Zycus Debuts Comprehensive P2P Performance Benchmark for Indirect Spend

PRINCETON, NJ November 24, 2014 – Zycus, a world leader in Procurement Technology solutions across the source-to-pay cycle, announces the release of its comprehensive new Procure-to-Pay (P2P) Benchmark study for indirect spending. A diverse group of some 453 procurement organizations participating in the new Zycus study, the report aims to measure the progress global corporate enterprises have made with automating and improving spend compliance, transactional efficiency and accuracy, and financial governance and control in indirect P2P processes.

Presented as Part 1 and Part 2, the Zycus P2P Benchmark report covers more than two-dozen key performance indicators (KPIs) in all. Some of the key findings from the study are:

• Corporations, overall, have achieved less than 50% visibility into total indirect (ID) spending and even less penetration in terms of ID spend addressed by procurement and/or under contract with preferred providers.
• Only 40% of indirect spending is currently addressed by P2P automation technology solutions, and procurement pros are not tremendously optimistic about their abilities to increase that percentage with first-generation P2P technology deployments.
• Financial record-keeping accuracy and controls appear to be one of the relatively stronger areas of P2P performance, with an average 72% of all indirect POs being properly approved and 67% of POs being accurate on first pass. Half of procurement organizations say less than 61% of indirect spend transactions are currently being classified correctly to spend taxonomy, exposing persistent weakness in procurement’s capabilities for promoting P2P and budget compliance and proactively managing indirect spending from demand, daily decision and overall consumption perspectives.
• While P2P process control and automation technology has been around for quite some time — since the middle to late 1990s — the study finds surprisingly little progress, to date, on key performance metrics that one might have expected to advance more substantially — for example in PO and invoice processing costs, P2P process cycle times and so forth.

Presented as Part 1 and Part 2, the Zycus P2P Benchmark report covers more than two-dozen key performance indicators (KPIs) in all.

“Our new P2P Bechmark study report paints a sobering — yet hopeful — view of procurement’s incremental progress and additional opportunities for documenting, categorizing, analyzing, influencing, controlling and effectively managing corporate indirect spending,” says Zycus VP of Corporate Development, Richard Waugh, who recently debuted the study results at the Zycus Horizon 2014 procurement leadership conference in Amelia Island, Fla. “A big takeaway for Zycus from the study is that our next-generation P2P solution is well positioned to address the gaps that remain from first generation approaches to P2P. Specifically, the application of Artificial Intelligence technology upstream in the procure-to-pay process transforms the users experience into a Guided Procurement System – or GPS – resulting in next level performance in terms of spend coverage, compliance, and transactional efficiency and accuracy.”