Source-to-Pay redesign under the cover of an ERP change.

The Challenge

The client, a European industrial group operating across several countries, had launched an ERP change project. The ideal window to rebuild the Procurement function and fix structural issues that had been piling up for years. Leadership knew the "usual classics" would resurface: suppliers poorly identified, spend invisible, POs placed inconsistently across BUs and sites, and a complete blind spot on indirect spend where orders were not even being raised. Services got started, invoices arrived, accounts payable validated after a small treasure hunt across the organisation to find out who was actually responsible.

My brief, acting as BPO on the Procurement function: work with the client team to identify, review and improve processes across the full Source-to-Pay cycle, and install a real indirect procurement process where none existed. All within the window of the ERP project, because that is the one moment business teams accept to change their habits.

What I Found

The classics, at scale:

• Supplier master data not mapped, many duplicates (same supplier under different codes depending on entity or site).
• No usable spend analysis, for lack of a shared category taxonomy and mapped GL accounts.
• POs placed along 4-5 different paths depending on the BU, with inconsistent control and approval levels.
• On indirects: no PO at all on entire pockets of spend (professional services, ad-hoc maintenance, general services). Invoices were arriving without any PO reference.

The new ERP would not fix any of this on its own. Without redesigning the upstream process, the tool change would just digitise the existing mess. Worse: an ERP exists to generate structured data. If the upstream is chaotic, the downstream data is too.

The Approach

Policy: frame before you tool. Clear procurement policy: engagement thresholds, PO mandatory above a threshold (including indirects), approval frameworks by amount and category, rules of use for referenced suppliers. Policy is the foundation. Without it, process design stays theoretical and the ERP has nothing to enforce.

Process design and friction reduction. End-to-end S2P redesign inside the new ERP, with an obsessive focus on reducing user friction. A correct-but-painful process will never be adopted. Simplified requester journeys, catalogues for recurring spend, automatic validation below threshold, clear escalation above. Target: a requester can place an order in under 2 minutes on 80% of cases.

Master data cleanup. Supplier base cleansing, deduplication, category taxonomy, GL accounts mapped to categories. Without clean master data, the ERP breaks the moment you want a reliable report.

Indirect procurement process from scratch. Real ordering process for the indirects that had none: scope definition, catalogues and preferred suppliers covering 80% of recurring needs, mandatory PO above a threshold, simple and fast approval workflow. Cultural rite of passage for teams who never used a PO and saw it as bureaucracy.

Adoption. Targeted communication by population, training with practical cases, close support during the first 90 days post go-live. Tracking dashboards visible to managers (PO rate, catalogue rate, approval SLAs, exceptions). What gets measured gets corrected; what is not measured stays invisible.

Governance. Monthly procurement committee with business stakeholders, quarterly review with leadership on data quality and captured gains. An ERP project is not done when the tool ships. It starts when adoption becomes measurable and data becomes usable.