Reinventing the procure to pay process

Purchase orders (POs) have been essential to B2B e-commerce for centuries. We can trace back the first POs to the industrial revolution when mass production required businesses to adopt a more formal process to manage procurement. Formal purchase orders emerged as a standardized way for companies to request goods and track spending, reducing fraud and errors.

Largely paper based, the usage of POs continued to grow and became the norm. These documents typically included details like item descriptions, quantities, prices, and terms of payment. Large organizations implemented purchasing departments to handle procurement efficiently.

With the advent of the internet, the late 1990’s saw a shift from paper based purchases to their electronic equivalents. IBM ReqCat pioneered the use of catalog based electronic purchase orders to speed up the process, increase visibility and reduce errors. The practice was rapidly adopted by Ariba (now SAP Ariba), Coupa and all other modern players in the procurement software space with little questioning of what had been the norm in organized procurement for centuries.

This ancient process is now about to change ….

Click here to discover how the new procure to pay process stacks with the old.