Key Steps for CFOS to Ensure a Successful Procurement Process

If you are a controller or a CFO thinking about rolling out a procure to pay technology and worried that it's not going to be a success, do these two things. One is the stakeholder buy in. And so what I mean by stakeholder buy in is when you think about like implementing a new tool or changing any process, right? There are other people who are getting impacted by it. Mostly it's operations. So like how does it impact them? And having just a conversation in the beginning to understand, okay, Sally, I'm planning to do this, here's why and here is the outcome. Here is how it's going to impact your operations, here are the benefits you're going to get and here is where I need your help. Right? So it's just basically talking through socializing the concept, but also getting an understanding on what roadblocks you're going to see before you even start talking about, you know, let me get you into a demo so you can see what kind of, you know, solutions are out there. Right? So definitely doing that. Second step is having a definition of what success looks like, right? Because each department might have their own success criteria, right? So what I mean by that, so if you think about an accounting manager, their success criteria might be, I want to spend less time approving the DAM invoices, so make sure they get matched automatically so I don't have to look at them. I can spend my time analyzing or managing my cash flow. Now you think from an employee standpoint you might come up with a process, right? Which is great for AP or accounts Payable team, but from a, an end user perspective, it's a nightmare. You got a form, I got to fill this up in this electronic form, you know, fill 20 fields because accounting needs it, right? So what is the value for me, I'm going to hate that process. So having that conversation in terms of what success looks like and making sure you have taken all your stakeholders into this discussion helps you to kind of define your requirements well and said, okay, we want something which is very strong with the matching process, but maybe I don't want an over complicated requisition process. So the tool we pick up should make it simpler for our end users to create requisition, right? So if you think about these things, it avoids surprises and you, you know, you don't want to be the most hated person in the company. And it's easy to become that when you implement the technology because guess what? People could do whatever they wanted to do before. Now you have controls and nobody like control so you got to do it in a way that, you know, one is you are getting their opinion before you start doing it and defining the success criteria together.