Culture
Finance and supply chain meet ServiceNow workflows
Few areas of business have faced more pressure over the last three years than finance and supply chain teams. Yet most are stuck managing this upheaval with manual activities and processes that haven’t changed much since the last enterprise resource planning (ERP) implementation.
The systems and tools these departments traditionally rely on lack the agility needed to excel in today’s business reality. That’s why we’re introducing ServiceNow Finance and Supply Chain Workflows.
Our customers asked us to step into this space with the same approach to innovation they know firsthand from our transformational work in IT, customer, and employee workflows—making work easier, faster, and more effective.
Increasing control and visibility
Our first focus area in Finance and Supply Chain Workflows is source-to-pay. Every company is looking to take cost out of their business operations. Indirect procurement is one of the biggest levers for doing so.
ServiceNow Source-to-Pay Operations automates processes and activities for internal and external teams involved in sourcing, procuring, and paying for the goods and services necessary to run the business.
The solution gives teams the control, visibility, and bandwidth they need to handle more procurement and sourcing requests using existing resources. This in turn enables organizations to consistently hit their procurement goals, such as sourcing from more sustainable suppliers, minimizing risk, and reducing total spend.
Agility is the new process optimization. Getting there requires getting everyone on the same page. You can’t waste effort and resources on manual tasks—there are too many other things to do. And it needs to be easy because everything can change quickly, including people, processes, customers, and opportunities.
Delivering 3 key outcomes
As we expand our workflow footprint in the finance and supply chain space, we’ll focus on delivering three key outcomes:
Unification: Many companies struggle to manage diverse and sprawling landscapes with processes that span multiple systems. This frustrates employees and can lead to suboptimal decisions and outcomes. With ServiceNow, you can unify people, processes, data, and technology across your entire organization into one easy-to-use experience. Everyone benefits from a single source of truth.
Simplification: Employees frequently wade from one system to another in a quest to get work done. The administrative overhead of remembering how to complete a task lengthens onboarding for new employees, aggravates experienced employees, and encourages out-of-process workarounds. ServiceNow helps simplify the way work gets done with a single environment and low-code tools that streamline everyday activities and eliminate technical debt.
Acceleration: Many organizations continue to rely on the processes they implemented a decade or more ago—even as their business changes or new systems and data sources are added. Employees must switch screens, manually compile data, and process every transaction. ServiceNow accelerates transaction throughput and employee productivity so people can accomplish more. AI and robotic process automation (RPA) eliminate routine, mundane tasks, freeing employees to focus on higher-value activities.
Unshackling agility
Most of us would agree that agility is the key to business success. If that’s true, what’s holding everyone back? Why do employees still default to emails, spreadsheets, and shared folders?
As it turns out, a lot of activities take place before and between transactions in any given business system: sourcing, ERP, and inventory, among others. Most companies choose to accept this process debt. Too often, it’s because they don’t have a choice—the technical debt of past customization decisions is killing their process agility.
Updates to processes inside ERP and similar systems often take too long to realize. Moving to a modern ERP environment would solve a lot of challenges, but getting there can be a huge undertaking. So employees revert to emails, spreadsheets, and everything else.
ServiceNow workflows deliver the process agility you need to create and capture new opportunities or respond to disruption in an increasingly winner-takes-most business environment.
Find out more about the benefits of Finance and Supply Chain Workflows.
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