It’s also true that it can no longer afford to be managed as a group of individual silos. While order-to-cash and procureto-pay activities have always been interdependent, the intricacies of today’s supply chains and the growing lack of market tolerance for anything that isn’t smarter, faster, better and cheaper has produced the need for an operational model dependent on very tight synchronization.
In order to run the most efficient operations, companies require the ability to quickly determine how delays, disruptions and other events affect incoming customer orders, overall operations, expenses/cost of goods sold, and in the end, overall revenue.
For many companies, however, gaps remain in operational visibility and management—typically between revenue and expense—that impede the speed of information sharing, updating, and ultimately, decision making. Filling these gaps requires additional planning tools, such as those that focus on aligning sales and operations. But, these types of tools only solve part of the challenge.
There is also a need for execution tools (generally based on B2B messaging technology) that can facilitate the accessibility, flow and updating of all revenue and expense data (planning and actual). When leveraged correctly with the right planning tools, these execution systems can serve as a powerful, integrated management console that delivers holistic visibility and management across a company’s end-to-end supply chain operations.