After large groups, mid-sized companies (ETIs) and large SMEs are in turn discovering the advantages of specialized solutions for optimize their purchases, procurement and, downstream, supplier accounting. For most of them, digitalization is still often limited to sending orders via e-mail or processing invoices and payments (Procure-to-pay, P2P) with their ERP or management package. Due to a lack of time or resources, upstream operations ranging from supplier identification to consultation-contracting (Source-to-contract, S2C), and even more so the management of the function (expenditure analysis, purchasing performance, suppliers risk and performance), are usually abandoned, or managed summarily using conventional office software.
Facing new demands
When the company reaches a critical size and stakeholders (end-users, prescribers, buyers, suppliers, accountants, management controllers, suppliers, etc.) multiply, or when the general management strengthens its requirements in terms of purchasing and financial performance and associated reporting, the opportunity or even the need to have a Dedicated digital solution Appear.
"There are frequently heterogeneous purchasing practices and insufficiently known expense management rules deployed to operational teams", Explains Bertrand Gabriel, Director of Acxias in charge of development.
According to him, "this gives rise to numerous exceptions and manual interventions of purchases or finance, as well as a relatively large volume of "wild" purchases made out of the framework, from unre referenced and unorthred suppliers, leading to litigation, complaints from suppliers for late payment, etc." and, overall, to a lower purchasing and financial performance.
A response to optimize purchases
The problems encountered on the ground and the benefits to be expected from a digitalisation project explain why the 150,000 companies that make up the mid-market in France, in particular the 5,000 ETIs (intermediate-sized enterprises, 250 and 4,999 employees and less than 1.5 billion euros in turnover) and the largest SMEs, are increasingly numerous to the largest structure their purchases and look for the best solution to optimize its operation and performance, particularly in terms of the income statement.
"This type of solution frees you from value-added tasks and concentrates resources on more productive tasks, ensuring more efficient purchasing," says Samuel Besnard, Logistics and Procurement Manager at Saint-Gobain WFP, a subsidiary of the materials production, processing and distribution group, which uses SAP Ariba, which is being deployed with the support of Acxias as part of a modernization plan planned until 2021.
Implementation of the same solution Burger King Quick Services procure-to-pay, with a start-up in mid-2019, "allowed us to improve the ordering process, with a reduction in wild shopping and paper documents exchanged," says Laurence Nouyer, head of the central systems and ERP division at the company's information systems department.
Full article from The Watch Digital Purchasing : "A new digital era is opening up for ETI purchases"