Today's procurement leaders—under pressure to drive efficiency, productivity, and cost control—continue to grapple with many challenges, from ongoing economic and geopolitical disruptions to supplier threats, rising costs, and compliance risks. All this is on top of their core responsibilities, such as setting procurement strategy, building strong supplier relationships, and ensuring a continuous supply of goods and services for the business.
Cutting procurement costs as you drive efficiency and process improvements
With this, the only constant is change, and strategic investments in digitalization and process automation are the way forward. After all, a lack of a comprehensive view across disparate systems can make it challenging to discover improvement opportunities or anticipate and head off problems. While manual workarounds reduce operational efficiency and increase costs, such as supplier reliability issues, compliance failures, long lead times, and long procurement cycles.
According to a recent Economist Impact study, 57% of the C-suite say digitalization is the top strategic priority for their procurement function over the next 12 to 18 months. With that, chief procurement officers typically report they want to focus on enabling process visibility and workflow optimization, boosting compliance by automating checks, and maximizing supplier relationships—for example, by using intelligent supplier management systems.
57% of the C-suite say digitalization is the top strategic priority for their procurement function over the next 12 to 18 months.
Opportunities for improvement
The big question is, what specifically needs to change, where, and how for cutting procurement costs as you drive efficiency and process improvements? Without the right solutions, answering these questions isn't easy. Many procurement leaders lack visibility across their processes and across systems, so it can be difficult to know where to focus investments in process transformation.
This requires a more comprehensive understanding of every step in a given process and data-driven insights into what's causing inefficiencies, where the bottlenecks are, the number of process variants, the best opportunities for improvement, and more.
How SAP Signavio solutions can help
SAP Signavio solutions can help procurement leaders address these challenges by supporting them to rapidly understand, improve, and transform their processes for improved procurement capabilities at scale. The cloud-based process transformation solutions increase cross-system visibility for process analysis across the business. Insights gained can be used to make targeted investments in digitalization and automation, resulting in streamlined, resilient, and data-driven procurement operations that deliver better business outcomes.
Why is procurement excellence important?
For example, according to a benchmarking study conducted by SAP, top-quartile-performing procurement organizations typically:
- Achieve more than 9% in annual sourcing savings
- See up to 4x faster sourcing times
- Reach a 60% higher rate of managing supplier compliance
- Pay almost 4x less to process their POs and invoices
- Reduce invoice approval cycles by 81%
- Use early payment discounts to save more than US $1 million for every US $1 billion in spend under management
SAP Signavio solutions provide procurement leaders with the tools and insights to drive meaningful change. For instance, features such as end-to-end process views across systems are central to delivering these kinds of business results. Let's take a closer look.
Cross-system analysis
Disconnected procurement systems force procurement managers to jump from system to system and manually aggregate key metrics in spreadsheets. However, they rarely have the real-time, end-to-end process transparency and insights needed to identify potential areas of improvement based on existing business challenges. Plus, it can be difficult to identify potential areas of improvement based on existing business challenges.
SAP Signavio solutions enable cross-system analysis through a unified analytical experience, deep insights, and proactive improvement recommendations. The solutions centralize key metrics on a single page for process performance monitoring, trend tracking, benchmarking, and rapid change response.
They also centralize visibility into processes, empowering users to understand current process execution and performance better; identify inefficiencies, dependencies, and automation opportunities; and make targeted investments to reduce costs, increase efficiency, and streamline processes. These processes can include, source-to-contract, plan-to-fulfill, procure-to-receipt, and invoice-to-pay, plus more.
Prebuilt content
SAP Signavio solutions come with a vast library of ready-to-use, prebuilt content, such as SAP Signavio Value Accelerators, representing the collective knowledge from thousands of transformation projects delivered by SAP solutions.
Examples include capability maps; reference architecture diagrams; business process models; ready-to-use metrics, dashboards, and data transformation templates; benchmarks; improvement and innovation recommendations; and prebuilt connectors.
Together, they accelerate procurement transformation and continuous improvement. This content can make it easier for procurement leaders to identify and prioritize improvement opportunities. That way, leaders can take fast, informed actions toward desired business outcomes, such as higher procurement efficiency and productivity, cost savings, reduced waste, greater process compliance, and more.
The SAP Signavio solutions advantage
These differentiators work together to help procurement leaders drive operational excellence, compliance, and resilience. For instance, by continuously analyzing process variants within and across disparate systems, SAP Signavio solutions help procurement leaders understand actual performance execution. They can identify specific process bottlenecks and inefficiencies, standardize and implement best-practice processes, and monitor the new processes with prebuilt metrics and dashboards.
This is how operational excellence, compliance, and resilience happen at speed—vital in today's unpredictable, ever-evolving business environment. Businesses today can't just stick with the status quo, which can introduce long lead times and frequent delays in procurement cycles. They can't afford to have unreliable suppliers disrupting procurement and production plans or cost-savings opportunities going untapped. The time to accelerate procurement transformation and value realization is now.
Start your journey today
Want to jump-start your journey to procurement excellence? Download our new quick-read paper: Three steps to accelerate the journey to procurement excellence.