“Visibility without value is vanity” – Bernard Kelvin Clive
It’s simple. To do things, you need to be able to see them. This is true for every enterprise regardless of its size and industry.
Let me share one of my observations!
I often come across business leaders who are confident of their streamlined processes, the operational cycle that requires minimal downtime, the quality control team which ensures that their products are up to the set standards. In simple words – they are well-placed in the business world. Hang on, this is what they think without identifying and realizing the gaps in the end-to-end processes.
The decision-makers must understand that despite having streamlined operations, the key lies in looking at processes holistically to avoid any kind of disconnect.
Unveiling Various Aspects
- Comprehensive Dashboard: Think of your procurement operations, if it is a global enterprise, how do you wish to track each stage of your procurement process?
The solution can be a dashboard that can report and monitor your complete enterprise spend in real-time while notifying the right stakeholders. - Spend Management: From an enterprise perspective, is the shared service center (SSC) or global in-house center (GIC) taking charge of your procurement process? Does this department control your procurements across multiple entities, countries, currencies and legal regulations? Let’s investigate the spend management module in your enterprise today.
•Do you have visibility into the overall enterprise spend?
• Is there an alignment between your enterprise spend and the estimated budget?
• Are you able to leverage your existing IT platform to capture business requirements?
• Have you been able to identify risks related to supplier relationships and have you defined ways to mitigate those risks?
Remember, an enterprise’s budgeting and forecasting trends are deeply connected with the procurement operations. Spend management investigates the cash outflow of an enterprise. However, ‘maverick spending’ a.k.a ‘rogue spending’ is where most of the enterprise’s deviation from the budget forecast comes into the scene. Maverick spending is the purchase that’s made outside of agreed contracts. And, there’s deviation because most of the purchase is done outside the system and the associated costs are mostly accounted under contingencies. These costs are very much unmanaged and non-compliant to standard operating procedures (SOPs) and could have various legal consequences.
- The Priority of Transactions: Also, your procurement professionals are highly focused on the high-value transactions, thus they tend to leave the low-value transactions to the respective departments. This, in turn, would have an impact on the financial position of the enterprise.
The Solution
To avoid the issues that might impact your procurement operations in terms of the siloed application landscape and rogue spending, you must leverage a digital automation platform that can monitor your costs and facilitate you with a comprehensive dashboard for end-to-end process visibility . Furthermore, the platform allows enterprises to focus on evolving business requirements and changing regulatory compliance. This digital automation platform, with low code capability, also helps in automating simple departmental functions to complex enterprise-wide solutions, enabling business speed and agility.
Choosing the right platform is key to bridge organizational silos for achieving better process visibility and delivering superior customer experience.
