A ProcureTech Business Case Hack

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Hi readers,

I hope you had a great week. Short and sweet this week as I’m vacationing with extended family.

📰 In this week’s edition:

• How to bolster your ProcureTech business cases and get your projects approved

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🌙 Sunday Night Note

When putting together a business case for ProcureTech, we often limit ourselves to benefits directly delivered by the tool in question.

For example, if implementing any kind of tool that reduces work/process cycle time, only the efficiency gains are documented in the business case (e.g. we believe we can save the equivalent of 1 full time employee's workload).

While this is interesting benefit, it misses the mark in 2 respects:

• It frames your ProcureTech project as a cost cutting project (e.g. you may have pressure to cut an employee to realize hard savings with your project).

• It fails to consider the indirect/secondary benefits that you can generate with the time you've just freed up.

While ProcureTech benefits are varied, there's almost always an efficiency component in a business case.

Thinking through how you will redeploy that time after freeing it up is the key to a strong ProcureTech business case.

For example, if implementing an AP Automation tool will reduce your Procurement team's workload by 20% (e.g. because they can be removed from the process of needing to manually coordinate exception resolution), you can redeploy that time to the highest value sourcing initiatives you’re not getting to today.

You can then assign the probable savings of those sourcing initiatives to your AP Automation project’s benefits to help justify it.

While these sourcing savings are not directly related to your AP Automation tool, the project is definitely the enabler.

By disconnecting your business case value levers from the actual piece of tech being delivered and using your foresight/vision to identify where you can generate value with the efficiency savings, you will make your business cases much more interesting and robust.

Have you tried this before in your company? What was the result? Let me know by leaving a comment.

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🌯 That’s a Wrap…

When you’re ready, here are 3 ways I can help:

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Till next time,

— Joël Collin-Demers

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