“ You can invest as much as you want in emerging technologies , but if your people are not adopting them , then what ' s the point ?
SAURABH GUPTA PRESIDENT OF RESEARCH AND BUSINESS OPERATIONS , HFS RESEARCH
Looking to the Future … Reflecting on the history of S2P , Gupta explains that “ for a very long time , S2P has been a very basic process , everybody had to buy goods and services to do their businesses . So in a way , it has been one of the most embedded processes of all time . What we started to see in the late 1990s was a lot of centralisation of S2P instead of every geography and every business unit doing their own thing . We also started to see more and more technology interventions - SAP and then SAP Ariba and those kinds of tools started to come up to help the entire process .
“ Then in the early two-thousands , we started to see a huge advent in offshoring , which was largely driven by labour arbitrage , but essentially finding the same skills at a lower price , especially the P2P downstream transactional activities . After I would say 2005 to 2010 , we started to see a lot of process improvements , Lean , Six Sigma , those kinds of things entering the industry .”
However , in the last ten years , Gupta highlights digital ’ s domination of the industry . “ It has been about how you use digital technologies from intelligent
92 July 2021