Objectives
The company had already started a digital transformation project by adopting the Proactis Source-to-Contract suite to modernise its procurement processes, so a discussion began with members of British Land about automating the Purchase-to-Pay and Accounts Payable processes.
“There were two main challenges that we were looking to address as part of this project,” stated Jonty McNuff, Head of Business Transformation, British Land. “Despite being a FTSE100 organisation, our electronic purchase orders were not managed in a consistent way across the business.” This led to a couple of issues, such as invoices arriving for payment with no way of tracking them back to initial commitment. The process often took quite a bit of time to track down what the spend related to, if it wasn’t clear on the invoice. This was often exacerbated with natural turnover of staff round the business as it meant, in some cases, there was no knowledge of what had been ordered or what had been agreed relating to price and payment terms. “It was also quite difficult to get an accurate picture of what our commitments were at a point in time,” continued Jonty. “We could do this as part of our external reporting processes at the end of each quarter, but this was largely a manual and pretty time-consuming exercise.”
Despite having a great in-house technology team, the company was eager to look into the use of best-in-class, externally developed, spend management solutions.