🚀 How ODS Helps ServiceNow Customers Improve Procurement Efficiency with Source-To-Pay
With over 25 Years of first-hand Procurement wisdom, ODS uses ServiceNow Source-to-Pay to provide real-time, consolidated visibility to provide new insights. By enhancing spend optimization and enabling organizations to identify cost-saving opportunities they eliminate inefficiencies. With enhanced data accuracy and consistency, customers can make better strategic sourcing decisions, ultimately lowering spend and improving financial performance.
📊 Some Procurement Efficiencies KPIs
Supplier Onboarding Duration
Slow onboarding delays everything: sourcing, contracting, and even project starts. Reducing onboarding time frees up resources, accelerates time-to-source, and builds early supplier trust. It’s also a clear marker of process agility.
Sourcing Cycle Time
How fast can Procurement turn business demand into a contract-ready supplier? This KPI measures end-to-end responsiveness. Speed here improves cash flow, helps meet project deadlines, and reduces rogue buying due to perceived delays.
Sourcing Governance Compliance Rate
Great sourcing isn’t just fast — it has to be defensible. This KPI ensures every sourcing event clears required checkpoints like spend authority, DEI goals, risk reviews, and documentation. High compliance reduces audit risk and protects brand reputation.
eSourcing Automation Coverage
Manual RFx processes are slow, inconsistent, and hard to scale. Automating events through a sourcing workspace increases speed, standardization, and data visibility. This KPI tracks how much of your sourcing is truly digital — a key driver of strategic efficiency.
Internal Stakeholder Satisfaction
If your internal business partners find procurement slow, confusing, or hard to work with, they’ll work around it. This KPI captures how aligned procurement is with business needs. High scores correlate with greater adoption, less maverick spend, and better sourcing outcomes.
📘 Case Study: Accelerating Procurement Efficiency with ServiceNow S2P & ODS
Background
A global healthcare organization with 30,000 employees relied heavily on spreadsheets, emails, and outdated intake forms to manage sourcing and procurement intake. Each business unit had its own way of engaging Procurement, and buyers spent more time chasing down information than running sourcing events.
Requests took too long to fulfill. Stakeholders complained. And Procurement found itself constantly in reactive mode — unable to keep up with demand or demonstrate value beyond cost savings. Leadership knew they needed a modern solution, but platform implementation alone wouldn’t solve the problem. That’s where ODS came in.
The Challenge
Procurement leaders faced growing pressure to scale their operations without growing headcount. Key inefficiencies included:
Slow supplier onboarding — with cycle times exceeding 30 days
Sourcing cycles that stretched over 6 weeks
Low automation — less than 25% of sourcing events used digital RFx tools
Governance gaps — with buyers regularly bypassing policy checks
Poor internal satisfaction — stakeholders rated Procurement 6.1 out of 10 in a recent survey
The Solution: A Modern Framework for Procurement Efficiency
ODS restructured the onboarding workflow with milestone tracking and SLA dashboards. Automated compliance checks and task routing reduced onboarding time from 32 days to 13 days, eliminating bottlenecks and freeing up buyers to focus on sourcing.
ODS introduced sourcing templates, guided intake forms, and role-based RFx workspaces to compress event timelines. Sourcing cycle time dropped from 42 days to 19 days, enabling Procurement to support more projects without adding headcount.
By embedding policy checkpoints — including ESG, DEI, and spend authority validations — directly into the sourcing workflow, ODS helped boost sourcing governance compliance to 99%, reducing audit risk and increasing executive trust.
Within 9 months, the team moved from manual spreadsheets to running 72% of sourcing events entirely within the eSourcing workspace, giving them better supplier analytics, faster evaluations, and full award traceability.
Perhaps the biggest shift came from the business. With faster cycle times, clearer intake, and more transparency, internal stakeholder satisfaction climbed from 6.1 to 8.4 out of 10, transforming Procurement from a bottleneck to a valued partner.
The Result:
The Procurement reduced sourcing cycle time by over 50%, handled more demand with fewer escalations, and dramatically improved internal alignment. By applying ODS’s structured framework and KPI-driven execution, Procurement proved that operational excellence is just as powerful as cost savings.