Larger organisations tend to use enterprise level ERP systems such as SAP and Oracle, neither of which are particularly user-friendly. In fact, the average person who only uses them to request, approve or receive goods and services will usually find them cumbersome to the point that they find ways around them.

Organisations typically react to this by offering solutions such as punch-out catalogues and P-cards, or even third-party integrators and BPO to deal with tail spend.

Smaller and medium-sized organisations either don't have an ERP system (particularly for rapidly scaling startups), or they have a sales / accounts-oriented solution like Xero, Sage or Netsuite.

In all of these situations, there isn't really much opportunity to have visibility of requisition and order tracking, as well as what is being spent against which budget in a format easily visible to users and budget holders.

My guest this week is the CEO of Canadian scale-up Procurify, who are making waves through their super user-friendly P2P software which facilitates a more visible "spend culture" in organisations through its smartphone app first technology and easy to user interface.

2:14

Aman begins the interview by walking us through what he views as being a good corporate spend culture, and examples of where it can easily go wrong.

5:47

We explore the differences between a healthy corporate culture of spend transparency vs. a more controlling, top-down approach of strict spend control, and how the former can result in a much more autonomy and less bureaucracy.

9:35

Uncontrolled spend vs. transparent spend - what is the difference and what can cause the former vs. the latter?

16:00

We look into two examples: A rapidly growing company that has no ERP system vs. a well-established organisation that has a legacy ERP system in place that does not really cater well to procurement's needs. I ask Aman how Procurify's system can drive benefits and what time savings this typically provides.

22:18

What to do if you already have an existing, legacy ERP system in place? If this has a finance module, what options are there to use a P2P system such as Procurify that has been designed with procurement in mind when there is still a need to use legacy systems for accounts and invoice processing?

25:56

Simple P2P functions such as approvals of requisitions and POs and performing goods receipts have only fairly recently become commonplace via mobile app, whereas travel & expense software has had functionality to submit reports in an app for years. I ask for Aman's thoughts around why this has taken so long to catch up.

29:27

How Aman sees Procurify's product as just a tool which can help as an enabler of how organisations can succeed through company culture and mindset.

Procurify website