On Tuesday 16th April, Documation sponsored an Ask me Anything P2P Lab, and opened the session with Q&As. Nick White, our Solutions expert, and our guest Paul Bryanhill, former Financial Operations VP for NBC Universal, held the floor with questions from the audience on everything from getting the wider business to support your NoPO NoPay policy to dealing with project fatigue when implementation is over 2 years and the benefits are slow to appear.
The small group of attendees ranged from Finance Managers to CFOs, working for both large and medium sized organisations. Interestingly, the pain points, processes and challenges were relevant across the group irrelevant of business size or industry.
Following a lively Q&A we moved on to a 3 group session. Asking 2 questions per group we discussed everything from benefits of a P2P automation to adopting technology and delivering against the ESG agenda.
The over-riding theme that came out through all 3 discussion groups was that the technology was important but the people more so. Understanding the needs of the team, the wider business, board members and stakeholders can make or break P2P processes and making sure you work with a partner takes time to understand nuances of the organisation is key.
There were loads of interesting points that came out of the talks , a couple highlighted below:
‘Not having a purchase order doesn’t mean you can’t automate’
There is often a presumption that a purchase order (and GRN for 3 way matching) are required for straight through processing and automation. Any exceptions to this require manual handling. The ability to code and set rules for automatic coding and posting and with developments in Ai and machine learning mean that invoices that cannot have a PO raised, (such as utility bills) can still be automated.
Another interesting topic was around project implementation.
How do you ensure ALL the stakeholders goals are being met?
IT often run away with the project and mark it as complete when the goals and objectives set by the finance team are not quite met. Input to this conversation centred around choosing an implementation partner that works with all teams across the business, and having a nominated ‘voice’ in the project team from each of the teams to ensure all the goals and objectives are delivered.
Overall it was a great morning, with a fab breakfast provided by the team at The Brewery. Thanks to all the attendees for making it such an informative interactive session and to the PPN for hosting the event.
