Spend Matters Compass Research: Series Three

Going back five years, very few procurement groups could passionately support the adoption of ERP procurement and sourcing applications within their organizations. At the time, both Oracle and SAP were long on marketing and vision, but short on global-scale references for implementations, not to mention broad solution coverage (i.e., supporting the entire source-to-pay process). But flash forward a number of years, and the ERP procurement decision has become far more complicated. This Spend Matters Compass research brief provides high-level context as well as a decision framework to help companies assess when ERP or best of breed may be more appropriate for specific areas. In this analysis, we analyze SAP's and Oracle's capabilities in the following functional areas: spend visibility, supplier information management and e-sourcing.
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The ERP source-to-pay landscape has spent the last decade transforming itself from a blank canvas to a partially complete montage, with varying degrees of elegance and execution. Despite the fact that both Oracle and SAP have greatly evolved their solution sets in this time, both acknowledge that gaps remain (e.g., supplier enablement and invoice automation) through their actions to engage preferred partners. Yet it’s now possible to take an approach to procurement and supply management systems that standardize on ERP vendor platforms by filling in the gaps along the way, rather than putting best-of-breed as the front and center component of a procure-to-pay (P2P) architecture (which also remains an option, for those who want the most innovative capabilities). This analysis examines distinct areas where third-party solution providers (both ERP partners and non-partners) can help round out ERP capabilities including: supplier onboarding, catalog and master data management (MDM) and invoice automation/connectivity.

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