Monday 21st May, 2013

At least, they do at the Disney Institute..As I sat listening to keynote Susan Pearsall of the Disney Institute at the IFO Fusion event, two things occurred to me. Firstly, how sometimes we’re so caught up with talking about automation and technology – it’s easy to lose sight of communication as the driver of any process improvement – and secondly – how it’s quite difficult to eat an egg filled croissant with your hands… I definitely could have improved my processes by not missing the knife and fork section…..

....But as Susan said, it’s not just communication – it’s communication that’s been empowered by imagination – and imagination that’s been allowed to blossom in what she calls the “yes, and…”philosophy. Too often when someone has an idea that doesn’t quite cut it, at least in our eyes – we listen and say “yes, but..” immediately smothering their idea (as was our not so secret intention). The idea of the “yes, and…” is that we can voice our concerns while also seeming to validate their idea – though it did seem to be to be more like “yes, and…..if…”

Still, it's a piece of advice worth remembering if you’re stuck in the middle of a process change – and you find yourself challenged by the hope that it would all just go away. Everything changes, especially across the P2P space – but it’s how we manage and communicate that change that will determine how successful it's likely to be. Force something through without explaining why it’s being done – and you can expect resistance at best, resignations at worst.

Facilitating change is something that Ariba know well. In fact, I was talking to Drew Hofler, Ariba’s Director of Solutions Marketing today who was describing their new contract invoicing solution. Similar in nature to a PO flip – essentially contract invoicing takes all the information contained and agreed upon in the contract and uses the precise information within that to convert the document into an invoice. By doing that, Drew says, organisations can reduce their chances of error, save an enormous amount of time and dramatically reduce their exception handling.

Of course what this also does is hardwire a more collaborative way of working into the P2P process. If procurement own the contract and have negotiated the deal contained within it, with contract invoicing, AP become a part of that ownership when that contract forms the basis of the invoice – everyone has visibility and shares control of the outcome.

Naturally, the more complex the environment, the more practical use an organisation can make of this method of working – for example Drew spoke about an airline who’d been struggling with highly complex invoices – sometimes stretching to 500 pages. And it doesn’t take a genius to work out that any checking could only ever be sporadic and certainly less than thorough. Not because of sloppiness, but to do otherwise would simply have been too time consuming and ultimately the costs outweighed the benefits of doing so.

To an organisation whose business is to fly planes – spending time and money investigating complex invoicing practice was low on their priorities. But with contract invoicing in place, the organisation was able to save $millions, adding real value to the bottom line and released AP staff to do other, more operational functions within the company. As Drew says;

 “Ariba’s all about giving people the tools they need to join today’s networked economy. Yes, it’s collaboration across P2P, but it’s also a lot more than that – it’s providing an open platform where all the stakeholders benefit from the strength of their connections. And that’s a powerful thing”.

So collaboration, sharing, communicating seem to be running themes here at Fusion, and in the P2P space generally – so I can’t wait for Tuesday’s keynote – how to spot a liar – ie those who don’t so much collaborate but “elaborate”. So, as in all the best Disney films, we’ve seen the goodies, now it’s time to root out all the baddies!