Procure-to-pay analytics draws meaningful insights and identifies risks, inefficiencies, and opportunities to streamline or optimize P2P workflows for better, more data-driven business decisions.
The procure-to-pay process is a complex series of workflows that spans various systems, departments, and operational business units. Because of this complexity, it can also be prone to errors, risks, and costly inefficiencies.
It’s critical to keep track of key P2P insights in order to mitigate these issues, highlight trends, monitor spending, and cultivate a more streamlined procure-to-pay process. Check out how teams can tap into procure-to-pay analytics to achieve this.
What is procure-to-pay (P2P) analytics?
Analytics is the analysis of data through the process of organizing, interpreting, discovering, and sharing patterns, trends, or insights.
Procure-to-pay analytics is essentially this but with an added, more specific focus on procure-to-pay data. This analysis identifies risks, inefficiencies, and opportunities to streamline or optimize P2P workflows. It’s also a great source for making better, more data-driven business decisions.
Why is P2P analytics important?
P2P analytics is important because it offers a layer of visibility and transparency to data across the entire procure-to-pay cycle. This analysis draws meaningful insights, measures process performance, and provides a clear picture of company spend management.
With access to spend data and supplier metrics, procurement and finance teams gain control over financial operations and become more informed and efficient decision makers.
Examples of analytics applied in P2P
There are many procure-to-pay metrics and KPIs that can be measured and analyzed, but here are just a few examples of common P2P analytics.
Spend analysis
Spend analysis is a robust and comprehensive analysis process that reviews historical and current spend data. This process gathers spending data from all sources, cleans, classifies, and analyzes the total spend history to determine how and where money is spent. The result is a better understanding of whether the business is getting the most value from suppliers/vendors or whether it’s time to consider new sourcing opportunities.
Cost breakdown analysis
A cost breakdown analysis — also known as a should-cost analysis — is the process of determining and considering the factors or elements that influence the cost of a product or service. To conduct a cost breakdown analysis, four steps are necessary:
- Data collection.
- Identifying cost elements.
- Determining cost drivers.
- Developing insights.
This is a popular cost reduction strategy because of the breakdown of direct and indirect costs incurred for a product or service. Insights gathered during the analysis process improve sourcing and buying power because teams are equipped with pricing estimates that can be leveraged during negotiations or proposals.
Supplier performance analysis
A supplier performance analysis is the process of measuring and monitoring supplier performance. Whether it’s performed monthly, quarterly, or annually, this is a necessary process because it’s an opportunity to improve supplier relationships and clearly communicate needs and expectations.
Things to consider when performing a supplier performance analysis are:
- Supplier financial stability
- Product or service quality
- Average lead time
- Flexibility or ability to respond to ad hoc requests
- Delivery performance
- Pricing and pricing changes
- Risks
Gain more control of your P2P analytics with Pipefy
According to a recent Pipefy survey of business leaders, almost 50% of business leaders report existing tech stacks of 101-500 components. That’s a lot of data streams to manage — and even more so with process gaps, data silos, or breakdowns in communication. Even in the smallest form, these issues can lead to errors that harm the reporting reliability.
In order for P2P analytics to be useful, the source of the analytics needs to be accurate. Accurate data derives from organized and seamless system integration ensuring that data and information flows are reflected truthfully and updated with real-time reporting.
With a solution that makes sense of complex tech stacks, unintegrated workflows, and siloed systems, gaining visibility and control of the complete procure-to-pay process is made possible — and so is tapping into cost savings.
Pipefy offers built-in dashboards and reporting capabilities to keep track of key procure-to-pay data in a visual and interactive way. Its no-code and user-friendly interface means no technical knowledge is required to build, customize, and deploy workflow optimizations and process dashboards. Pipefy’s artificial intelligence capabilities give teams the means to access critical data when they need it — all they have to do is ask.
And with hundreds of compatible integrations available, tech stack consolidation and data centralization rapidly fall into place. The results? Lower costs. Less chance of errors. Greater operational efficiency. More reliable, agile, and strategic decision-making.
