The Playback Podcast #2 | Debunking Source-to-Pay

So where to start? So Source2Pay.

is, I think you'd agree with this, Sergio, Source2Pay is a bit of a beast in service now.

So the best way to do this is to probably break it up into chunks.

Because if you just see the features and the products that are included as part of the Source2Pay licensing, it's just going to blow people's brains that I think that's where a lot of people are at.

So So source to pay is broken down into three core products.

They used to be sold separately.

It was a pro and a con at the same time, I think, at the time.

So it's come a long way in the last two or three years.

So you have three separate products.

You've got sourcing and procurement operations, you've got accounts payable operations, and then you've also got supplier lifecycle operations.

So to really, really keep it simple, Sourcing procurement operations is the start of your purchasing journey as an organisation.

And we'll go into some of the things that you need to think about and is helpful to think about as part of this.

But basically, if you as an employee need to contact procurement because you want to either buy something that you've already bought before or you have got an idea, you've gone out to a trade show and you've seen that you want to buy some licences for something, and you want to get permission from procurement, so your sourcing and procurement teams to actually go ahead and buy that, this is the start of the journey.

So yeah, we'll go into a little bit more detail shortly, but effectively it's that intake process to contact sourcing and procurement and then Once you've gone through approvals and back and forth interactions, there's another caveat to the end of this, but that's when you can then get permission to go and contact the supplier.

You've got a purchase order and then you can start that purchase.

And next, I suppose I'll talk about accounts payable operations.

So again, that journey, if you think about it, so you've gone out to a supplier, you have got permission and got a purchase order.

they're going to provide those goods or those services to you.

So once you've received them, which also fits into the sourcing and procurement operations, you need to pay for it.

So at the moment, there's a lot of accounts payable teams who are just flooded with emails and PDF invoices and all sorts of stuff to get those paid.

So Accounts Payable Operations allows you to take in those invoices and then there's some really cool kind of document intelligence, OCR technology that is used to extract that information.

You match it up to the purchase orders and then you can get the permission to then pay the supplier for what they've done.

And then the final piece is around supplier lifecycle operations.

So this could probably go a little bit earlier in that narrative, but supplier lifecycle operations kind of does what it says on the tin.

You have a range of different suppliers that you interact with, and people on this call have probably been on both sides of the fence.