SharePoint vs M-Files: The Solution For AP Efficiency & Purchase Order Automation in Anaheim
Creating capabilities in your business operations is a critical first step toward digital transformation, back-office modernization, and giving your organization an upper hand in a growingly aggressive professional sector.
Paper-based systems and incoherent workflows with bottlenecks make collaboration, efficacy, perceptibility, and responsibility to stakeholders very complicated.
Through accounts payable mechanization, you can achieve dematerialized operations into your company and streamline tasks like purchase requisitions, invoicing, payment processing, procurement, and data logging processes.
Automating these kinds of organizational workflows produces more capacity in enterprise resource planning (ERP), greater cost reductions, and reformed application of your human resources.
In this manual, we’re examining a duo of the most prevalent platforms designed for AP proficiency and purchase order mechanization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our goal is to help you select the proper toolset and collaborate so you can develop and expedite your AP digital revamping.
But before we begin with our product review, let’s do a quick review of what purchase request digitization is and how it creates further capability for your AP processes.
What is Purchase Order Automation?
Purchase order automation is the process of utilizing business software with robotic technology, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) to mechanize the purchase order system and its corresponding undertakings.
Via mechanization, purchase requisitions could be mechanically transmitted to the relevant team to initiate the authorization process. After, once the order is approved, it is instinctively sent to the supplier.
Though this may not look like much at first glance, mechanizing the purchasing process abolishes the need for a physical process, tangible schemes, and streamlines the standard time-consuming workflow.
For example, with purchase order solution or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application, you can develop automated purchase requests that suppliers can identify and then have the details mechanically fused into your accounting platform.
This superficially small ability significantly expedites the workflow, dramatically reduces the need for human intervention, and thus, improves efficiency through your Accounts Payable section.
The Perks of AP and Purchase Order Automation
We talked about various of the gains of AP digitization in the preceding chapter, but just to make sure you get the point, let's dissect these advantages in absolute terms.
Mechanized data input and storage
Greater competence through further digitization and less by-hand interference
Greater accuracy because of less physical faults
Greater transparency into procedures through your mechanized processes
Current-time analytics, auditing, and reporting to continue to improve efficiencies
Reformed supply network and vendor connections and self-service portal
Improved ability to regulate for security and conformity
Since we’ve discussed what AP and purchase order automation is, how it operates, and why it’s important, let’s start our platform evaluation on Sharepoint versus M-Files.
Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review
Within this chapter, we’re reviewing a fundamental analysis between the pricing and capabilities of SharePoint as well as M-Files, followed by an in-depth analysis on their AP and purchase order mechanization qualities.
Basic Price and Features Breakdown
While this portion gives a good standard simultaneous evaluation, it doesn’t educate us on how these tools administer workflows like digital purchase order. Thus in this following portion, we’re giving an overview of each tool and how it manages this significant operation.
Microsoft SharePoint Overview
SharePoint is one of the most prominent and established enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS solutions, due to its deep connection with other prevalent Microsoft solutions like Outlook, Word, and Excel.
When it comes to purchase requisition mechanization, SharePoint sanctions you to handle all the problems you might be experiencing with your current, by-hand purchase request system.
Order Tracking
To initiate, by utilizing Microsoft SharePoint and combining Office 365 applications, team members could monitor purchase requisitions at all level from request authorizations to delivery.
Customization
SharePoint and Office 365 also empower your business to customize your electronic purchase order scheme to your individual instructions and needs.
Components you may custom tailor within SharePoint comprise of the format of the purchase requisition forms, role assignments, line items, multi-level approvals, and filters based on payment terms, location, type, and more.
Communication
SharePoint and Office 365 may also facilitate correspondence among divisions. As soon as the PO process has begun, SharePoint may actuate a programmed email to all relevant teams to alert them that the operation has commenced and once more when it’s carried out.
Interactive Dashboards
One more critical aspect of automation is the clarity into capability and workflow visibility. SharePoint delivers this by authorizing you to monitor purchase request progress via an interactive dashboard.
Through the dashboard setup, you can monitor purchase request history across sections, view the analysis of approval vs denial percentage, and track the state of POs in progress.
Vigorous Integrations
Moreover, SharePoint provides great adaptability in that it can integrate with most tools between departments for greater cooperation.
For instance, if a division presents a purchase request for a network printer; when the request is processed, SharePoint can automatically develop an entry in your finance solution for the new IT resource.
Now that we’ve seen what SharePoint is capable of in terms of aiding you in digitizing your AP tasks, let’s continue to M-Files.
M-Files Overview
M-Files is a robust enterprise content management (ECM) solution that presents both local, cloud solutions, or a hybrid adaptation determined by your company requirements.
Its interface is derived from the Windows Explorer web engine making it simple to figure out and execute for teams that are accustomed to the Windows ecosystem.
Moreover, M-Files offers advanced functionality that enables businesses to automate workflows and processes such as purchase order automation. Let’s examine those competencies.
Input
With M-Files you could capture invoices from primary or allocated locations and mechanize the gathering of essential data associated with your purchase requisition and authorization undertaking.
Data entry
As a continuation of the input aptitude, M-Files empowers clients to pinpoint and withdraw information from purchase requisition areas to promote the mechanization and conveying process. Furthermore, M-Files allows you to input any appropriate business codes, approval specifications and incorporates directory searches to help ensure precision during the process.
Matching and coding
As an advanced feature-set, M-Files may perform matching of POs and GL coding of non-PO statements in your ERP procedure to streamline structure and delivery.
Mechanized approvals
The M-Files system can regulate and mechanize as much of the authorization process as you wish. This involves managing, queues, routing, response, and aging records. Any purchase requisition that falls short of the authorization process can be revised physically and then restored into the mechanization flow for authorization.
Automatic storage of approved POs
As soon as authorization has been issued, purchase requisitions can be sent to finance automatically to conclude handling and storage in a main repository.
How Wave Can Aid You in Executing Your Purchase Order Automation Tool in Anaheim
Keeping your company competitive nowadays requires simplifying your operations and uprooting the bottlenecks from your workflows that work to diminish your capability and output. Additionally, it requires selecting the right business solutions to achieve your calculated growth aims.
At Wave, we can help by studying the essential pieces of your company and via step-by-step digital conversion and business process automation, reform them.
We apply a consolidation of solutions appertaining to your business necessities to digitize your repetitive processes around capturing, organizing, and registering data so that it's simple to track down and access whenever, from any location.
We can assist you in customizing your AP mechanization tool to fulfill your business's particular needs and we gladly work with over 60 industry-acknowledged ECM and DMS platforms including M-Files, SharePoint, OpenText, and Oracle.
If you’re interested in learning more, contact us today and we can set up a time to chat.