Purchase to Pay

Purchase to Pay is crucial to making promised savings a reality. A great promised saving for a particular procurement category is worthless if you can't prevent people in your organization going off piste when it comes to purchasing. And a great supplier relationship will be ruined if your finance function pays late. ImageBecause you're reading this - you probably already know all about P2P. But do you really know what P2P is? Because depending on whether you see it from a finance point of view or a purchasing point of view you could have a very distorted view of what getting P2P right is all about. It's a bit like a police investigation. Three different witnesses to a crime can give three entirely different accounts of an incident - so much so that the police could be forgiven for thinking that there was three separate incidents. The witnesses are not stupid and they're not lying - they simply have different points of view. And its the same with P2P.

At a recent Purchase to Pay conference in Amsterdam, representatives from a wide range of industries got together to compare notes - warts and all - on their P2P programmes It is really interesting when a diverse group of Purchase to Pay professionals from different organizations get together to compare notes. Despite working in isolation, there is a great deal in common in terms of the challenges faced and the approaches adopted to overcome those challenges. But there's also a healthy variation in approach and below is a short list of some of the best takeaways from the conference.