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Solution · ProcurementStop debating maverick spend from anecdotes: measure it from SAP event data every month
P2P process mining: maverick spend and real touchless rate
Process mining on your SAP purchase-to-pay events measures off-contract buying, retroactive POs, rework loops and the real touchless rate, and feeds a monthly review with owners and actions.
Executive summary
Nobody knows what share of purchases bypass contracts and POs, or how often an invoice is touched. Measure it monthly.
Mientha builds a purchase-to-pay process app on UiPath Process Mining from the events your SAP system already records, from requisition to payment.
Off-contract buying is measured at item level, per category, supplier, region and store, instead of estimated quarterly at vendor level.
Power BI review pack; Microsoft Lists findings register; UiPath Automation Hub pipeline
Business problem
Process intelligence
Indirect procurement in a store network is a long tail by design: shelving, refrigeration repairs, cleaning, energy, marketing print. Central procurement negotiates framework contracts for the large categories and sets a rule that reads well on paper: request, purchase order, goods receipt, invoice. Under time pressure the sequence turns around: the goods arrive, the invoice arrives, and the purchase order is created afterwards with the invoice amount as the price, if at all.
Three groups pay for this. The procurement director cannot show how much negotiated volume flows through the contracts, so rebate tiers are missed and the next negotiation starts from a number the supplier knows better than the buyer. Accounts payable handles the same invoice two or three times: parked without a PO, blocked in MRBR, released by hand after a phone call. Finance sees the price effect only in the margin analysis, months later.
At 180 stores, sampling stops working. Every measurement starts with an Excel extract that is out of date before it is clean, and "no PO, no pay" is quietly bypassed because the bypass is invisible. Even the touchless rate is contested, because the capture tool and accounts payable count different things.
How it works today
- PersonA store manager orders shelving from a local supplier by phone; the invoice reaches accounts payable three weeks later without a purchase order
- PersonThe AP clerk asks the regional office for a PO; it is created in SAP ME21N after the invoice, with the invoice amount as the price
- SystemThe invoice is posted against the retroactive PO; SAP records a clean three-way match and the report shows a compliant purchase
- WaitingInvoices without a PO sit in the parked list for one to two weeks; the supplier calls the store, the store calls AP
- PersonOnce a quarter an analyst pulls spend by vendor from BW into Excel and marks a vendor "on contract" if any contract exists for it
- Risk of errorItem-level off-contract buying, price changes after approval and duplicate invoices never appear in this view
Why the current process costs more than it appears
Nobody planned this work; it accumulated.
- The price gap is paid in thousands of small transactions, each too small to notice, and their volume never counts towards the contract's rebate thresholds.
- A retroactive purchase order is a control that checks nothing: its price is copied from the invoice, so the three-way match passes by construction.
- Every blocked or parked invoice costs a second handling, a supplier call and often the early-payment discount.
- Two analyst-weeks per quarter go into an extract that is disputed in the meeting, and auditors asking for evidence of contract compliance receive a vendor-level ratio.
Cost of inaction
The cost of waiting never appears as a single line. The pool leaks in thousands of purchases at list price and in invoices that pass through accounts payable twice, and contracts are renegotiated on volumes smaller than the real spend, so rebate tiers are never reached.
A policy that cannot be measured cannot be enforced, so "no PO, no pay" stays a slogan and the auditor's question keeps receiving a ratio that answers something else.
A plausible organisation with realistic proportions. The figures are there to be recalculated on your data; they are not a client result.
Food and non-food retail chain: 180 stores, two distribution centres, SAP S/4HANA, Microsoft 365 E3; roughly €140m of indirect spend a year; accounts payable in a shared-services centre.
Around 60,000 supplier invoices a year on indirect spend, about 1,900 active vendors, 40 framework contracts.
Contract compliance is reported quarterly at vendor level from a BW extract; the touchless rate is whatever the capture tool posted; agreed actions are never re-measured.
No event-level picture: retroactive purchase orders look compliant, invoices returning to AP after a block are not counted, and every discussion restarts from a new extract.
UiPath Process Mining with the Purchase-to-Pay SAP app template; conformance checking; maverick-buying conditions and tags defined with procurement; a Power BI review pack and a monthly review in Microsoft Teams; recurring deviations handed to UiPath Automation Hub.
The modelled case measures the off-contract share monthly per category, supplier, region and store; the illustrative value pool is €672,000 a year of price gap plus 4,400 hours of AP rework; routing one third of that volume back onto contracts would be worth about €224,000 a year. The value pool is a calculation on illustrative figures, not a finding from your data.
