To speed up purchase-to-pay processes with automation and reduce costs, processes must first be streamlined with Lean.
Lean and automation are in one sense opposites. Lean focuses on optimizing processes by continuously countering complexity, errors and waiting times to the end user.
Automation aims to accelerate and reduce costs of processes by standardizing them and taking out the human factor.
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Automation purports to provide a solution, but can actually create more complexity, waiting times and errors. On the one hand, because automation exposes existing defects and even reinforces them. On the other, when automation itself does not fit well with the desired process and therefore introduces new errors, complexity and waiting times.
To prevent automation of the purchase-to-pay process from backfiring, every automation project must start with process optimization. Using a Lean approach, existing processes are mapped(process execution) and it is investigated why certain processes do not produce a desired result, in order to then improve them(process improvement).
Only then can the streamlined purchase-to-pay processes be automated with a solution that allows further optimization and scaling to some degree.
