Zycus releases a report from The Hackett Group on the Latest Purchase-to-Pay performance metrics and best practices

PRINCETON, N.J. March 30, 2016 Zycus, the world leader in Procurement Technology solutions across the source-to-pay cycle, has just made available a 26-page report highlighting key findings from The Hackett Group’s latest Purchase-to-Pay Performance Study.

Zycus releases a report from The Hackett Group on the Latest Purchase-to-Pay performance metrics and best practices.

The Hackett Group (NASDAQ: HCKT) is an intellectual property-based strategic consultancy and leading enterprise benchmarking and best practices implementation firm to global companies. The Purchase-to-Pay performance study examines dozens of metrics associated with efficient and effective purchase-to-pay processes. The key findings report analyzes Purchase-to-Pay from an end-to-end process and service delivery model perspective.

While the report covers findings from an initial group of more than 100 companies, the study remains open to Zycus clients and contacts. Companies that actually participate in the study obtain baseline assessments of current-state performance, quantified placement on The Hackett Group’s proprietary Value Grid, plus in-depth analyses of best business practices associated with top performance levels.

Authored by Amy Fong, The Hackett Group’s Senior Procurement Advisor and P2P Program Leader, the report highlights a host of different ways that top performers in purchase-to-pay excel. Compared to a peer group, top performers:

• Continue to lead in technology enablement of P2P processes.
• Reduce purchasing operating costs year over year.
• Invest in ways that enable them to guide requisitioners to preferred suppliers, pricing, and proper buying channels.
• Enable supplier self-service.
• Track and endeavor to improve procurement’s responsiveness to stakeholders.
• Remove ineffective controls while still mitigating risk through policy design, channel strategy, fraud and payment error detection, supplier onboarding controls, and master data safeguards.
• More frequently leverage electronic interactions such as Web-based solutions for AP connectivity and are faster at placing orders and processing invoices.
• Have higher levels of visibility into spend at a line-item level (a key contributing factor to spend management effectiveness), have achieved greater levels of supply base rationalization, and have cleaner supplier master files.
• Are leading a transition to more integrated solutions for fraud and error detection.

“Beyond efficiency gains,” notes Fong in the report, “process automation is foundational to driving business agility, spend visibility, information digitization, predictive analytics, discount realization, and working capital optimization.” Peer companies, she adds, “have significant opportunities to move beyond process efficiency to deliver greater value to their organizations.”

The new report, Purchase-to-Pay Performance Study Results can be accessed here. Zycus customers and contacts interested in learning where they place on The Hackett Group’s Value Grid for purchase-to-pay and the above-mentioned metrics may still participate in the ongoing performance study here.

“The Hackett Group’s Purchase-to-Pay deep-dive study provides an invaluable resource to procurement leaders,” observes Zycus’ Vice President of Corporate Development, Richard Waugh. “The study itself – the questions it asks, the choices it provides – contains an enormous amount of intellectual capital in terms of how best-in-class companies measure and drive procurement performance. Participating in the study is a rigorous exercise that forces procurement teams to undertake deep introspection about their own practices and approaches. And, finally, the study provides the external metrics needed to understand if one is simply improving performance from point A to B or truly delivering performance with the potential to yield competitive market advantage. We would strongly encourage all Zycus clients and contacts to take advantage of this unique opportunity to participate in TheHackett Group’s Purchase-to-Pay Performance Study,” Waugh adds.