Procure to Pay Networks

Value Propositions

Procure to Pay Networks offer clear value propositions associated with the buying and selling of goods and services:

• Eliminate paper
• Automate PO, Invoice, Payment and other document exchange between buyers and suppliers
• Automate workflow

It’s a simple, yet compelling offering.  Procure to Pay Networks exist for indirect goods, physical supply chains, services, specific industries, cross-border transactions, and even risk management functions.

Strategic Issues

For Procure to Pay Network clients, I often end up addressing one, or more, common issues:

On-boarding

Success in procure-to-pay, or any type of supply chain automation depends on enabling buyers and suppliers of all sizes to collaborate on a wide variety of business processes. Product design, pricing, marketing, customer support, standards-setting are all involved in making sure this collaboration happens.

Pricing

Procure to pay clients often have several pricing issues. They may have started with a procure to pay tool and added a network later (like Ariba). Now they are struggling with how to price the network. Or they may be seeking help on which side of the network to charge, how much, in what form, and how to implement billing procedures. I have successfully implemented new pricing models for several clients.

Application versus Platform

Some clients started with an application and added a network, some started with a network, or platform, and added applications. In both cases, clients need to consider which applications to build themselves and which to cede to their ecosystem. For example, Microsoft added Office to its Windows platform, but let the ecosystem build many other applications.