Thinking outside the box, or in this case the enterprise software box, can benefit your organization by filling those gaps that are costing your company time, money and opportunity! The pendulum had swung from companies adopting best of breed solutions back to opting for large, enterprise solutions with lots of bells and whistles. The reason for this shift is not hard to decipher; software company consolidation and the resulting expanded application pool make these enterprise systems an easy choice for CIO’s and the procurement folks. Less overhead to manage and one stop shopping.
However, that metaphorical pendulum is once again swinging back towards greater adoption of best-of-breed solutions to compliment, not replace, ERP and other ubiquitous enterprise software platforms. The one-size-fits-all model may be attractive to the IT and procurement decision makers, but the operational and back-office support teams can be short changed by these systems with significant functional gaps that are not being filled.
Take your time when choosing solutions
When looking to address a particular business problem, take advantage of opportunities to become more efficient, or mitigate the effects of unforeseen challenges presented by recent events such as the global pandemic and increasing frequency of cyber attacks, look for “best-of-breed” solutions that are better equipped and much more flexible to address those needs. These “complementary” applications exist and co-exist with most enterprise solutions and can bridge functional gaps to drive tremendous operational and economic value without the expense and risk of customizing your enterprise “out-of-the-box” systems. And if you switch or upgrade platforms the solution follow.
There are a host of cloud based solutions that you can quickly deploy and integrate with your system of record that will allow you to bridge gaps and address unique issues in the financial back office. Whether you are trying to streamline vendor management activities, implement a vendor self-service structure, or take on the hybrid/remote workforce model without any loss of productivity there are best-of-breed solutions to help:
- Vendor Portal (supplier portal)
- Payment Inquiry
- Invoice Submission
- Dispute Submission & Tracking
- Vendor Onboarding (supplier onboarding)
- New vendor data & document collection
- TIN check and compliance validations
- COI submission, approval and expiration tracking
- Diversity status, compliance
- Existing vendor updates
- AP Automation
- Workflow management
- Data Capture & Document Assembly
- Remote Processing
- PO matching
- non-PO approvals and exception processing
- PO Dispatch and Update
- Automatically dispatch PO’s to your vendor
- Update PO’s as changes occur
- Proactively request delivery updates from vendors in critical supply chains
- Dynamic Discounting
- Buyer generated offers for early payment for discount on invoices
- ERP and Systems Integrations
- Multiple integration methodologies to ANY back-end system
- Cloud hosted, single tenant configurations
- Single tenant cloud deployments for maximum configurability
- High levels of security for data
Contact ICG Consulting today for more information or for a demonstration of one of our comprehensive best-of-breed solutions.