Re-imagining Procure to Pay in the Telecoms Industry

Legacy purchase-to-pay Legacy approaches to the management of 3rd party connectivity assets, like access circuits, in the telecoms industry are time-consuming and inefficient, acting as a barrier to the effective delivery to the end customer.

Lack of alignment between services as delivered to the customer and services as procured from suppliers causes operational and commercial issues between industry partners. [Upgrade.png-Invoice.png] Better for customers, suppliers and employees Working with partners, we moved from cumbersome and manual activities to an automated process based on an aligned view of services.

Each asset was provided with a unique identifier that was recognised by both parties and used for service and commercial interactions.

This facilitates speedier fulfilment of customer requests, efficient payment of suppliers and frees staff time for value-adding activity. [UpgradeEasy.png-InvoiceEasy.png] Leveraging technology – Blockchain & AI The solution enables sharing of service inventory on a blockchain that captures and validates service and commercial changes real-time to pre-validate supplier invoices and allow frictionless payment.

Automating supplier interactions is also opening the way to the use of machine learning to pre-empt commercial issues. Results Massive simplification of the telco purchase-to-pay process; supplier invoice queries down 75%, rejected/cancelled invoices down 79%, average 8 days reduction in order duration.