Thursday 6th March, 2014

ITESOFT and Mazars have once again collaborated to deliver the 5th edition of the annual “Purchase-to-Pay Automation” survey, in partnership with Accounts Payable News, Shared Services Link and Fujitsu. The European-wide survey aims to identify emerging industry trends and the key factors for a successful Purchase-to-Pay (P2P) process, comparing different P2P practices across UK, Belgium, France, Germany and Switzerland.

P2P automation is an ever-growing practice within AP departments, something that was confirmed by 75.5% of all survey respondents who reported that they have implemented one or more solutions for their AP processes - a 15% increase from 2012.

The rate of growth for P2P projects is consistent across all countries, with 58% of respondents reportedly having a P2P project for their AP process. Given the already high implementation rate, these projects often involve the addition of new applications (e.g. the collaborative supplier portal) or new roll-outs.

 Financial and Accounting departments need “flexible” solutions that are capable of adapting to frequent organisational and IT changes. 43.5% of respondents say that the reorganisation of their accounts payable department is “likely” or “being considered”. At the same time, the accounting IT system is heterogeneous (15% of companies are multi-ERP) and can change quickly; 29% of respondents indicate they have changed at least once during the past three years.

In fact flexibility i.e. “multi-ERP integration” and the “business-line management tool” are reported as the two new key principles when choosing a P2P solution. On average, 82% of respondents maintain that it is ‘fairly’ or ‘very’ important to choose a platform that is capable of carrying out multiple, diverse applications as well as adapting to fast organisational changes. And 84% of respondents also choose according to the capacity of the P2P solution to automatically generate management indicators to monitor the whole chain, regardless of the existing or future IT systems and organisational methods.

And nearly 25% of organisations in the UK have implemented a supplier portal, compared to just 14.5% in France. This emerging practice is expected to gradually grow, with 17.6% of projects reported for France, 27% for the UK and almost 19.3% on average for the all countries covered by the study.

To improve flexibility and responsiveness, and keep in line with “DAF 3.0”, 30% of Finance and Accounting departments are already using smartphones and tablets to authorise management of the business line in real time. In 23% of cases they use them to consult documents and 19% for their collaborative process (validating a procurement request or an invoice).

The full results of the 2014 ‘Purchase-to-Pay Automation’ Finance Survey are available for download here