Basware Benchmarking: Taking Data (and You) to the Next Level

It’s Monday morning, you’re synching your FitBit for the workweek challenge and narrowing your eyes at coworkers across the aisle. This week you’re going to get it – you’re going to beat everyone at getting the most steps in per day. You’re even going to beat Maria over in AP who somehow manages to get 20,000 steps per day and excel at her work. She wins every week – but not this time because you’ve seen her stats and you know what you have to do to get ahead. That's what benchmarking is all about. 

The above scenario may be comical, but benchmarking has infiltrated our lives in many ways and we may not even realize how data-driven we’ve become. In the age of information, benchmarking is making sense of the seemingly endless stream of data so we can also be results-oriented.

Benchmarking is how we measure success

With big data fueling nearly every technical innovation, benchmarking has become commonplace in how we manage success against our goals – both professional and personal. From tracking friendly fitness competitions to monitoring quarterly numbers, applications that allow us to tap into our own historical data and the data of others help us know if we’re leading or falling behind. Now we can know where we stand among our competition, if the position is good or bad, and what we need to do to change it. As the user experience between consumer and business tools melds, more benchmarking technology is making its way into procure to pay.

Data is always the key

At Basware, data is core to our message to customers because future success is so dependent on building a data set which you will then layer with advanced analytics, machine learning and artificial intelligence to gain a competitive advantage and break away from the pack. As the world’s largest open business network, we harvest data across millions of transactions – an ability unique to the Basware offering – to bring our customers even more data to leverage through the power of benchmarking.

Benchmarking is critical to ensuring ROI

In our recent product release, we added benchmarking capabilities to our out-of-the-box analytics suite to help customers track their success across the procure-to-pay process. With peer benchmarking, companies can see if they are aligned with the best performers in certain categories using the key performance indicators (KPIs) Basware has identified to be the key measurements of success in those areas, based on 30 years of industry expertise. These KPIs include e-invoice rate, spend under control, automated invoice processing and payment times. Visibility into the aggregated performance levels of the highest performing companies helps procurement and AP departments in setting targets that are ambitious but achievable, so they can drive success and generate ROI. Peer benchmarks are updated dynamically, so everyone can follow how leading companies are progressing and ensure they will be in a trajectory of constant improvement.