I received NAPP’s (National Association of Purchasing & Payables) newsletter the other day. There are always one or two articles that catch my interest, but the one in the current issue really jumped out at me. It was titled “Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch” by Mark Trowbridge (and originally appeared in a different publication). What a fantastic headline!

The article was well done and very supply-chain focused, but it struck me that the topic can just as easily be applied to Accounts Payable — particularly with regard to invoice automation. Invoice automation strategies can be designed with the best of intentions, but if you have a culture resistant to change, your investment in invoice automation will not pay off.

But a resistant culture isn’t the end of the world. It just means you’ll need to put some extra thought and energy into ensuring adoption. I believe there are at least 4 main areas that need to be thoroughly covered when considering an invoice automation deployment:

1. Business strategy and system selection — does the invoice automation strategy support a higher-level corporate strategy (ie. cost containment) and is the chosen invoice automation system the right “fit” without significant customizations?
2. Change management — is there an internal marketing campaign to get stakeholders on board and a value proposition developed that speaks to the personal and organizational benefits of invoice automation? The campaign should start well before a system implementation even begins.
3. Policy and policy enforcement — does organizational policy support adoption of invoice automation (ie. are there approval thresholds based on dollar amounts for non-PO invoices?)? And perhaps more importantly, how is the policy enforced — does it have real “teeth” to deal with policy breaches? It should or it won’t be taken seriously.
4. Leadership — is there active endorsement from an executive who is willing to not only be a project cheerleader but who also can marshal support from other areas of the company, such as IT?Bon appetite, culture!

Last 5 posts by Tommy Benston

• Culture Eats Strategy for Lunch - January 17th, 2008
• Measuring Purchase-to-Pay Productivity - November 14th, 2007
• Tommy Benston - January 1st, 2007

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