How to discover process blockers faster and achieve high process efficiency

In achieving fast and lean business processes around ​​procurement and incoming invoice verification, we always encounter the same recurring process blockers in our day-to-day work.

It is the manual changes to documents that cause increased process costs and workloads. Often, they do not seem to matter so much: A missing information on the invoice or a manual price change for the order within the invoice verification. Does that sound familiar? For many clerks in accounts payable, this scenario describes everyday issues. If you were to look at every manual change in its entirety, you would be amazed at how many process blockers complicate your business processes every day.

A process analysis helps you to find out how your internal processes really work. And there is hope: Documents that have gone through further process steps without changes except for manual approval can be automated. To increase the degree of automation in your processes, it helps to identify process blockers more clearly.

A clearly identification of process blockers

Most of the process blockers in the P2P process are certainly clear to us: Missing goods receipt, incorrect article or delivery quantities, quality defects and the resulting price / quantity blocks. In addition, downstream work, for example, slows down your business processes due to low budget limits or incorrect determination of agents. Imagine, if you were able to understand the errors in detail that keep occurring, you could discover approaches how you could remove process blockers in the long term.

With pi.a analytics you are able to answer the following questions:

• How long are the lead times for individual process steps?
• How many invoices from a particular vendor had to be reprocessed due to incorrect goods receipts?
• How often do price changes for the order take place during invoice verification?
• Which employee and user groups cause the most follow-up tasks?
• Which documents can be automated in the future?

The solution

An analysis of your processing times, for example, considering the number of forwardings and releases in the incoming invoice verification process, allows you to draw conclusions about what your processes really look like. Manual changes may accumulate in a certain company code, whereas others seem to be checked and run through with ease. A closer look reveals the patterns in which vendors cause overtime.

Is it due to the incorrect invoicing or has the agent determination not been set correctly? To optimize processes sustainably, objective process mining is an important basis for finding your best practice approach.

We at pi.a factory have set ourselves fast and lean processes as our goal. With a well-founded process analysis, we provide you with a roadmap for transformation initiatives so that you can optimally improve your business processes.

The advantages are apparent:

• Faster lead times
• Reduced process costs
• Reduced volume of work
• Protected nerves