SharePoint vs M-Files: The Tool For AP Efficiency & Purchase Order Automation in Lexington
Developing capabilities in your organizational workflows is a critical opening stage toward digital switch-over, back-office upgrading, and supplying your business an upper hand in a progressively competitive professional sector.
Paper-based systems and disjointed processes with bottlenecks make collaboration, efficacy, transparency, and liability to stakeholders notably difficult.
Through accounts payable automation, you could implement dematerialized operations into your company and simplify workflows like purchase requisitions, payment processing, procurement, invoicing, and data logging processes.
Automating these types of business processes generates more efficiency in enterprise resource planning (ERP), better expenditure cuts, and enhanced utilization of your personnel.
In this manual, we’re examining two of the most prevalent tools designed for AP efficiency and purchase requisition digitization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our goal is to aid you in selecting the right toolset and collaborate so you may augment and expedite your AP digital revamping.
But before we begin with our product analysis, let’s talk through what purchase order mechanization is and how it creates further productivity for your AP workflows.
What is Purchase Order Automation?
Purchase order automation is the concept of utilizing business software with artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and robotic technology to mechanize the purchase request process and its synonymous workflows.
Through automation, purchase requests may be spontaneously sent to the relevant team to start the authorization process. Then, once the order is authorized, it is automatically forwarded to the supplier.
Though this may not look like much at first glance, automating the procurement process eliminates the need for a physical process, materialized schemes, and simplifies the often labor-intensive workflow.
As an example, with purchase order solution or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application, you can create electronic purchase requisitions that suppliers can acknowledge and then have the data spontaneously incorporated into your accounting tool.
This seemingly minuscule aptitude substantially expedites the process, drastically lessens the demand for human interference, and therefore, improves productivity within your Accounts Payable department.
The Perks of AP and Purchase Order Automation
We covered a number of the advantages of AP automation in the previous portion, but to be certain that you understand, let's take these advantages apart in absolute terms.
Digitized data input and storage
Greater competence with more mechanization and less human interference
Greater reliability because of less human error
Greater perceptibility into procedures via digitized processes
Actual-time reporting, analytics, and auditing to continue to improve efficiencies
Enhanced logistics chain and merchant relationships and self-service portal
Greater ability to regulate for safety and amenability
So now that we’ve reviewed what AP and electronic purchase order is, how it operates, and why it’s vital, let’s get into our platform review on Sharepoint versus M-Files.
Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review
Coming in this portion, we’re reviewing a straightforward breakdown between the rate and capabilities of SharePoint as well as M-Files, followed by an extensive review on their AP and purchase request mechanization potential.
Basic Price and Features Breakdown
While this portion provides a fine conventional side-by-side analogy, it doesn’t tell us much about how these tools administer workflows such as digital purchase order. Thus in this following portion, we’re going to do a synopsis of each program and how it manages this essential operation.
Microsoft SharePoint Overview
SharePoint is one of the most prominent and established enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS tools, because of its close relation to different popular Microsoft solutions like Excel, Outlook, and Word.
In the context of purchase requisition automation, SharePoint allows you to address all the issues you might be experiencing with your current, physical purchase requisition system.
Order Tracking
To initiate, by employing Microsoft SharePoint and incorporating Office 365 programs, team members may oversee purchase orders at all phase from request approvals to delivery.
Customization
SharePoint and Office 365 also allow your company to customize your automated purchase requisition arrangement to your individual guidelines and requirements.
Components you could personalize within SharePoint involve the format of the purchase requisition forms, role assignments, line items, multi-level approvals, and filters based on location, type, payment terms, and more.
Communication
SharePoint and Office 365 could also promote communication between sectors. Once the PO procedure has commenced, SharePoint can trigger a programmed email to all respective groups to inform them that the operation has begun and once more as soon as it’s carried out.
Interactive Dashboards
A further important component of digitization is the clarity into capability and workflow transparency. SharePoint enables this by allowing you to monitor purchase request progress with an interactive dashboard.
With the dashboard system, you can monitor purchase order history throughout sections, view the evaluation of approval vs denial proportion, and follow the status of existing POs.
Robust Integrations
Moreover, SharePoint offers terrific flexibility in that it can incorporate with most solutions between departments for greater synergy.
For instance, if a branch submits a purchase request for a network printer; once the order is actioned, SharePoint can automatically generate an entry in your finance tool for the new IT resource.
Now that we’ve discussed what SharePoint is capable of in terms of assisting you in automating your AP processes, let’s move on to M-Files.
M-Files Overview
M-Files is a robust enterprise content management (ECM) solution that offers both on-premise, cloud solutions, or a hybrid version determined by your business demands.
Its interface is modeled off the Windows Explorer internet browser making it simple to understand and implement for departments that are comfortable with the Windows interface.
Additionally, M-Files provides state-of-the-art functionality that allows businesses to digitize operations and processes like purchase request automation. Let’s study those capabilities.
Input
With M-Files you could gather invoices from main or allocated sites and digitize the ingestion of significant data linked to your purchase order and confirmation processes.
Data entry
In addition to the input capability, M-Files enables clients to distinguish and pull out data from purchase requisition fields to promote the digitization and conveying process. Additionally, M-Files enables you to input any relevant company codes, validation terms and incorporates archive lookups to assist in guaranteeing veracity throughout the procedure.
Matching and coding
As a cutting-edge functional scope, M-Files may carry out conforming of POs and GL coding of non-PO invoices in your ERP procedure to simplify structure and delivery.
Mechanized approvals
The M-Files system can regulate and digitize as much of the approval procedure as you desire. This contains managing, routing, response, queues, and aging reports. Any purchase requisition that flunks the approval course can be corrected by hand and then reinstated into the automation flow for validation.
Automatic storage of approved POs
Once authorization has been issued, purchase requests can be forwarded to finance spontaneously to conclude development and storage in a main repository.
How Wave Can Help You Implement Your Purchase Order Automation Platform in Lexington
Keeping your organization fierce nowadays means simplifying your processes and uprooting the impasses from your systems that work to diminish your capability and output. Additionally, it involves choosing the appropriate business tools to achieve your calculated growth goals.
At Wave, we can help by studying the foundational pieces of your business and via gradual digital conversion and business process automation, transform them.
We use a consolidation of solutions based on your company necessities to automate your laborious workflows around collecting, organizing, and filing data so that it's simple to track down and use whenever, from any location.
We can help you to custom-tailor your AP mechanization solution to fulfill your company’s specific needs and we happily collaborate with upwards of 60 industry-recognized ECM and DMS platforms including SharePoint, OpenText, M-Files, and Oracle.
If you’re ready to learn more, contact us today and we can set up a time to chat.