Achieving Significant Savings in Procure-to-Pay at a Technology Company

Achieving Significant Savings in Procure-to-Pay

at a Technology Company

Summary

Cost reduction of over $8M in Procure-to-Pay processes for the global technology company in less than one year.

Organization Background

The technology company set-up a new business process management (BPM) department in an effort to support its enterprise-wide transformation initiatives. The key goals were reduction of cost and cycle time for target initiatives which included procure-to-pay, supply-chain planning and customer order management. Procure-to-pay was the first target initiative for the new BPM unit.

Business Challenges and Opportunities

The technology company is a complex organization, with multiple locations, in various regions with countless business units and departments. Due to the complexity, enterprise-wide business transformation was already launched with limited movement. So, it was later decided to set up the new BPM unit to speed up progress and ultimately drive the transformations.

The new process transformation unit needed to show fast impact while building sustainable process management capabilities. The BPM capabilities would then need to be rolled-out enterprise-wide.

To effectively accelerate the process improvement for the various initiatives, new digital process tools were leveraged to connect stakeholders and project teams across different business units in different locations and countries.

Solution

A pragmatic approach was applied for the analysis of the existing processes and design of the to-be process which reflected the identified improvement, process standardization and automation opportunities. BPM strategy and capabilities were developed in parallel to enable effective knowledge transfer and sustainability.

Process Improvement

Fast and pragmatic work with process models to identify improvement opportunities and related actions in including procure-to-pay.

Business Process Repository Set-up

and Incremental Roll-out: Set up a business process repository (Signavio) — Create the repository content in a re-usable format for the different improvement projects to provide immediate value and transparency across project teams.

Systematic Knowledge Transfer

Systematic knowledge transfer and educational activities with face-to-face trainings combined with E-Learning components to facilitate and expedite enterprise-wide roll out.

Process Governance Organization

Define and implement simple process governance organization — collaboration model, roles and responsibilities, governance processes, and the integration of process and data governance.

BPM Playbook

Develop a practical BPM Playbook to sustain the BPM capabilities — key topics include methods and guidelines, repository management, governance, the approach to projects, the value realization, the process intelligence, and intelligent process automation.

Results

Significant improvements of key processes — includes cost reduction of over $8M, major time savings and improved supplier experience.
Fully functional digital process repository, structured strategically to reflect the organization’s key business capabilities.
Successfully train and enable key resources in core BPM team, as well as in business units in process management methods and tools so that they can take over those activities on an ongoing basis for the enterprise transformation initiates.
Operating model for the process management discipline is in place and guided through the BPM playbook — this creates a sustainable ongoing business process management capability that enables the enterprise-wide transformation.
Streamline process activities and minimized and define KPIs for continuous improvement.