Proposed solution
Mientha builds a purchase-to-pay process app on UiPath Process Mining from the events your SAP system already records, from requisition to payment, plus the outline agreements that hold your contracts. Extraction runs on a schedule through Theobald Xtract Universal or CData Sync with incremental loads, read-only. The Purchase-to-Pay SAP app template brings the analysis structure, including a maverick-buying dashboard driven by conditions we agree with procurement, and cycle times per supplier and region. We configure conformance checking against your target flow and define the tags for your deviations: PO created after the invoice, no PO, contract available but not used, price changed after approval, block released manually, paid late.
The findings land where the people who can act on them already work. A Teams channel for the monthly P2P review carries the Power BI review pack as a tab, with contract coverage per category next to the process KPIs, and links to the dashboards for drill-down. A findings register in Microsoft Lists holds each deviation with an owner and a due date, and a Workflows (Power Automate) flow posts an Adaptive Card when a data alert fires on a KPI threshold. The analytics are deterministic: no language model, every number traceable to SAP document numbers.
A deviation that keeps recurring becomes a policy action or an automation candidate, sent from Process Mining to UiPath Automation Hub with the measured volume and cost attached; UiPath Insights later shows the automation's ROI, and the process app shows whether the touchless rate actually moved. Unlike the four-week process X-ray with KYP.ai, this is a standing monitor for one process, owned by the people who run the review.
UiPath Process Mining Purchase-to-Pay SAP app template (conformance checking, maverick-buying conditions, tags, due dates, potential duplicates, invoice capture channel); Theobald Xtract Universal or CData Sync data loading; automation ideas sent to UiPath Automation Hub; Power BI Teams tabs and data alerts; Workflows (Power Automate) Adaptive Cards; Microsoft Lists
The extraction scope and event log; the target process; maverick-buying conditions and tags; the touchless-rate definition in the app's business logic; the Power BI review pack, thresholds, findings register and review routine
A contract register kept outside SAP (SharePoint list or contract tool) joined to the spend data; none on the SAP side
How the automated process works
- AutomationEach week the extractor loads new and changed purchasing, invoice and payment documents from SAP into the process app
- AutomationThe app rebuilds the event log per PO item and invoice, checks every case against the target flow and applies the tags, from PO after invoice to paid late
- AutomationDashboards and the review pack refresh; when a KPI crosses its threshold, a data alert triggers the flow that posts a card in the review channel
- PersonThe procurement analyst prepares the monthly review: top deviations with SAP document numbers, trend against last month, open findings
- PersonCategory managers, the AP lead and regional managers decide: route a category onto a contract, close a one-time vendor, change a store limit, raise an automation idea
- SystemFindings are recorded with owner and due date, candidates go to Automation Hub with volume and cost, and the next cycle shows whether each action moved the number
Human-in-the-loop model
Automation handles
- Extraction, event-log construction and conformance checking for every PO item and invoice, every cycle
- Tagging of deviations and the maverick-buying conditions, applied identically across regions and months
- Dashboard and review-pack refresh, threshold alerts in Teams, hand-over of candidates to Automation Hub
People decide
- Which deviations are acceptable, such as an emergency repair at a store, and where the thresholds sit
- Category and contract actions, owned by category and regional managers: what to route onto a contract, which vendors to close, which store limits to change
- The definition of "touchless" and the target process itself, owned by procurement and finance
Before and after
Systems and integrations
We do not add technology to make an architecture look serious. Every element below has a specific job in this process.
Inputs
- SAP purchasing, invoice verification and payment tables (requisitions to payments, change documents, outline agreements)
- vendor master
- contract register outside SAP
Automation layer
- UiPath Process Mining (Purchase-to-Pay SAP app template)
- Theobald Xtract Universal or CData Sync
- UiPath Automation Hub
- UiPath Insights
- Power Automate
Target systems
- Power BI review pack
- Microsoft Lists findings register
- UiPath Automation Hub pipeline
Human touchpoints: monthly P2P review in Microsoft Teams; Power BI tab and dashboard links; alert cards; findings register
Technologies used
event log from SAP; conformance checking, maverick-buying conditions, tags, due dates
Ascheduled, incremental, read-only extraction from SAP tables
Aautomation ideas from Process Mining, assessed with measured volumes and cost
Abusiness ROI of the automations that follow
Areview pack as a Teams tab; data alerts on thresholds
Areview channel, alert cards, findings register
Asource of the events, from requisition to payment, plus change documents and outline agreements
AIllustrative economic model
What it is worth, with the arithmetic shown.
Read the table as a hypothesis to be tested against your own data, not as a client measurement. We assume €140m of indirect spend a year, 12% of it bought outside existing contracts, and an average price gap of 4% between off-contract and contracted prices; both are exactly the numbers the process app replaces with your real ones. For rework: 60,000 invoices a year, 22% handled a second time at 20 minutes each, at a fully loaded hourly cost of €25. The result is a value pool, not a saving; how much is captured depends on the actions taken.
