Thinking outside of the ERP box benefits your organization by giving you opportunities to fill the ERP gaps, costing your company time, money, and opportunity. In the past, the pendulum has swung from companies adopting best-of-breed solutions to opting for large, enterprise solutions with lots of bells and whistles. The reason for this shift is not hard to decipher; software company consolidation and the resulting expanded application pool make these enterprise systems an easy choice for CIOs and procurement managers.
However, the metaphorical pendulum is once again swinging back towards greater adoption of best-of-breed solutions, this time to complement, not replace, ERPs and other ubiquitous enterprise software platforms. The one-size-fits-all model may be attractive to IT and procurement decision-makers, but the operational and back-office support teams can be short-changed by these systems with significant functional gaps that are not being filled.
ERPs as a Whole Solution
Many organizations lean towards only using a multifaceted ERP as a back-office solution. While this can work for some organizations, ERPs that exactly fit your organization’s specifications are few and far between. Plus, there is an even smaller chance of you finding the right one in the sea of options. Additionally, some organizations can make ERPs work for their full functionality by paying for expensive software tweaks and upgrades, but this can be costly and take a lot of time.
Although ERPs have branched out and offer a multitude of solutions that may include some of the functions that your organization needs, they may not have the ability to do the same things as best-of-breed solutions. However, it all comes down to what is most important for your organization when choosing a back-office solution.
Choosing Solutions
When looking to address a particular business problem, take advantage of opportunities to become more efficient, or mitigate the effects of unforeseen challenges presented by recent events such as the global pandemic and increasing frequency of cyber attacks. Look for “best-of-breed” solutions that are better equipped and flexible to address those needs. These “complementary” applications exist and co-exist with most enterprise solutions and can bridge functional gaps to drive tremendous operational and economic value without the expense and risk of customizing your enterprise’s “out-of-the-box” systems. And if you switch or upgrade platforms, the solution follows.
Get Started
There are a host of cloud-based solutions that you can quickly deploy and integrate with your system of record that will allow you to bridge gaps and address unique issues in the financial back office.
Whether you are trying to streamline vendor management activities, implement a vendor self-service structure, or take on the hybrid/remote workforce model without any loss of productivity, there are best-of-breed solutions to help:
- Vendor Portal
- Payment Inquiry
- Invoice Submission
- Dispute Submission & Tracking
- Vendor Onboarding
- New vendor data & document collection
- TIN check and compliance validations
- COI submission, approval, and expiration tracking
- Diversity status, compliance
- Existing vendor updates
- AP Automation
- Workflow management
- Data Capture & Document Assembly
- Remote Processing
- PO matching
- non-PO approvals and exception processing
- PO Dispatch and Update
- Automatically dispatch POs to your vendor
- Update POs as changes occur
- Proactively request delivery updates from vendors in critical supply chains
- Dynamic Discounting
- Buyer-generated offers for early payment for discounts on invoices
- ERP and Systems Integrations
- Multiple integration methodologies to ANY back-end system
- Cloud-hosted, single-tenant configurations
- Single-tenant cloud deployments for maximum configurability
- High levels of security for data
ICG offers these solutions and more in a customizable, modular format perfect for any organization looking to fill the gaps that ERPs leave. If your organization’s ERP has any shortcomings, contact ICG today for more information or a demonstration of one of our comprehensive best-of-breed solutions.