Procure-to-Pay (P2P) Process Lean Agile Transformation

Transformed the Procure-to-Pay Process for a global Facilities Management Company to improve consistency and accuracy of data and reduce errors to improve the process cycle time, applying Lean-Agile Project Management.

How we helped...

We were commissioned to help a global Facilities Management company with transforming their Procure-to-Pay (P2P) Process due to high volumes of queries and errors, significant inefficiencies and inconsistencies in their processes, and poor data quality leading to lack of Management Information. The consequences of these issues not only impacted their internal operations, but also their entire supply chain. There was recognition within the business that people were operating varying processes and adopting poor practices. There was a lack of clear and specific instruction to determine what best practice was and this resulted in confusion across the business on ‘the right way’ to operate. The P2P team suffered from a significant volume of queries, disputes and errors which consumed all of their time, leading to long waiting times, high inventory and poor productivity. There was also no single report detailing financial performance for the business as the data existed in several places and there were no standard internal KPI’s in place to evaluate performance.

We carried out an end-to-end review of the P2P Process from an end-user perspective, from raising a requisition, to an invoice being paid and to a query being managed. This required analysis of the “as is” process; and due to COVID-19 restrictions, this was conducted online through virtual process mapping workshops with a number of different teams and roles throughout the business. We identified the waste and variation within the process and analysed the data including volumes of disputes and time to resolve queries.

CI Projects supported with the implementation of tactical fixes using a Lean-Agile approach. We identified best practices and developed a company-wide e-learning programme across two finance platforms used within the business to educated users on how to raise a requisition in a number of different purchasing scenarios and how to receipt in the correct manner. The e-learning was rolled out to hundreds of end-users.

In-parallel to this, we worked with Central Finance Support Functions to streamline their processes and developed clear guidelines around how to manage queries and disputes in a way that provides value-adding updates to the customer and enables quicker resolution. We worked closely with the data team to develop a standard list of KPI’s which would then be developed into a dashboard so that there was a single view of the financial performance for the business detailing measures including volume of invoices in dispute, time to resolve queries, and time to pay an invoice from the point of invoice being received.

Throughout the project, whilst engaging with different teams across the business, we continued to identify strategic improvements that could be made to the end-to-end process so that once the initial tactical phase was complete, there was already an understanding of the work requirements for the following phase.

The benefits of this project included:

  • Business-wide understanding and education of best practice, reducing the amount of variation within the process and improving efficiency
  • Fewer invoices being disputed
  • Faster query resolution time and clearer communication regarding queries
  • Reduced re-work and duplication due to Purchase Orders and invoices being managed correctly right-first-time
  • More tools and training easily available to the business to enable sustainable change

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