Introduction
Procurement has evolved significantly over time, transforming from isolated purchasing departments to integral business partners managing multiple departments and subprocesses. This evolution has made manual processes increasingly costly and time-consuming, prompting organizations to seek more efficient solutions. E-procurement solutions have emerged as a powerful tool to streamline procurement operations, reduce costs, eliminate silos, and improve supplier relationships. This comprehensive guide explores the opportunities, essential features, and advantages of digital procurement solutions for optimizing workflows and achieving long-term business success.
Opportunities for procurement automation
Requests for purchases
An employee identifies a need, prepares a purchase requisition, and passes it through numerous levels of management for approval. Manual processing can cause bottlenecks (one out-of-office manager might delay an order by days) and expensive mistakes and dangers.
E-procurement technologies help all stakeholders by showing the same data to each department for each purchase requisition, ensuring accountability. Every stakeholder will receive an alert when an action is overdue with automated reaction time restrictions.
Purchase approvals
Purchase approval and fulfilment offer comparable challenges to requisitions. By inserting your approval hierarchy data into a customisable process, your form may circulate while you work on anything else. Set email alerts for each approval process to track it remotely.
Purchase orders
Automation of the purchase order cycle may greatly decrease invoice processing time and expense. Everything from procurement and approval to PO issuance may be digitised. That includes:
- Find the perfect procurement tool for your company. You have several choices. The ideal software for you depends on your industry, business size, tech stack, and procurement goals, such as speeding production, eliminating order mistakes, or reducing dead stock.
- Enter all data and link finance/accounts payable. Several PO steps include procurement and accounts payable. Your new software system will be linked to accounts payable to guarantee accurate records and payments.
- Map approval and process workflows. Assign each team member to create step-by-step lists of their PO duties. Create workflows. Digital transformation depends on this since it determines a new software system’s functioning.
- Automate. After mapping your procedures, utilise your digital procurement software to automate them for quicker, more accurate, and cost-effective POs.
Manage supplier relationships
Tension is never fun, but only procurement specialists can assess and fix supplier relationships. E-procurement tools strengthen and repair buyer-supplier relationships by:
- Quicker and earlier payments
- Supplier self-service workflows
- Quick and easy vendor onboarding
- Auto-reminder calls and status updates
- Feedback forms and surveys
- Supplier performance visibility
Processing invoices
Digital procurement solutions can automate the whole invoicing process, eliminating document scanning and data input. E-invoicing software incorporates ingoing and outgoing invoice data, including payment statuses and histories, into your data stack. It also shows your invoice procedure from issue to payment.
7 essential e-procurement aspects
Implementing an e-procurement solution that lacks functionality is discouraging and unpleasant. List your procurement difficulties in detail.
Ask all stakeholders for suggestions, emphasising daily system users. As your must-haves list expands, consider these digital buying basics.
1. Automation
Automation has transformed procurement. Many procurement procedures demand skilled leaders. Ironically, automation is essential. Routine jobs like order entry stifle workers and waste their skills. Automating these activities lets procurement teams focus on what matters most.
2. Complete integrations
Digital procurement tools may replace some IT platforms in your stack. It simplifies and streamlines. Choose an e-procurement technology that connects with your ride-or-die tools like Slack, DocuSign, and SalesForce if you want to keep using them.
Why don’t your favourite applications function together? Low-code business process automation (BPA) systems let you create bespoke automations that help apps work together. The game-changer is stack extensibility.
3. Managing documents
Digital contract management is essential for e-procurement tools. The capability lets procurement teams track a contract’s lifespan, view prior versions, and update documentation for everyone. In these domains, contract compliance and procurement collaborate:
- Customer relations. Compliance with all contract terms develops customer and supplier trust. Complying and communicating early when difficulties emerge increases your chances of winning new contracts and expanding existing ones.
- Reduce risk. A digital contract management technology can monitor and anticipate industry volatility or supply chain disruptions to minimise disasters.
