Last month's eWorld Purchasing & Supply event highlighted an interesting phenomena in the world of procurement vendors that must give a lot of potential customers pause for thought - the odd fact that so many of those on show only provided one part of the full source-to-pay cycle.

From a vendor point of view, it’s easy to see why just delivering solutions for electronic sourcing would make for an attractive business proposition. Consultants with strong category management skills can quickly and easily leverage the growing popularity of electronic sourcing in an area that is quite technology light in comparison to P2P and that is much easier to deploy – far fewer users, suppliers, rules and processes to worry about. What’s more, the sales process is shorter and the ROI case more compelling in the near term, with paper savings realised almost immediately.

So it’s little wonder that over 50% of the exhibitors at the show focused exclusively on this end of the market!

From a customer point of view, however, it’s a situation that points to the failings of some procurement programmes.

Without an enterprise-wide purchase-to-pay system in place to create a compliant purchasing environment and bring all employee spend under management, many of those shiny contract dollar, pound and euro savings will leak away through maverick spend. P2P crystalises the notional ROI from eSourcing and then further creates the management information to drive future, ever more effective strategic sourcing activity.

Building a world class purchasing environment means ensuring the two halves – sourcing and purchase-to-pay – are tightly interlinked. And while that could potentially be achieved with a mix of partners, an experienced vendor with a single team and platform to tick all the boxes must make sense in delivering joined up procurement.