Can Platform consensus make Finance, Procurement play better with IT?
All three departments work for the same organization, and their strategies are aligned along with the same goal: Cutting costs and increasing savings. Yet, all departments walk alone when they should be partners. Can you guess who we are talking about? Yes, you got it right, we’re talking about the ‘Procurement’ and ‘Finance’ and ‘IT’ department.
Traditionally, the CFO worries about the money, the CPO worries about the spend and savings, and the CIO worries about technology.
Now, technology makes these interests overlap — in good ways and bad.
So how can the right platform help bridge the gap between Procurement, IT, and Finance?
If the IT department can’t tame all of the processes across a company, it can start by choosing a platform that can meet its needs — as well as address the extended functionality requirements of those in other departments across the company.
In other words, if the whole company can get behind the selection of a single platform, it can extend its future technology requirements out from a common foundation — while reaping the benefits of accessing function-specific tools like those for source-to-pay.
Benefits of a Common Platform
Platforms that are purpose-built for serving the whole enterprise can ensure functionality for -
Introducing Aavenir as a Source to Pay Solution
Organizations need automation to improve performance in accounts payable, contract management, and sourcing. Having those solutions on a single platform that already has the blessing of IT means that users can realize faster returns on investment and can focus on the work — not on persuading IT to approve a bunch of different solutions.
With Aavenir, a provider of source-to-pay solutions built natively for one platform helps to reap the benefit of standardization for finance and procurement which also extends to IT. All these departments can easily accept updates instead of having separate processes for outside modules that may have been tacked on for specialty areas like AP automation or contract lifecycle management (CLM).
Procurement, Platforms in Action
Reece Group, Australia’s largest plumbing and bathroom fixture supplier, uses Aavenir’s Contractflow solution for centralized contract storage and streamlined approvals. Since contracts exist across all departments, many stakeholders need a tool that works for them, not just for IT.
Reece handles a variety of contracts, including procurement, sales, and other commercial contracts. Most of Reece’s contracts are third-party papers. As a result, contracts were increasingly hard to manage, and they had to spend significant time reviewing the contractual terms and amendments. With the higher contract volume, Reece’s team started facing difficulty accessing contracts because there was no systematic way of storing them. Contract managers had to spend a great effort in monitoring contract status, so they needed a solution that could provide complete visibility into the contracts and their lifecycle stage.
“It’s very difficult to make edits or manage approvals when you have a huge variety of contracts, in different formats, on different platforms,” said Alison Prior, Procurement Contract Manager at Reece.
With all these points in mind, you need to actually have the right folks that you talk to and have them on board as well as you need to understand the challenges of the current departments and how the new solution would help your company out.
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