Integrating a Digital Product Catalogue with Your Procure-to-Pay (P2P) Suite

Procure-to-Pay (P2P)

Increasingly, companies are seeing procurement as a service that can benefit from digitalisation and the number of active P2P suites is expanding as forward-looking companies within Thailand and across ASEAN are using automation and innovation to control spending and improve collaboration with their suppliers. By using a P2P suite, purchasing and procurement professionals can benefit from many procurement services such as budget control, transaction management, invoice and contract management; bundling their suppliers into a single P2P suite or platform, with payment services, price benchmarks and reporting readily available. This creates a single connected environment, in which the applications can share common data leading to visibility, cost and control efficiencies. A P2P solution is different from a Source-to-Pay or Source to Contract (S2C) solution in that P2P enables a cross-functional workflow to streamline and improve the company’s process from the act of requisition to accounts payable. Whereas a S2C solution takes this much further, by including the process of sourcing the products or services which need to be purchased.

The Typical P2P Cycle

Through the typical P2P cycle, a purchase requisition is routed for approval through a predefined rule-based workflow. Once approved, the requisition will be converted into one or more purchase orders (POs). The POs are transmitted to the supplier(s) by email, electronic data interchange (EDI) or XML integration. The final step in the workflow is the receipt, followed by the goods or service. The part of the P2P suite which involves companies like Lyreco, involves creating a series of digital or e-catalogues containing a range of products or services from regular suppliers.

Requistions

Catalogue Content Management

Purchase Orders

This digital catalogue of products or services can be either static (hosted) or punch-out (also known as dynamic) based on the requirements of the company. Some of the differences between the two digital catalogue options are explained on the next page.

Ordering

P2P

RFQs / Quotations

Sourcing

Receiving Invoice / Payment

Analysis

Supplier Management

Reporting

Supplier Performance