Editor’s Note: This article is the first in a brief series examining the problem of using social networking tools for procure-to-pay applications. This installment presents the issue at hand, using social media in a procure-to-pay context, and the next part of the series will discuss how to bridge the proverbial gap and make use of social tools in a P2P framework.
If the internet and process automation tools have helped revolutionize many aspects of the business world over the past 15 years, the main elements, capabilities, and features of social networks are almost non-existent across the Procure-to-Pay (“P2P”) value chain. It is true that some enterprises use various social media and networks for a variety of reasons (to varying degrees of success), but the primary efforts today focus on engaging consumers, not other businesses and trading partners.
Beyond direct use of social networks to advance their agendas, enterprises have generally been unable to borrow or leverage most of the underlying capabilities and drivers that are behind the most successful Social Networks. The result is an extraordinary gap between the way consumers communicate, collaborate, and share information and the way that enterprises do these things with other enterprises. Consider the following examples:
- While enterprises today rely on email as a primary mode of communication, there is a new generation of college students who may not have email accounts and instead use content-rich social media to connect with friends, classmates, and professors.
- While many enterprises regularly struggle to evaluate and gain visibility into their suppliers’ and partners’ performance, some parents use online ratings services to provide direct feedback that will help new parents choose their pediatricians or decide where to stay and what to do on their next trip to Disney.
- While enterprises invest significant time and resources trying to identify new, innovative sources of supply, “crowdsourcing” websites can help users identify high-quality goods and services at unbelievable prices for its users.
For the users who struggle to accomplish basic tasks in the workplace that they can complete with relative ease in the homestead, the dissonance can be jarring—they see the social media gap and they really do mind it.
This is a significant problem, particularly as social networks continue to gain users year-over-year. Facebook, for example, had an average of 1.23 billion monthly active users in 2014, which means that 1.23 billion people visited Facebook at least once per month. Twitter had 284 million monthly active users in the same period, while LinkedIn boasts 300 million registered users. This doesn’t even begin to consider the various other social applications on the market today, such as Pinterest, Instagram, Tumblr, WhatsApp, and many more.
Enterprises can thus ill afford to ignore the capabilities of social media tools. In fact, communicating with trading partners via social tools may open up new working relationships that could result in significant cost and process savings through greater efficiencies. Social tools, or at the very least social capabilities, are as a result worthwhile to consider as part of a robust P2P workflow.
Check out these related articles:
Mobility and Complex Spend Management (Part II)
Is the “Flex Economy” for Real?
