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Source to Pay implementation. Go-Live is here. Now what?

by | July 9, 2018

Going live with a Source to Pay solution is a major step towards better spend management – capturing savings, improving efficiency and gaining control. However, it is only the start of a journey and the most successful organisations keep project momentum going to really deliver against the business case.

Having the right approach and planning, along with the rest of the usual post go-live principles and processes, can ensure the pathway to success and guarantee the organisation maintains the strategic approach towards the new solution.

  1. Set goals – when a project begins it’s always recommended to set goals, even before the implementation phase. Think about operational goals that you want to achieve such as: number of users, number or invoices processed electronically, number of completed sourcing events.
  2. Plan ahead  – the immediate post-deployment support which will be needed, followed by the maintenance and operational support of a new system and its users. This includes training of the existing support function, user support and issue management, etc.
  3. Evaluate and Improve (Post-Go-Live) – Measure against the goals you set at the beginning of the initiative, and more importantly, how you are supporting the achievement of those goals. In order for the implementation to be a success measurement and improvement is always necessary.

Generally, once organisations go live with a new system, there is a large sigh of relief and they relax. Like going on holiday, you’ve chosen the destination, the bags have been packed, your flight has landed – now what? Well, now your trip has properly started and you want to make the most of it.

The truth is that organisations are struggling with the post go live strategy and processes and often their chosen implementation partner isn’t there to help all the time.

Business pain points:

  • Keeping abreast of new releases after go-live – after go live some customer find they don’t have the support and infrastructure within their project team to add new functionality, review business processes, and take advantage of new functionality when it’s released.
  • Interpreting data from a variety of procurement sources – customers are not always able to extract and analyse data from a variety of sources. You can add value by extracting specific data over an extended period of time to analyse how your solution is working
  • Identify compliance issues and efficiency opportunities – most companies, although not necessarily proud of the fact, will have a level of retrospective POs, however as it can be considered taboo, it is very rarely measured or monitored. Increasing efficiencies can also make for a less arduous process, which can help drive adoption. If the problems or bottlenecks can be measured, they can be addressed.
  • Improving repeatable spend through leveraging catalogue items – in most cases where requisitioners who cannot find what they are looking for by using the search functionality and adding a predefined item or webform will just raise a ‘Free Form’ request to buy their requirements.

The Xoomworks team created a solution to fulfill these exact requirement/needs. After a source to pay implementation project, your organisation can now make the most out of that investment with our spend management optimisation solution. This service gives you a KPI dashboard with results fed back to you in the context of success metrics and business case objectives.

If you want to know more about optimising your spend management solution, let’s have a chat!