PROCUREMENT OPTIMIZATION BLOG

Integration ranks among the top challenges companies encounter on the road to procurement automation. One reason is that successful integration of your e-procurement platform requires bringing together different technical and business stakeholders, each of whom are focused primarily on their particular piece of a puzzle–not the end result.

Over the past seven years, the Shelby team has helped to manage hundreds of e-procurement platform integrations. This experience has given us a unique vantage point from which to identify common misassumptions, bottlenecks and choke points that can cause cost overruns, schedule delays and the erosion of bottom-line business benefits.

Shelby’s latest eBook, Five Principles for E-Procurement Integration Success, provides valuable insights for IT and project management teams. This e-book does not describe the coding and object-mapping tasks for integrating e-procurement platforms with internal enterprise systems. It does, however, offer suggestions for optimizing IT services and integration planning to ensure both technical and business success.

The good news is that leading e-procurement platforms have simplified the tasks associated with integrating with your ERP other internal systems through open standards, APIs and integration toolkits. However, this sometimes leads IT departments to adopt overly simplistic views of the tasks associated with e-procurement integration. Often overlooked are the challenges involved in getting reference and transactional data out of internal systems. Another challenge is that teams often lack an overarching plan that, over the course of a phased implementation, will ultimately result in fully automated Procure2Pay processes. This makes it difficult to plan for the efficient utilization of valuable IT resources.

This eBook presents a framework for integration planning that will help you avoid setbacks and get the most out of your company’s investment in procurement automation. Enjoy the read!

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