PAVE, short for Procurement Automation & Vendor Enablement, is a strategic add-on to Cleo’s  ecosystem integration platform, Cleo Integration Cloud , powering the supply chains of 4,100 companies worldwide. By standardizing and centralizing supplier interactions via an online portal, PAVE enables manufacturers to extend their supply chain to every non-integrated supplier regardless of  API or EDI  , empowering  your entire procurement ecosystem. 

PAVE enables you to bring the outcomes of automation, standardization, visibility, and alerting  to your suppliers without having to stand up an independent integration solution.

PAVE is a modern procurement portal that allows your suppliers to manage all steps of the procurement process from accepting and acknowledging orders, to issuing Advanced Shipping notifications and generating invoices. A prebuilt bridge from PAVE to CIC allows for end-to-end integration to your ERP so you can realize API / EDI automation where you are likely using emailed PDFs or spreadsheets today.

In short, yes. While the number of orders you issue to a smaller, non-integrated supplier may be lower in comparison to your largest vendors, the challenges around manual intervention, inaccuracies and inefficiencies in handling procurement this way, illustrate the immediate benefits of a portal designed for procurement automation.

Manual and fractured processes take more time, cost more money, and consume skilled resources that are better utilized on the business. 

PAVE replaces phones, faxes, and emails to manage orders, acknowledgments, shipments, and invoicing. It automates processes that are extremely time-consuming, error-prone, and difficult to track.

According to industry data, the downsides of manual procurement processes with non-integrated suppliers can be severe

• Up to 25x higher cost to process an order
• Up to 60% longer cash cycle time
• Up to 40% more errors
• Up to 50% higher people costs

Some of the other pains that come from manually managing procurement processes are as follows: 

• Reduces productivity & increase unpredictability
• Pulls focus away from strategic business initiatives
• Increases costs exponentially vs EDI
• Adds complexity to procurement and distribution
• Slows down the P2P cycle
• Demands far greater lead time 
• Impacts days payable outstanding KPI
• Expands risk vector for security event

PAVE provides a single point to integrate all of your vendor interactions needed in procurement from your ERP to your supplier ecosystem.  

A typical Purchase Order-to-Order Acknowledgement process will look something like the following: 

• You issue an EDI 850 purchase order to your supplier
• The EDI 850 is created in your ERP
• The EDI 850 is automatically sent through CIC and populates PAVE with the new purchase order 
• PAVE alerts your supplier about the new order 
• Your supplier logs into CIC PAVE and reviews the order
• The supplier then uses PAVE to generate and send an order acknowledgement 
• PAVE uses the information provided by the supplier to generate an EDI 855 Purchase Order Acknowledgment which is then transformed in CIC and integrated into your ERP

Challenge with manual P2P:

Reduces productivity & increase unpredictability

Pulls focus away from strategic business initiatives

Benefit of CIC PAVE:

Process standardization of Increases efficiency and allows for reallocation of strategic resources to focus on business priorities instead of manual intervention

Challenge with manual P2P:

Increases costs exponentially vs EDI

Slows down the P2P cycle

Benefit of CIC PAVE:

Automation saves costs by reducing effort, eliminating errors, and adding velocity to your procurement processes

Challenge with manual P2P:

Demands far greater lead time

Impacts days payable outstanding KPI

Benefit of CIC PAVE:

Increases lead time and protects KPIS by eliminating gaps, inaccuracies, and inefficiencies on the supplier side through a single point of interaction and control

Challenge with manual P2P:

Expands risk vector for security event

Benefit of CIC PAVE:

Downloading documents from email is the most common method of manual procurement today. This greatly increases the likelihood of human error and the potential of a security incident such as ransomware.

Some of the technical benefits you can realize are:

• Automatically collecting real-time data from each transaction that is then stored in a centralized location where users can easily access and analyze it
• Sending timely order updates or other changes to suppliers 
• Producing standardized transactions that enable automated integration into your ERP
• Empowering suppliers to get “EDI-capable” without actually needing EDI expertise or investments.