From cost control to value realization: Rewiring the airline source-to-pay value chain

Airlines manage billions in spend across safety-critical aircraft components, FAA-regulated maintenance services, airport operations, and enterprise technology. Yet many organizations still operate with fragmented processes and loosely connected systems. This limits visibility into how spend is planned, committed, and governed.

Anshul Bansal

Even with modern source-to-pay platforms, insufficient integration with contracts, projects, and financial systems can slow improvements in compliance, spend transparency, and working capital management. Closing this gap requires viewing procurement as an integrated capability within the broader enterprise operating model rather than a standalone system upgrade.

The airline procurement reality

Airlines manage a uniquely complex mix of indirect and direct spend. While indirect categories such as IT, HR, facilities, real estate, marketing, and legal are often governed through enterprise procurement systems, large volumes of operational spend, such as aircraft parts procurement, ground services, catering, and airport operations, have historically operated outside structured S2P processes.

Historically, much of this operational spend bypassed structured procurement. Non-PO transactions were common, approvals occurred outside formal systems, and invoices arrived after services were rendered. Spend data was fragmented across ERPs, legacy maintenance systems, spreadsheets, and emails. Even when strong commercial contracts were negotiated, they were frequently disconnected from execution, stored in offline repositories, unmanaged SharePoint sites, or paper files, with no systematic enforcement at the point of spend.

Compounding the challenge, many aircraft maintenance and parts systems are FAA-regulated, decades-old platforms that are mission-critical and difficult to replace. Rather than attempting wholesale replacement, leading transformations have focused on synchronizing these environments with modern S2P platforms, preserving operational integrity while enabling enterprise governance and visibility.

Integrating direct spend without disruption

Integrating operational spend into S2P proved to be as much an organizational challenge as a technical one. Maintenance and airport operations teams prioritize speed and safety, and any perceived friction can undermine adoption.

Successful programs respected these realities by allowing teams to continue working in certified systems while synchronizing contracts, commitments, and financial controls end-to-end. This approach embedded governance without disrupting execution, creating a compliant and auditable procurement environment for direct spend at enterprise scale.

Operationalizing contracts and suppliers

A major source of value unlock came from operationalizing contracts directly within procurement workflows. Thousands of contracts and active projects were cleansed, digitized, and embedded into transactional workflows.

This shift converts unmanaged spend into contract-enabled purchasing, ensuring pricing, terms, and regulatory requirements are applied automatically at requisition and invoice stages. Standardized supplier onboarding and catalog-driven buying further reduce spend leakage and accelerate supplier enablement. As a result, spend under management has increased from around 40% to 75% to 80% in large-scale programs.

Enable enterprise IT spend

Enterprise IT procurement is complex, with a diverse user base that includes corporate staff, airport personnel, pilots, and flight crews. Some programs have introduced reusable integration connectors between major SaaS platforms to orchestrate IT hardware procurement directly into S2P workflows. These connectors standardize processes for laptops, tablets, mobile devices, and peripherals. Unlike one-off integrations, they can be reused across the enterprise and industry. This improves usability, keeps auditability intact, and ensures operational and financial controls are aligned without disrupting daily workflows.

Measurable outcomes

Across large airline S2P programs, results included:

• Spend under management increased from roughly 40% to 75% to 80%
• Supplier onboarding cycle times dropped from 20–25 days to around 7 days
• Invoice exception rates decreased significantly due to upstream enforcement
• Procurement and payment cycles became faster, improving operational responsiveness
• Multiple legacy procurement and finance systems were sunset, reducing overhead and improving data accuracy

Operational categories such as catering, cleaning, baggage handling, and ground services also saw productivity gains. Suppliers gained better visibility into contract terms, invoice status, and payment schedules, reducing exceptions and improving collaboration.

Organizational realities and trade-offs

These transformations are not executed without challenges. Integrating regulated legacy platforms takes time and careful planning. Resistance can occur when teams are used to legacy systems. Success often requires phased rollouts, role-based training, and close collaboration between procurement, finance, IT, and operational teams. When managed well, the long-term benefits in visibility, compliance, and enterprise agility outweigh the upfront effort.

Procurement as an operating system

Source-to-pay transformation is no longer just a back-office modernization initiative. It has become a strategic enabler of operational resilience, compliance, and value realization. Integrating legacy and modern systems, direct and indirect spend, and supplier and internal workflows shows that procurement can directly influence financial performance, working capital efficiency, and operational agility.

Measurable results, from higher spend under management to faster supplier onboarding and improved compliance demonstrate that procurement can move from a transactional function to a core driver of enterprise-wide performance. For airlines facing margin pressures, complex regulations, and distributed operations, mature S2P models are essential infrastructure for sustaining growth, reducing risk, and capturing the full value of negotiated contracts.

Author disclosure

The author holds over 18+ years of technology consulting experience and has held senior technical and delivery leadership roles on multiple large-scale airline Source-to-Pay transformation programs and continues to advise airline clients on procurement and technology modernization initiatives. This article reflects industry insights and observed outcomes rather than personal opinion.

About the author

Anshul Bansal is a technology consulting leader at Accenture LLP with 18+ years of experience in Big 4 firms for designing and delivering large-scale Procurement, Finance, and Supply chain transformation programs. He specializes in implementing Source-to-Pay (S2P) and spend management transformations, helping organizations translate strategy into executed outcomes.

Throughout his career at leading consulting firms, including Accenture and Deloitte Consulting, he has served as a trusted advisor to C-suite executives, guiding complex enterprise transformations spanning sourcing, supplier risk management, procurement operations, and financial systems integration. He works closely with executive sponsors and functional leaders to modernize operating models, integrate digital platforms, and embed new capabilities into day-to-day execution. From experience working with Fortune 500 clients across several industries, he has led one of the industry first transformation for US major airline carrier and had further replicated to other major airline carrier. He serves as an industry expert advising several airline clients on leading practices for end to end process re-engineering and also define solutions to connect with decades old complex direct spend procurement applications.  

His recent work focuses on technology reinvention through analytics, automation, and AI, with a pragmatic emphasis on breaking down data silos, reducing manual workarounds, and enabling more resilient and adaptive supply chain operations.

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