SharePoint vs M-Files: The Platform For AP Proficiency & Purchase Order Automation in Arlington
Creating capabilities in your organizational workflows is a critical opening phase toward digital conversion, back-office modernization, and giving your organization an upper hand in a growingly competitive professional landscape.
Paper-based arrangements and incoherent processes with logjams make collaboration, efficiency, visibility, and responsibility to partners very complex.
Through accounts payable mechanization, you could achieve paperless arrangements into your business and streamline duties like purchase requests, procurement, invoicing, payment processing, and data entry workflows.
Mechanizing these kinds of company processes generates more proficiency in enterprise resource planning (ERP), greater cost savings, and improved application of your human resources.
Included in this manual, we’re reviewing a duo of the most popular tools geared toward AP proficiency and purchase order digitization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our goal is to assist you in selecting the right tech stack and partner so you can augment and expedite your AP digital switch-over.
But before we begin with our product analysis, let’s discuss what purchase request mechanization is and how it generates further capability for your AP operations.
What is Purchase Order Automation?
Purchase order automation is the concept of employing business solutions through artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), and robotic technology to automate the purchase requisition operation and its related workflows.
By means of automation, purchase orders can be automatically forwarded to the fitting team to initiate the validation process. Then, immediately after the requisition is approved, it is mechanically forwarded to the merchant.
Although this may not appear to be significant at first glance, automating the procurement procedure abolishes the need for a physical process, materialized schemes, and simplifies the often time-consuming workflow.
As an example, with purchase requisition solution or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application, you can create digital purchase requisitions that suppliers can comprehend followed by having the information spontaneously incorporated into your accounting platform.
This presumably small capability significantly streamlines the workflow, dramatically lessens the requirement for human intervention, and therefore, amplifies productivity through your Accounts Payable division.
The Advantages of AP and Purchase Order Automation
We talked about a number of the advantages of AP automation in the previous portion, but just to make sure you get the idea, let's break these benefits down in absolute terms.
Mechanized data entry and storage
Improved efficiency with extra mechanization and less by-hand meddling
Improved reliability on account of less human faults
Increased perceptibility into operations with your mechanized processes
Real-time reporting, analytics, and auditing to sustain the betterment of capacities
Improved distribution process and vendor connections and self-managed portal
Improved ability to monitor for safety and compliance
So now that we’ve reviewed what AP and purchase order automation is, how it works, and why it’s vital, let’s start our software review on Sharepoint vs M-Files.
Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review
In this portion, we’re examining a straightforward evaluation between the pricing and capabilities of SharePoint along with M-Files, and then an in-depth analysis on their AP and purchase requisition mechanization potential.
Basic Price and Features Breakdown
Although this section gives a decent conventional side-by-side analogy, it doesn’t tell us much about how these programs handle workflows namely purchase order automation. Thus in this succeeding chapter, we’re going to do a summary of each tool and how it administers this important operation.
Microsoft SharePoint Overview
SharePoint is amongst the most prominent and established enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS platforms, because of its close relation to other famed Microsoft tools like Word, Excel, and Outlook.
In the context of purchase order digitization, SharePoint allows you to resolve all the issues you may be confronting with your present-day, physical purchase request arrangement.
Order Tracking
To initiate, by employing Microsoft SharePoint and incorporating Office 365 programs, team members can monitor purchase requisitions at any level from request confirmations to delivery.
Customization
SharePoint and Office 365 also allow your organization to adapt your digital purchase request scheme to your individual directions and requirements.
Elements you may individualize within SharePoint involve the format of the purchase order forms, multi-level approvals, role assignments, line items, and filters attributed to location, type, payment terms, and more.
Communication
SharePoint and Office 365 may also further communication among divisions. As soon as the PO procedure has begun, SharePoint can actuate an automated email to all relevant parties to notify them that the procedure has started and again once it’s complete.
Interactive Dashboards
Another significant aspect of automation is the foresight into efficiency and workflow transparency. SharePoint delivers this by authorizing you to monitor purchase requisition progress with an interactive dashboard.
Via the dashboard framework, you could oversee purchase request history across sections, distinguish the evaluation of approval vs denial percentage, and follow the state of POs in progress.
Robust Integrations
SharePoint also offers great flexibility in that it can work with with most solutions among departments for improved synergy.
For instance, if a department submits a purchase requisition for a network printer; once the order is processed, SharePoint can automatically develop an entry in your finance solution for the new IT asset.
Now that we’ve seen what SharePoint is capable of in terms of aiding you in digitizing your AP workflows, let’s move on to M-Files.
M-Files Overview
M-Files is a vigorous enterprise content management (ECM) tool that provides both local, cloud solutions, or a hybrid adaptation determined by your organizational needs.
Its interface is derived from the Windows Explorer internet browser making it easy to figure out and implement for departments that are used to the Windows ecosystem.
Moreover, M-Files provides advanced functionality that enables organizations to automate workflows and processes suchlike purchase request automation. Let’s examine those aptitudes.
Input
With M-Files you can capture invoices from main or assigned areas and mechanize the gathering of essential data associated with your purchase requisition and confirmation undertaking.
Data entry
As an extension of the input capability, M-Files enables users to pinpoint and extract data from purchase requisition fields to promote the automation and routing process. Moreover, M-Files allows you to input any pertinent company rules, confirmation details and contains database lookups to assist in guaranteeing precision across the operation.
Matching and coding
As a state-of-the-art feature-set, M-Files can carry out matching of POs and GL coding of non-PO billing statements in your ERP procedure to streamline organization and transmission.
Automated approvals
The M-Files system can manage and mechanize as much of the confirmation process as you desire. This includes handling, queues, routing, response, and aging records. Any purchase request that falls short of the authorization course can be corrected manually and then reinstated into the mechanization flow for authorization.
Automatic storage of approved POs
As soon as authorization has been granted, purchase requisitions can be sent to finance automatically to conclude development and storage in a primary database.
How Wave Can Aid You in Executing Your Purchase Order Automation Platform in Arlington
Keeping your organization competitive nowadays means rationalizing your operations and eliminating the hindrances from your undertakings that mitigate your efficiency and productivity. It also means selecting the appropriate business solutions to achieve your calculated growth aims.
At Wave, we can assist by examining the essential aspects of your company and via incremental digital conversion and business system automation, revamp them.
We use a consolidation of solutions based on your business necessities to automate your tedious workflows around capturing, organizing, and registering data so that it's easy to track down and utilize whenever, from wherever.
We can help you to custom-tailor your AP automation solution to fulfill your business's particular demands and we willingly go along with upwards of 60 industry-accepted ECM and DMS solutions including SharePoint, OpenText, M-Files, and Oracle.
If you’re interested in learning more, reach out today and we can schedule a time to chat.