-Pay Process

Procurement is often an either/or exercise—swinging between competing modes. Do you control costs or increase supplier quality and deliver a more innovative, satisfying employee experience? What if you could say yes to all of these?

Too many digital transformation projects require you to replace existing systems. This introduces greater cost, risk, and time—but without a clear path to better outcomes or experiences.

Source-to-Pay Operations programs free up staff time through the automated execution of underlying transactions, all while creating a unified experience for workers, and providing an extensible platform to easily drive the latest innovations for your business.

With ServiceNow, you can say yes to it all: reducing costs, working with premium-level suppliers, and elevating employee experiences.

Streamlined Procurement Takes Off at a Leading Aerospace Manufacturer

But what does that look like in the real world? A global aerospace company that had experienced severe budget cuts and workforce reductions in recent years was struggling to deliver airplanes fast enough. Its supplier interactions were spread across myriad portals and required a high degree of manual processing.

Accounts payable, for example, took days to dig through Excel sheet links and the SAP contracts maze to resolve supplier payment issues. With ServiceNow, the company established a standard supplier workflow solution to reduce stock-outs and gain higher parts availability.

Just some of the improved KPIs include:

• 300% increase in ROI using a global-standard supplier workflow platform
• $50M anticipated savings over 5 years
• 50% cost reduction by rationalizing in-scope legacy systems
• 10% reduction in compliance penalties.

At the same time, the company is protecting both supplier and internal proprietary data and, critically, is now in compliance with export requirements.

Download the Full Four Steps to Removing Friction from your Source-to-Pay Process.

Read the full eBook and learn how it can help you handle more requests with fewer resources while better managing spend, reducing risk, and sourcing from more sustainable suppliers—creating an exceptional experience for all.