Example: purchase to pay

A full walk through, from "why are purchase orders slow?" to a small pilot. You can follow along with the purchase to pay demo.

This example follows a procurement lead who wants to know why purchase orders take so long. You can follow along: ask your agent to “set up the purchase to pay demo”, and your numbers will match.

The question

Our purchase orders take too long from request to payment. Where does the time go, and what could we change?

Getting the data

In real life your agent asks which system you use. For SAP it lists the tables to export, such as purchase orders, goods receipts, invoices and payments. See What to export from SAP. For Dynamics 365 Business Central, see Dynamics 365.

In the demo, the data is already there: 1,500 purchase orders.

The first read

Your agent gives you a short summary and opens the browser view. On the Overview you see the size of the work, the typical time from start to finish, and a ranked list of what stands out.

Digging in

1. Find the slow hand-off. Open Process and switch to Time. The red arrow into approval stands out. Click the approval step to see how many orders reach it and where they come from.

2. Check whether it is every order or some. Add + Filter → At least or at most a value for orders of 25,000 or more. Approval for these orders takes 6 to 14 days. Remove the filter and the delay mostly disappears.

3. Find out who. Ask your agent:

Who handles approval for the big orders?

It is one person. Every large order waits in one queue.

4. Look for rework and errors. Ask:

Is anything paid twice? Which vendors cause the most rework?

You find 14 invoices paid twice, and one vendor whose invoices often fail the price check and need a price change before they can be paid. That vendor shows up as a Driver on the Overview.

5. Put a value on it. If the data has an order amount, ask “how much money sits in the slow orders?”. glasstarn shows the value of the items involved. This is not a loss, it is what is waiting.

Deciding what to change

Ask your agent:

What could we remove or simplify before we automate anything? Then which steps could an agent help with?

A good set of ideas from this data:

Simplify approval. Raise the threshold, or add a second approver for large orders, so one person is not the bottleneck.
Stop double payments. Add a duplicate check before payment. A rule can do this, no agent needed.
Fix the price problem at the source. Update that vendor’s prices in the system, so invoices stop failing the check.
Agent candidate. An agent could prepare each approval with the order, the budget and the vendor history, so the approver decides faster. A person still approves.

Your agent gives these in the chat, each with the number behind it, and the page shows the orders each one is about. Nothing is approved or deployed. See Improve.

Checking it worked

After the change, export the new period and ask your agent to compare it with the period before. See BPMN and before and after.