E-Procurement Implementation Will Save UK Company £100,000 Per Year
With Europe’s financial crisis making news headlines nearly every day and the UK working to deal with its own economic issues, most organizations across the pond are proving reluctant to invest in new technology. It’s something of a Catch-22: technology is available to help streamline processes and reduce costs for these businesses in areas such as work order management, e-procurement, inventory management and more, but to gain the benefits, there must be an investment into those services. Growing availability of the less expensive cloud computing alternative (vs. on-premise deployment) is making this an increasingly viable option even in an uncertain economy, enough so that some companies are taking the risk and reaping the benefits.
Supply Chain Digital recently reported on the successful implementation of a purchase-to-pay system by The Russell Group, a UK-based logistics firm, which curtailed the typical issues involved in a paper-based purchasing system, such as lost invoices, approval delays, lack of visibility and strained supplier relations. Following the success of their purchase-to-pay system, The Russell Group is proceeding with the deployment of an e-procurement solution, which will save in excess of £100,000 per year.
When questioned about the reasoning behind the projects by SCD, Ronnie Johnstone, Group ICT Manager for The Russell Group stated, “Previously it took approximately four weeks from distributing an invoice to the relevant person to manually authorise it and then return the approved invoice to the finance department to process. As the organisation grew this became extremely inefficient as we used to spend inordinate amounts of time chasing people for approval.”
The benefits of automated purchase-to-pay and invoice management software are well-established at this point, with businesses across the world increasingly viewing such solutions as vital to their future growth and operations. While paper will continue to have its place in business for the near future, it has become more of a liability than an asset. There’s a reason why we don’t use an abacus for accounting: it’s dated, inefficient and prone to human error; 30 years from now, we’ll probably look back on paper-based business processes as ancient history as well.
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