Transforming the Back Office of P2P

James Fusco is a strategic sourcing leader who brings together deep procurement experience, strong analytical skills, and a clear understanding of operational priorities. He guides cross-functional teams, strengthens supplier relationships, and advances system-wide reliability while focusing on long-term value and organizational resilience.

In this interview, Fusco outlines how customer service, integrity and disciplined sourcing shape his leadership. His approach strengthens supply reliability and positions Yale New Haven Health for a more resilient, data-informed future.

Let’s be honest, how many times a day do issues get escalated because your team dropped the ball? How do you manage the endless inquiries of the departments you service with backorders, open orders, requests for tracking information, etc.? How many resources does it take? We have used the case-to-email feature in Salesforce to create instances we can track. We can communicate with suppliers and our departments through a single email thread that any team member can read case notes, responses, etc., and take appropriate action. Previously, using personal Outlook mailboxes led to lost information, multiple team members working on the same problems, and some emails going unread or unanswered.

We can now capture our volume and analyze the data. Making process improvements immediately when something does not go quite as we expected.

How often do credit holds and unpaid invoices impact your Supply Chain? The three-way match process, intended to save money, prevent fraud, and improve the receiving rate, only fails because the work is never done. We implemented a solution, Healthchain, utilizing Penrod Inc. as our system implementer.

How often do you find out that invoices are not being disputed within the contract term? Or that we did not seek the POD? Then a credit hold puts your Supply Chain Management in crisis! Patient care is at risk, and the only option is to play  the invoices as soon as possible, jeopardizing your internal controls and costing you money.

This system, which sits on top of our already rapid use of Salesforce for our team members to reach out to Procurement Operations, uses AI to assign exceptions to the appropriate personnel and to dispute invoices with the supplier immediately for price and receiving issues. Maintains supplier responses, history and audit trail in a single source. We have experienced significant communication across all departments involved in P2P. Imagine the case being routed from your accounts payable department to your procurement team and a response back to accounts payable within hours.

During our first 90 days of go-live, we achieved a 49% reduction in exceptions. We no longer experience credit holds related to exceptions!

As a member of the team who has worked on exceptions and managed the process for 20 years, I never dreamed there was a solution that could assist with the automation of emails to suppliers, disputing every invoice, obtaining credits and rebills for prices and getting proof of delivery to the appropriate team members to resolve exceptions in days rather than weeks and months. All at once, keep a record of the resolution for auditing purposes.

Having this level of data to use during supplier reviews is critical during negotiations and in holding both the provider and supplier accountable for accurate data.