At Touchstone Spend Management we have helped hundreds of organisations deploy systems to tackle their purchasing and procurement system requirements and the main conclusion we can draw is that this is less to do with technology and far more related to the culture of an organisation. Hence most implementation project plans heavily feature change management alongside the physical deployment of the application.
For us, it’s important to understand that every business is just a little different from the next and that the people who will be users of the system can make or break a deployment. The deployment of a system can only be considered fit for purpose if it considers the likelihood of successful adoption by the user base. That is why our consultants are business-process focused and provide best practice guidance over simply being software experts; they understand that, just because you can do it a certain way, you don’t have to and in some cases you certainly shouldn’t!
Culture and change management aside, the two traditional problem areas for a project are reporting and integration. Understanding the different types of outputs that users and stakeholders will need is key to getting reporting right, and integration is one of those areas that you simply have to have years of experience in; like most tasks it really only gets quicker and easier once you have done it a few dozen times before.
The Touchstone Spend Management team provide a range of Integrated Services that cover all of these critical requirements and they consider the success of a project to be directly linked to the time and attention to detail spent in these areas.
The Spend Management suite of applications has inherent standard reporting and dashboard tools that allow for rapid, user-friendly report design without the need for consultancy or detailed programming. The report library holds a series of template reports for most standard information needs, and uses the key supplier and transaction data from within P2P to quickly and easily publish regular reports.
Most of our clients go further and deploy our Advanced Reporting tool, powered by ETL Agile. This is a business intelligence and reporting solution built specifically to meet the needs of our Spend Management clients who need to bring information together from multiple application databases into one place for reporting purposes. A typical example of this is combining data from our P2P & Expenses platform and their Finance/ERP system to achieve a single picture of budgeted, committed and actual spend by supplier and category.
The deployment of Advanced Reporting allows for a single reporting layer across integrated, multiple applications where the powerful engine extracts, transforms and loads all the disparate data via a staging warehouse into a single data warehouse. This data warehouse provides the platform of a common ‘language’ and can be directly and easily accessed for use by either your existing data visualisation (i.e. dashboard) tools such as MS SQL Reporting Services, Qlik, Tableau, Targit or perhaps simply from within spreadsheets, making the user experience far more familiar, simple and logical.
Advanced cross-application reporting Spend Analysis is the process of collecting, cleansing, classifying and analyzing expenditure data with the purpose of reducing procurement costs, improving efficiency and monitoring compliance.
Touchstone Spend Analysis has made effective Spend Analysis far easier for procurement and finance professionals to implement and use without needing special skills, hefty capital investment or a collection of processes tagged onto an existing Financial Management or ERP package.
Cloud-based and mobile-ready, Spend Analysis combines sophisticated spend data capture, cleansing, enrichment and classification capabilities with powerful, intuitive, ready-to-use analysis tools. This visibility gives you all the information you need to identify and capture savings opportunities, identify and mitigate risks, improve process efficiencies and enhance performance.
It is sophisticated, but remains easy to use, delivering powerful insights from the moment you turn it on. Comprehensive pre-built views and KPIs come with extensive filtering, point-and-click, drill-down options, and instant CSV export capabilities.
Your Spend Management processes do not operate in isolation, they work hand-in-hand with your core financial management systems. They may also work in conjunction with key operational systems and, increasingly, they exchange information with your suppliers and their systems as well. Any true Spend Management suite therefore relies on close integration.
However, integration can be challenging for those that don’t understand, or have experience of, those various platforms and systems. At Touchstone, we draw on 35 years of solid experience of deploying Financial Management systems such as Infor SunSystems, Dynamics GP, NAV, AX, and more recently D365.
We combine that with our specialist knowledge of Spend Management platforms to ensure we completely understand the full end-to-end flow of data and information that underpins all the core purchasing and procurement processes. That’s why we are considered integration experts as much as Procurement specialists. The Purchase-to-Pay (P2P) and Source-to-Contract (S2C) solutions, as part of a broad Spend Management suite, are already tightly integrated with each other but also with the most popular ERP and Financial Management systems, as well as with a wide range of industry-specific and special-purpose operational systems. Our solutions can be integrated with limitless types of software applications from financial/ERP, to Facilities Management, HR, Property Management and Works Order systems.
Our solutions are Finance-system agnostic and ideally suited to deploying as an umbrella platform across multiple ERP systems where information is otherwise in siloes. Integrating each of these systems with our universal Spend Management platform brings uniformity, consistency and visibility across the whole enterprise.
Our Implementation Methodology follows a proven approach taken in all our projects and is based on a core set of values. These values combine a detailed knowledge of our customer and their business requirements with a broad range of experience, skills and knowledge taken from implementing Integrated Spend Management platforms.
Our project team will consist of highly qualified and skilled individuals where quality remains at the forefront of all that we provide. Everyone in the team focuses on Spend Management as a discipline, and we understand Procurement best practice. Our team of Spend Management practitioners guide you through the end-to-end process.
We will look for quick wins as deliverables from any project; no one wants to see their time, resource and investment disappear into a black hole for a year. Also, big bang rarely succeeds. Together we will explore how you can roll out the system in a phased approach, starting with the core process needs that underpinned the main business case, and with subsequent phases delivering the extra value-add or ‘nice to have’ functions.
First step in the project, we will hold a joint kick-off to establish your goals for success, resources, timelines and metrics, as well as providing project governance and risk assessment.
Soon after we will capture your requirement for the ‘to-be’ business processes, advise you on best practices, and start designing your configuration, integrations and reporting needs.
We will help you plan and run User Acceptance Testing and end user training and then, once fully tested, we will take you through go-live and ensure we stay close by for those critical first few weeks. A Help Desk representative will assist with the transition across to regular ongoing support.
Our UK based support help desk is staffed by experts in your solution, providing you with the peace of mind that if you experience any issues with your software, help is just a phone call away.
Our customer portal enables you to submit cases 24/7 and track the status of these issues, from the initial log through to resolution. It also provides valuable online access to knowledge-based articles, technical documentation and opinion pieces – enabling you to broaden your understanding, and the value, of your applications.
