The spend control process?
Spend control is a structured business process that dramatically increases the control and visibility you have over what your organisation spends for all types of goods and services. It’s a process you use to significantly reduce costs by ensuring that only truly needed and properly authorised goods and services are purchased, and by making sure you obtain best possible value when they are. It also serves to dramatically reduce invoice processing time, effort and cost in Accounts Payable, as well as creating greater efficiencies in Procurement and throughout your organisation.
But you may be wondering if it is possible to implement effective spend control without first replacing your existing ERP system. You know from experience that process can be long, expensive and risky. You don’t want to do it if you can possibly avoid it.
The good news is that you can deploy highly effective spend control around just about any core
financial management or ERP system. In fact, it makes good sense to use a spend control system that is outside the bounds of ERP for two important reasons:
- Spend control is about managing business processes that are outside the realm of ERP. For instance, it manages the processes before a PO or invoice hits ERP and before a supplier is added to ERP. And it uses a whole new range of information about suppliers, RFPs, contracts and catalogues that is not even in your ERP system.
- Spend control involves many more people than those who use ERP. Parts of your system will be used by practically every employee. Other parts will be used by your suppliers who are outside the four walls of your organisation.
Because the business processes are so different, and because so many people will always be ‘non-expert’ users, the nature of a good spend control system is quite different from the nature of most ERP systems. Modern spend control systems have been designed to remove complexity and guide users through intuitive step-by-step processes – a different approach to the transaction processing model within most ERP systems.