This week, we continue our journey through Ardent Partners’ AP Metrics that Matter in 2019” (click to download) by looking at another key to success, that being data or information. In 2019, it is no longer ‘good enough’ for Accounts Payable (“AP”) departments to simply be proficient at processing invoices and payments. It is, however, a good start, and a required one at that, for AP to transform itself into a strategic, value-adding, force to be reckoned with. The future of enterprise operations depends on the greater organization’s ability to leverage business agility in conjunction with intelligent, on-demand decision-making. In order for AP, or any other internal function, to thrive in a dynamically evolving world, it must serve a greater purpose than the relative sum of its parts. Nearly 82% of organizations today state that data and intelligence are an important-to-critical piece of the greater AP function. The “age of intelligence” is upon business leaders, and those AP teams that leverage the power of its vast repository of supplier, invoice, and payment data, by transforming this data into influential spend management and vendor payment intelligence, will solidify a place in the future state of business operations.
Steve Ballmer, the former CEO of Microsoft, and current owner of the NBA Los Angeles Clippers, said that “The number one benefit of information technology is that it empowers people to do what they want to do. It lets people be creative. It lets people be productive. It lets people learn things they didn’t think they could learn before, and so in a sense it is all about potential.” Information technology in and of itself is great but it requires access to data to enable it to realize its true potential.
Through deeper analytics, seamless integration between core spend management and financial management systems (i.e. ERP, P2P, etc.), and the ability to transform day-to-day data into real intelligence, AP can secure its place in the future of the organization and become part of a new age, an age of information.
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