How La Poste Group turned Procure-to-Pay blind spots into hard savings

The challenge: Flying blind in a complex P2P landscape

When La Poste embarked on a major finance transformation – including a migration to SAP S/4HANA and the rollout of the Cœur Finance program – the Procure-to-Pay cycle emerged as a critical bottleneck. The P2P process spanned SAP and Ivalua, involved multiple accounting sites, and generated operational friction that traditional reporting tools could not explain.

The challenges were systemic and impacted daily operations:

• Limited end-to-end visibility across the full P2P cycle, particularly after the S/4HANA migration.

• High volumes of exceptions (blocked invoices and manual workflows) with unclear root causes. It was difficult to tell whether issues stemmed from data quality, technical limitations, or delays in goods receipt.

• Heavy manual workload, as employees frequently performed large data extractions to reconcile information between two separate systems.

• Duplicate invoices creating financial risks, which were impossible to detect exhaustively using fragmented, local controls.

• Inconsistent practices between accounting sites, making it hard to justify workload imbalances.

The risks of inaction were significant: escalating late payments, increased regulatory exposure, reduced supplier satisfaction, and a potential negative impact on La Poste’s brand image.

The solution: Process intelligence powered by QPR ProcessAnalyzer

La Poste chose QPR ProcessAnalyzer for its powerful, automated SAP connectors and its ability to provide rapid, high-ROI insights. By connecting directly to SAP for supplier invoices and Ivalua for purchase orders, QPR delivered something entirely new: a complete, data-driven view of how the P2P process was actually executed.

What QPR ProcessAnalyzer revealed

The insights uncovered were eye-opening and immediately actionable:

• Exhaustive duplicate detection: For the first time, La Poste gained an organization-wide view of duplicate invoices. QPR revealed recurring patterns and systemic weaknesses, identifying recovery opportunities worth several hundreds of thousands of euros.

• True root causes of non-automation: The analysis proved that manual interventions were often driven by process deviations and heterogeneous practices between accounting sites, rather than purely technical or data quality issues.

• Quantifiable workload imbalances: QPR uncovered structural imbalances between sites that directly increased exposure to payment delays.

• Hidden integration issues: QPR was the only tool capable of detecting inconsistencies between SAP and Ivalua, such as differing statuses for the exact same invoice.

• Pinpointing late payments: Overdue invoices could finally be traced back to specific process steps, handovers, and exceptions, enabling targeted corrective actions

Measurable impact across efficiency, quality, and control

The project has delivered tangible outcomes across multiple dimensions:

For accounting and finance teams, increased transparency made workloads and issues more visible and easier to understand, reducing frustration from unexplained delays or recurring exceptions. Discussions with management have shifted from perception based debates to fact based, data driven conversations, and teams have embraced a more analytical mindset focused on continuous improvement.

Beyond individual KPIs, the combination of cost recovery, cost avoidance, and productivity gains demonstrates strong operational and financial impact – and positions process mining as a strategic enabler of La Poste’s ongoing finance transformation.