Upon entering a meeting with a financial manager, I often encounter the usual apology “sorry for the mess, it’s a stressful time right now,” he tells me while trying to put some order in the paperwork on his desk. So I say to myself, we live in the 21st century; many tools today allow you to pay a supplier on the other side of the world with a click while fully synchronizing with advanced BI systems. However, there are organizations where innovation seems to halt with the invention of paper – piles of documents, price quotes, tenders, contracts, purchase orders, invoices, payment confirmations, and more. These are part of the daily business routine in many large and small organizations.

A budget system – desirable versus common

The organizational bureaucracy is sometimes so cumbersome that it is clear to everyone that something needs to change. How is it possible that nothing is progressing? The same financial manager tells me, “a salesman came here and offered us a new ERP system that will digitize all our papers, but with a price tag of six figures, I prefer to keep the existing accounting system which costs only a few hundred a month.”

The power of the ERP system and its importance for business growth

Indeed, these systems are expensive; This is an industry that generates hundreds of billions of dollars every year. The organizations that use these systems pay quite a bit for a single system that replaces the entirety of the existing systems – AP, AR, attendance, production, budget, procurement, and more; however, most of the money is spent on implementation. The statistics tend to be around 80% implementation fee out of the total spending.

So what do those organizations that cannot afford such a high price can do? Or even if they can pay, are they satisfied? In response to this need, there is the Best of Breed approach. 

The idea is to computerize the business processes alongside the existing systems with dedicated systems that provide a better quality solution while emphasizing interfacing, synchronization, import, and export of data.

An excellent example of such a system is salesforce – a customer relationship management (CRM) system. It is considered the best system in its field because of its friendly interface, the synchronization with the rest of the organization’s systems, the internet access from a browser/smartphone, and the SaaS model – Software as a service.

Procee – Automate Your Procurement Process

More and more organizations, and even those that already implement one of the major ERP systems, use dedicated systems that interface with the existing systems and thus enjoy the “best of all worlds” – a lower price, a more professional approach, and avoiding the dramatic change of existing systems that sometimes leads to employee resistance, adaptation difficulties, training, and implementation.

Procee, the system we developed, is a good example as well. Our customers enjoy access from any device while synchronizing with the local ERP making their organizational procurement more efficient and customized according to the customer’s needs.