Enhancing the Procure-to-Pay business process with middleware

Ensuring market reach is essential in an intensely competitive and uncertain business environment, particularly for B2B organisations that do not rely on typical consumer sales channels.

For some, harnessing Procure-to-Pay (P2P) platforms for their e-commerce/ marketplace functionality has been lucrative in securing new business.

There’s a variety of different Procure-to-Pay platforms for B2B organisations to utilise. Each of these serves a different market; depending on the business industry. Whilst the key use-case for businesses is in automating procurement processes, they can also offer additional functionalities, such as e-commerce marketplaces.

P2P middleware solutions enable organisations to take advantage of this marketplace functionality by automating processes and consolidating data from multiple outlets into one central business system.

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Our whitepaper, the rise of e-commerce marketplaces, identifies three key areas that any business should address to ensure greater long-term success with online sales channels.

In this blog, we will be exploring the benefits of utilising P2P platforms for marketplace functionality and how P2P middleware solutions can help ensure full efficiency. This includes a detailed client case study.

Utilising P2P platforms for marketplace functionality

Ensuring market penetration is essential for B2B suppliers. Procure-to-Pay (P2P) platform marketplaces are attractive to B2B suppliers as they overcome one of the challenges of being able to secure new customer contracts; market visibility. Read more: How a stationery supplier replaced withdrawn P2P middleware within nine weeks.

In addition to improving the procurement process, B2B Suppliers can list their product catalogues on these P2P platforms that have marketplace functionality.

Procurement technology enables greater visibility and efficiency for suppliers and buyers alike and is attractive to both parties for these reasons:

• P2P platforms offer a structured supplier bidding process that supports transparency for buyers to accurately compare propositions
• They provide the supplier with significant exposure to buying communities across targeted industries

Connecting to multiple P2P platforms

Organisations that follow this B2B supplier strategy should consider listings on multiple Procure-to-Pay (P2P) platforms.

Each Procure-to-Pay platform tends to serve a different audience, which could be industry specific or general. For this reason, B2B suppliers that serve multiple business types and industry verticals should list on all relevant Procure-to-Pay marketplaces.

Online B2B marketplaces offer several general benefits to business. Notable are greater transparency in product, service, and supplier availability, as well as in pricing and purchasing terms. Hours and time zones are irrelevant, making marketplaces truly global. And, perhaps most significantly, they provide CPOs with the means to offload the tactical, often repetitive work that dominates procurement (especially in indirect categories), improving their management so they can focus on more strategic activities.

― McKinsey*

Harnessing one-to-many middleware for P2P platforms simplifies this strategy for B2B suppliers. Organisations that require integrated data communication between their ERP system and their network of Procure-to-Pay platforms can deploy an EDI middleware solution.

By taking this approach, the organisation avoids the hassle and expense of setting up individual connections and integrations for each P2P platform. Ultimately, the middleware software acts as a funnel layer that processes data exchanges between each party and feeds it into the required endpoint.

We dive deeper into this strategy in our case study below…

A case study

Transalis can offer expert insight on this subject following a large-scale project for a client.

The utilisation of Procure-to-Pay marketplaces was a key sales channel for this particular business division. The client had marketplace listings across a total of 15 different platforms, which resulted in supplying over 300 customers.

The situation

The client came to Transalis because the existing solution that managed connections with these P2P platforms was being withdrawn, with a 4-month deadline. They were also challenged by very limited in-house knowledge of P2P processing management due to the acquisition. Our tailored approach to the client’s needs ensured rapid onboarding of P2P platforms to achieve maximum market coverage.

Regarding the build of the solution, Transalis worked on a modular basis. The production team resourced the project in an optimal way by identifying key commonalities between the P2P platforms and then replicating the configuration across them. Then they were able to dedicate appropriate time and focus to the technological exceptions.

The results

In summary, this strategic approach in implementing EDI middleware meant that all 300 customers across the 15 P2P platforms were live within 9 weeks. Subsequently, our client was able to expand its client base and scale this area of the business. Transalis has since onboarded an extra 100 customers, completing this in just 4 weeks.

Conclusion

Suppliers may already be managing orders from B2B marketplaces such as Alibaba, but Procure-to-Pay platforms enable the automation of the entire procure-to-pay business process as well as offer this functionality. Utilising middleware integration services simplifies the connection to multiple platforms, making it a more accessible strategy to increase market coverage.