SharePoint vs M-Files: The Solution For AP Productivity & Purchase Order Automation in Oklahoma City

Developing competencies in your organizational processes is a pivotal opening phase toward digital transformation, back-office modernization, and giving your organization an advantage in a progressively competitive professional landscape.

Tangible arrangements and disjointed processes with bottlenecks make synergy, productivity, perceptibility, and responsibility to partners quite complex.

By means of accounts payable mechanization, you could implement dematerialized arrangements into your business and simplify workflows like purchase orders, invoicing, payment processing, procurement, and data input processes.

Mechanizing these types of business operations produces more efficiency in enterprise resource planning (ERP), higher cost savings, and enhanced application of your personnel.

Included in this handbook, we’re reviewing a couple of the most prevalent platforms geared toward AP proficiency and purchase order digitization: SharePoint and M-Files. Our objective is to assist you in selecting the proper solutions stack and cooperate so you could augment and accelerate your AP digital transformation.

But prior to starting our product analysis, let’s discuss what purchase order automation is and how it creates higher capability for your AP workflows.

What is Purchase Order Automation?

Purchase order automation is the process of using business solutions via robotic technology, artificial intelligence (AI), and machine learning (ML) to mechanize the purchase requisition operation and its corresponding undertakings.

Via digitization, purchase requests could be automatically transmitted to the relevant team to begin the approval process. Later, once the order is approved, it is instinctively forwarded to the merchant.

Though this may not look like much at first glance, mechanizing the procurement procedure removes the necessity for a physical process, paper-based systems, and expedites the usual laborious workflow.

For example, with purchase order software or your Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) application, you can develop electronic purchase orders that contractors can acknowledge and then have the information automatically integrated into your accounting tool.

This seemingly minor aptitude significantly streamlines the process, dramatically reduces the demand for manual intervention, and thus, improves productivity inside your Accounts Payable division.

The Advantages of AP and Purchase Order Automation

We covered various of the advantages of AP digitization in the previous portion, but to be certain that you get the idea, let's break these benefits down in absolute terms.

• Digitized data logging and storage

• Enhanced efficiency through more automation and less by-hand intervention

• Enhanced reliability due to less physical faults

• Greater visibility into operations through your mechanized tasks

• Real-time reporting, analytics, and auditing to sustain the betterment of capacities

• Enhanced logistics chain and supplier relationships and self-managed portal

• Enhanced aptitude to monitor for safety and compliance

So now that we’ve gone over what AP and digital purchase order is, how it functions, and why it’s vital, let’s start our software evaluation on Sharepoint as opposed to M-Files.

Microsoft SharePoint Online vs M-Files Review

In this portion, we’re reviewing a fundamental analysis between the costing and competencies of SharePoint along with M-Files, followed by an in-depth analysis on their AP and purchase order digitization qualities.

Basic Price and Features Breakdown

Though this chapter provides a decent standard simultaneous evaluation, it doesn’t tell us much about how these programs manage tasks like purchase order automation. Therefore in this succeeding section, we’re giving a summary of each tool and how it handles this important undertaking.

Microsoft SharePoint Overview

SharePoint is one of the more widely known and established enterprise content management (ECM) and DMS solutions, owing to its deep connection with other famed Microsoft solutions like Word, Excel, and Outlook.

In the context of purchase request automation, SharePoint sanctions you to address the entirety of problems you could be confronting with your existing, by-hand purchase requisition scheme.

Order Tracking

To initiate, by using Microsoft SharePoint and combining Office 365 programs, personnel may oversee purchase orders at every level from request confirmations to delivery.

Customization

SharePoint and Office 365 also allow your organization to tailor your digital purchase requisition arrangement to your specific guidelines and requirements.

Elements you can individualize within SharePoint involve the layout of the purchase requisition forms, role assignments, line items, multi-level approvals, and filters appertaining to type, payment terms, location, and more.

Communication

SharePoint and Office 365 could also further connection among divisions. Once the PO procedure has commenced, SharePoint could trigger a programmed email to all appropriate groups to alert them that the procedure has started and once more when it’s complete.

Interactive Dashboards

Another important component of digitization is the foresight into capability and workflow transparency. SharePoint delivers this by permitting you to supervise purchase request progress with an interactive dashboard.

With the dashboard framework, you can monitor purchase requisition history across departments, distinguish the evaluation of approval vs denial ratio, and monitor the state of ongoing POs.

Vigorous Integrations

Furthermore, SharePoint provides superb versatility in that it can integrate with most tools between departments for improved collaboration.

Such as, if a division delivers a purchase order for a network printer; as soon as the requisition is handled, SharePoint can automatically produce an entry in your finance tool for the new IT resource.

Now that we’ve seen what SharePoint can do in terms of aiding you in digitizing your AP workflows, let’s continue to M-Files.

M-Files Overview

M-Files is a robust enterprise content management (ECM) system that offers both local, cloud solutions, or a hybrid variant contingent on your business needs.

Its interface is based off of the Windows Explorer web engine making it simple to understand and execute for departments that are accustomed to the Windows operating system.

Moreover, M-Files offers state-of-the-art functionality that empowers companies to digitize tasks and processes like purchase requisition automation. Let’s study those aptitudes.

Input

With M-Files you may capture invoices from primary or allocated locations and automate the collection of essential data linked to your purchase requisition and authorization undertaking.

Data entry

In addition to the input aptitude, M-Files empowers customers to distinguish and withdraw information from purchase request fields to facilitate the automation and transmission process. Additionally, M-Files allows you to input any relevant organizational rules, confirmation specifications and incorporates directory searches to help ensure veracity across the operation.

Matching and coding

As a cutting-edge functional scope, M-Files can perform matching of POs and GL coding of non-PO statements in your ERP procedure to simplify structure and delivery.

Mechanized approvals

The M-Files platform can manage and digitize as much of the confirmation process as you wish. This includes overseeing, routing, response, queues, and aging accounts. Any purchase order that fails the approval course can be revised by hand and then restored into the mechanization flow for approval.

Automatic storage of approved POs

As soon as approval has been granted, purchase orders can be forwarded to finance spontaneously to wrap up handling and storage in a primary cache.

How Wave Can Aid You in Executing Your Purchase Order Automation Platform in Oklahoma City

Keeping your organization cutthroat these days requires rationalizing your operations and removing the impasses from your systems that mitigate your proficiency and productivity. It also involves choosing the right business solutions to accomplish your calculated growth aims.

At Wave, we can help by examining the fundamental aspects of your organization and with gradual digital conversion and organizational process automation, revamp them.

We apply a combination of solutions in accordance with your business requirements to digitize your tedious processes around collecting, organizing, and cataloging data so that it's easy to locate and utilize at any time, from anywhere.

We can help you to custom-tailor your AP digitization solution to satisfy your company’s precise requirements and we gladly go along with upwards of 60 industry-recognized ECM and DMS platforms including SharePoint, OpenText, M-Files, and Oracle.

If you’re ready to learn more, contact us today and we can arrange a time to chat.