The emergence of innovative technologies in recent years has the potential to radically alter the way business is done. And, as enterprises intensify their focus on optimizing internal processes, modern Accounts Payable (“AP”) teams are better positioned to advance beyond their transactional past. The way that businesses have gained intelligence from data has evolved and now presents many new opportunities for AP to showcase their strategic value. The AP team is a well of untapped financial and business data. AP teams that are able to get more out of this data will provide business leaders with the necessary intelligence to react in an agile fashion to new and unseen market pressures.
Evolving Intelligence
Today, the technology available in the marketplace can provide an immense amount of data for businesses to take advantage of. For AP and finance leaders, leveraging this data to drive business value is an important organizational capability. But in order to get the best results, it is important to measure the right data to make sure you are able to correct errors, and also prevent them from happening in the future.
Today, there are new enterprise technologies entering the business world at a pace never before seen. While many are heralded as the “next great thing,” the reality is that with many of these solutions, their actual impact will never match their current hype. But, when viewed in whole, it is pretty clear that technological innovations will make an impact on the AP function. Some of the technologies are available and in use by AP teams today, while others are emerging within enterprise solutions and/or developing their own unique market.
Agile analytics, represent the next wave of Big Data-led strategies for generating true financial intelligence. Agility within AP analytics can revolutionize how invoice data is collected, prioritized, and utilized, helping key stakeholders connected to AP, particularly procurement, finance, and treasury, garner information that is needed to address dynamic business pressures and challenges. AP has the opportunity to increase its value if it takes an approach founded on the utilization of data science, and integrated and collaborative intelligence.
Final Thoughts
The strategic transformation of accounts payable is frequently a multi-stage process that evolves based upon stakeholder requirements and attitudes, organizational maturity, and the project’s alignment with overall enterprise goals. Over the last decade there have been many new developments that have challenged legacy solutions. There is a deep well of untapped financial and business data stored within AP that can now be taken advantage of. If AP teams can extract the invoice and operational data available, they can turn it into intelligence that the entire organization can utilize. The use of Big Data is a real and effective strategy that is already driving knowledge sharing for executive planning and key decision-making for Best-in-Class organizations. Taking a data driven approach is one of the best ways to accelerate P2P performance and drive more business value.
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