Business benefits
- Off-contract buying is measured at item level, per category, supplier, region and store, instead of estimated quarterly at vendor level
- The price gap becomes a number with a location, so the categories and stores to fix first are visible
- Retroactive purchase orders, manually released blocks, one-time vendors and duplicate invoices are counted and trended; "no PO, no pay" becomes a measured policy
- AP rework is quantified per reason, and the touchless rate is defined once, from receipt to payment, and tracked monthly
The management view
- Procurement, finance and shared services work from the same purchase-to-pay numbers, refreshed automatically and traceable to SAP documents
- Contract compliance and touchless rate become monthly KPIs with owners, thresholds and alerts rather than slides for the quarterly review
- Every automation that follows starts from a measured baseline, so its effect shows in the same dashboards
Board-level KPIs
Security and governance
Trust in automation is built on the audit trail, not on a promise.
- A dedicated read-only SAP service account, limited to the tables in scope, is the only credential involved; nothing in the solution writes to SAP
- Access is a Microsoft Entra ID group decision and nothing else: the review pack and the findings register sit in your Microsoft 365 tenant, and UiPath Automation Cloud holds the process data in its EU region
- User IDs of PO creators and approvers are pseudonymised unless procurement and HR agree otherwise; managers see only their categories or stores
- Target process, conditions and thresholds are versioned and changed only with sign-off from procurement and finance; no AI models are involved
Why now
Each month without measurement leaves the modelled €65,000 of the value pool (€782,000 divided by 12) unaddressed, and the quarterly slide keeps costing two analyst-weeks
Indirect spend is one of the few retail cost lines still negotiated on estimates; a measured off-contract share changes the next contract round and its rebate tiers
The Purchase-to-Pay SAP app template, incremental SAP extraction and Power BI in Teams are documented, standard components; the project is configuration and a review routine, not a data warehouse
Relevant executive roles
Contract compliance becomes a measured monthly number per category and region, and the next negotiation rests on the volume that really flows through the contract
The price gap and the AP rework become a value pool with arithmetic, and the touchless rate is defined from receipt to payment
A read-only extraction from standard SAP tables, no change to SAP, one process app instead of another generation of Excel extracts
Common questions and objections
At vendor level, and that is the blind spot: a purchase from a contracted vendor at a non-contract price counts as compliant, and a PO created after the invoice looks like a clean match. Process mining sees the order of events and the contract reference per item.
Missing contract references and late purchase orders are not a data problem; they are the findings. The first load shows where references are missing and who creates orders after the fact.
No. The X-ray is a four-week, one-off measurement across processes, including desk-level work captured with KYP.ai. This is a standing instrument for one process, owned by the people who run the monthly review; the X-ray often comes first.
When this is not the right solution
- Purchasing runs largely outside the ERP: orders by email, invoices posted straight to cost centres. There is no event trail to mine, and purchase-order discipline comes first
- Indirect spend is small or sits with a handful of suppliers; a contract review and a quarterly extract are enough there
- You want a one-off picture of what people do on screen before choosing what to automate; that is the process X-ray with KYP.ai
A question for the next management meeting
What share of our indirect spend bypasses the contracts we negotiated, and what evidence would we accept as the answer?
Implementation approach
What we deliver, and what we need from you to start.
We deliver
- Scoping with procurement, accounts payable and IT: target flow, maverick-buying conditions, touchless definition
- SAP extraction with incremental loads and the event log for the Purchase-to-Pay SAP app template
- Conformance checking, maverick-buying conditions, tags, due dates and the touchless-rate KPI configured on the template
- The Power BI review pack as a Teams tab, alert thresholds and the findings register
- The first three monthly reviews facilitated by us, first automation candidates assessed in Automation Hub
We need from you
- Read access to the SAP purchasing, invoice verification and payment tables, or an existing extraction layer
- A process owner in procurement and one in accounts payable who will run the monthly review
- The contract register where it lives outside SAP, and the managers who will own findings
Stages
Discovery
Target flow, maverick-buying conditions, touchless definition, data availability
Data and configuration
Extraction, event log, reconciliation against SAP totals, template, tags, KPIs, review pack, thresholds
Validation
First results reviewed with procurement and AP; conditions and thresholds adjusted
Review routine
Three facilitated monthly reviews, findings register in use, first candidates in Automation Hub
Continuous monitoring
Scheduled loads, threshold alerts, KPI targets, further categories or company codes
Departmental. Effort depends on the number of company codes and purchasing organisations, the quality of contract references in purchase orders, and whether a contract register exists outside SAP.
Nobody has measured your off-contract spend; the figure in the deck is a guess.
Share your indirect spend by category, your yearly purchase-order and invoice counts and your SAP release; you get back a data-availability check and a value-pool model built on those figures.
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