Centreviews, SpendBridge Pair Up On Hospitality Procurement

Accounts payable solutions provider Centreviews is teaming up with cloud procurement firm SpendBridge to develop a procure-to-pay solution for the hospitality industry.

Reports Monday (June 26) said Centreviews will lend its technology for automated workflows and payments, and SpendBridge will provide its automated procurement and sourcing solution. The two will combine their efforts for a tool that targets the hospitality industry’s particular needs in purchase savings, discounting, invoice management, digitization, early payment discounts, payment optimization and auditing.

The solution is mobile-optimized, the companies said, to enable employees to make the best procurement decisions for their businesses, regardless of location.

Automated solutions have begun targeting the hospitality industry as technology firms attribute automation to enhanced customer experience.

Sophisticated automation systems can “significantly streamline internal processes and enhance the customer experience for the restaurant industry and other hospitality businesses,” said Joe Lautner, director of business development at Core Brands, in an interview this month discussing the role automation plays in this sector. “With a single touch, staffers can control climate and lighting, access security and video cameras, control music and video content and more. And the best systems can be automated with customized ‘events,’ making facility management easier than ever.”

Automating procurement can have a similar effect on satisfaction of businesses in the hospitality industry as customers of suppliers, too. But automating procure-to-pay is a challenge, according to Proactis, which released research last year to assess corporations’ procurement automation practices. Invoice management, procure-to-pay and spend analysis are all experiencing increased levels of automation as companies across industries, the report found, but a self-assessment of survey respondents found none had ranked themselves at the top of the automation scale when it comes to fully automating procure-to-pay.