We live in a world with a whole lot of options. While you might feel like you have a lot of options at Safeway while the sandwich artist puts your sandwich together for you, as a business owner you actually have a whole lot of choices to make on a daily basis. For example, is Coupa implementation worth your time?
Also, what could a P2P consultant do for your business? There are a lot of companies that are looking to take money from your company in exchange for whatever services they offer, and it can be hard to determine which ones are really good and which ones are just people trying to make money.
It doesn’t make it any easier that even in fields that can actually help your company there are still people that care only for their pockets and not the results of their work. So, ideally, what kind of efforts could you expect from a P2P consultant?
We’ve gone ahead and done some digging on this topic so that you don’t have to! Let’s go ahead and dive right into the wonderful world of P2P consulting and how it can help your business in both the long and short term.
Briefly Exploring P2P
You hear a lot of words when you do business. Some of them are new, some of them are old, but regardless of that, it can be more than a little difficult to make sure that you know and understand what all of the words you hear while you’re doing business are.
Procure-to-pay, or P2P for short, is a process used to streamline the process of procuring goods. It aims to streamline every part of the process, from finding suppliers to making payments, by putting it all in one place.
Most of the time when you hear someone talking about P2P they’re really talking about a P2P software that can be used to further streamline the process as much as possible. The software does make all of this a lot easier than trying to do it manually.
That’s just kind of true of software in general if you really think about it. Technology has made doing business a lot easier. Imagine having to go back to doing paper financial records without being able to use any sort of spreadsheets.
Of course, it’s entirely doable. You could easily do it with paper, a pencil, and a calculator. The biggest issue here is that it’s incredibly inefficient to do your financial records this way, and even with a calculator, you have a much higher chance of making a mistake.
This is just one example of how software can make your life easier, but it can be hard to see how much easier it makes our lives until it comes time to think about what life would be like if we had to go back to doing things manually. The same can be said about P2P software.
The increased efficiency also happens to save you money. Employee time costs money, and every minute that an employee spends doing something inefficiently adds up over time and that can cost you a lot. Even 10 minutes a day comes out to over a full week of work a year wasted doing things inefficiently.
If you have a whole department doing things inefficiently it adds up even more quickly. A team of 10 people taking an extra 10 minutes per task comes out to 500 hours spent doing things the hard way a year. That’s over 12 weeks out of the 52 of the year that you’d be paying to do things inefficiently.
What’s the Deal with P2P Consultants?
Companies the world over get consultants when their companies need help with certain things. Marketing, I.T., construction, design, accounting, the list goes on. If there’s something your company could feasibly need help with, there’s a consultant out there willing to help. For a fee, of course.
P2P processes are not an exception to this, and you can easily get someone with professional experience that would be willing to lend your company their outside perspective on how you handle these kinds of things, which can be wonderful.
P2P consultants do a lot of things, and what any particular consultant will do can vary. Typically, you can at least expect your consultant to:
- Look over your current P2P processes to help find inefficiencies.
- Help you decide if you should be looking for new supplies to save money.
- Recommend good P2P software.
- Figure out a good strategy to maximize efficiencies in your processes
Some consultants will do more, but any consultant that’s worth their salt won’t be doing any less than that. Some consultants will go above and beyond and even help you find new suppliers to work with and will get really hands-on when working with you.
Most consultants will do a lot for your company, but what they’re willing to do really depends on your contract and budget. They say that you get what you pay for, and that couldn’t be more true when it comes to consultants.
If you feel like you need help with your P2P process, you should probably reach out to a consultant. It might mean that you have to change how things work in your company, but over time it will be worth it when you see your return on investment increase before your eyes.
What is Coupa?
We touched on Coupa briefly in the introduction of this article and never really explained what it was that we were talking about, so we figured it might be a good idea to try and make sure that we all understand what Coupa is before we close out this article.
Coupa is an SaaS, software as a service, platform that leads the entire industry. This program is able to help your company out with making your procurement process as efficient as possible. It can also help you optimize your company’s spending and make a whole lot of things a lot easier.
From that information, you could extrapolate that Coupa is an incredibly powerful piece of software that could potentially help your company a lot, and that would be a correct assessment. Thousands of companies already use Coupa to help optimize a lot of things in their business.
There is one little caveat to this though. Coupa is a tool, 必利勁 and tools only work as well as you use them. If you use a hammer incorrectly you’re not going to get anything built, and if you use a screwdriver incorrectly you’re going to strip any screws that you want to work with.
Coupa will only work as well as you set it up to work. It is just a computer program, after all, it won’t be able to do anything that you don’t tell it to. If you have a broken system that is nothing but inefficient, Coupa will just reflect those inefficiencies.
That being said, if the system that you have in place is solid, Coupa will make it even more efficient and can save you both a lot of time and money throughout your entire procurement process, and nobody’s ever made about saving time and money on something you need to do anyway.
What are the Best Practices Moving Forward?
If you came to this article looking for advice, well, we have good news and bad news. We won’t be able to fix your company’s problems, unfortunately, this article is just for the purpose of educating those that want to learn about this topic.
That being said, we can make some recommendations to help you get on the right path to get your company running like the well-oiled machine that we both know it can run like. So, what is our biggest piece of advice for people looking to get their S2P process running better?
Hire a consultant. Their outside perspective can add a new layer to the way that your company operates on a daily basis in the best possible kind of way. They’ll be able to provide you with veteran advice and get your company getting higher profits than ever before.
Of course, we can’t guarantee these kinds of results. It really depends on the consultant and what condition your company is in before you call them. That being said, there are definitely some consultants out there that can work wonders with their strategies.
Getting Ahead of the Curve
If you run a business, you’re probably always on the lookout for ways to make things run more smoothly. Whether it’s something simple like the way that your employees unpack boxes or even the way that your company handles the S2P process.
There are all sorts of people out there that can help get your company into ship shape. Whether you just need help with the final tweaks or you need help rebuilding from the ground up, someone is out there willing to lend a helping hand to your company so you can meet your goals.
