Monstar Club, in collaboration with AGOS Asia has officially launched Lunch Connect! This engaging session over lunch time aims to bring together finance and shared service professionals over a casual platform to discuss day-to-day Finance & Shared Services issues. Our theme for the day was P2P (Procure to Pay) and we were honoured to have 2 distinguished speakers who have had over 15 years of experience working in MNCs.
Key takeaway points and food for thoughts:
- The end game for P2P is to ultimately achieve full automation (from OCR (Optical Character Recognition) to Host-to-Host payment), with minimal or no human intervention
- It’s impossible to achieve overnight success. From experience, P2P automation requires up to 2 years to run smoothly with an initial success rate of only around 50%.
- It is advisable to spend up to 60%-70% of your project time on the design phase-the devil is in the details!
- As OCR is gradually gaining popularity, it might not be advisable to carry out a ‘big bang’ implementation worldwide. APAC serving shared service centres might want to start off with countries such as Malaysia and Singapore where Roman characters are more commonly used
- Aha Moment! A tip to successfully automating P2P: A P2P expert with a hint of curiosity about IT would be the perfect fit to carry out these automation projects!
- Companies who are looking to explore Host-to-Host payments need to implement strong front-end controls as payments are sent directly from our accounting system to the bank. This method is popular among overseas companies while our local scene is still catching up with this new wave
- Payment by P-Cards (Purchasing Cards) are also extremely popular in Europe and America. With the usage of P-card, suppliers can swipe the P-card for the amount chargeable. A great sense of discipline and trust would be required in this case!
- A pre-requisite for system implementation is standardisation, hence reduction of exception handling!
- Esker, Kofax, Ariba, Tungsten- which one gives you the bang for your buck?
We all had our Aha moments and overall a fruitful session. The aim is for everyone to go back to their organisations with SOLUTIONS and new perspectives! For those who missed out on our first session, fret not as we are working on organising our next Lunch Connect.
So, let us know which areas you would like to know more about and we will try our very best to address them in future sessions!