- Management of lifecycle. Rules might change during a contract. Digital contract management lets you edit and revise contracts and share them with stakeholders instantly.
4. Onboarding and vetting vendors
Manual vendor screening requires tedious spreadsheet research. E-procurement removes both. Self-registration and access to vendor information help procurement teams to make data-driven partner selections.
Time-consuming vendor onboarding data input is eliminated by e-procurement technologies. Write and review an NDA, T&Cs, or W-9, then send it to legal and accounts payable for approval and cloud storage.
Grant and limit document access per individual. Digital procurement methods reduce delays and miscommunications.
5. Three-way matching
Three-way matching requires error-free review by multiple stakeholders to verify an invoice, purchase order, and order receipt before payment release. Collecting, processing, and sharing paper records risks errors and loss.
E-procurement systems reduce such risks by eliminating manual paper processes, speeding reconciliation, and preventing costly mistakes like duplicate or late payments.
6. Automated approver and stakeholder alerts
Alerting stakeholders in a document’s approval circulation is one of the best uses of digital procurement notifications. This might relieve busy procurement experts from hand-typing multiple emails each day and prevent paper documents from getting lost during approval.
Any corporate employee may be assigned to a process step, so stakeholders can track a document or project in real time. This tool simplifies procurement procedures for accounts payable and quality control as well as procurement teams.
7. Organised and digitised requests
Creating organised forms to enter and store data is essential for procurement. Most e-procurement invoices, purchase orders, and receipts start as form field data. Structured forms organise and search data. This simplifies daily operations and compliance and audit enquiries.
The simplicity of digital request forms has made them widespread in many sectors. They digitalise the inter-departmental ticket process and make onboarding and submitting requests easy for suppliers and consumers, benefiting internal and external procurement processes. This feature is essential for digital procurement.
Advantages of procurement solutions for your organisation
Cost-saving
Saving money drives most digital conversions. Converting saves money in almost every area, including paper, record and inventory storage, postage, and repetitive operations.
Manage risk
Digital procurement systems’ powerful customisations let you monitor and maintain contract standards. Your simplified, adaptable business model will help your company survive and prosper throughout market changes like those of the previous few years.
Make suppliers feel empowered
Easy onboarding is a terrific approach to establish a buyer/supplier relationship. Easy and regular contact, on-time payments, and feedback surveys to learn about their experiences with your organisation will maintain goodwill.
Faster approvals
Procurement solutions appear ideal for automating this crucial procedure. Send a form through departments for approvals automatically to avoid delays and bottlenecks. Timed alerts inform all departments and positions of approval status.
Top 5 procurement solutions
Pipefy
The award-winning procure-to-pay system from Pipefy helps procurement teams cut costs, boost efficiency, and align procurement strategies with company goals.
Low-code automations, dashboards for real-time process performance metrics, and customisable templates make procurement processes easy to adapt.
Kissflow
Kissflow Procurement Cloud lets users develop unique apps and digitise procedures without coding. Automation, forms, project and case boards, collaboration, analytics, and integrations are included.
Procurify
The cloud-based procurement and purchase software Procurify enables customers monitor, track, and manage their purchasing process. Customised approvals, in-platform communication, audit tracking, analytics, reporting, and accounting/ERP connectors are available.
Coupa is a platform for managing business expenses. AP automation, expenditure tracking, approval procedures, and Slack connection.
ZIP is an intake-to-procure technology that provides a centralised platform for procurement stakeholders. Approval workflows, departmental and tech stack connectors, activity dashboards, and audit management.
Conclusion
E-procurement solutions offer a transformative approach to managing procurement processes, providing substantial benefits in terms of cost savings, risk management, supplier relationships, and operational efficiency. By leveraging digital tools, organizations can streamline their procurement operations, reduce manual errors, and ensure faster approvals, ultimately enhancing overall productivity and strategic alignment. As the business landscape continues to evolve, adopting advanced procurement solutions will be crucial for staying competitive and achieving sustainable growth.
