Pressure is ramping up for procurement. Right now, being able to procure the right item at the right time and at the right price from the right place, is more important than it has ever been.

Automating the process from procurement to payment can speed up the procurement process dramatically. It frees up your team from repetitive and manual tasks, and minimises error, anomalous spend and governance oversights. A team once drowning in paperwork, audits and compliance are empowered to make strategic decisions again, releasing value to the company and keeping costs low.

So, what are the six key processes you should be automating?

1. Purchase requisition

Organisations often find this is the first sticking point. Complex hierarchies and busy managers slow down the approval cycle. Digitise your requisitions to flow automatically to pre-determined authorised roles, with alerts when requests are delayed.

2. Quotation requests

Put an end to unending emails, briefings, and unnecessary time wasters when preparing requests for quotation or similar. Assign your pre-approved suppliers to requisitions and allow them to do the work on a shared portal against your set requirements.

3. Assessment and negotiation

Overwhelming data is not something humans compute quickly. Pressurise procurement teams need support to evaluate suppliers based on their responses, fairly and accurately weighing up value, lead times, discounts, and terms. Automating adjudication and sifting out digital responses lightens the load and turns your team from pen-pushers to negotiators.

4. Approvals

No matter how small or large the organisation, the risk is always there of a slip-up or oversight on the manual approval route. Keep an audit trail of approvals and ensure approvals are only made through a compliant workflow with the right lever of authorisation.

5. Purchase orders

There is no room for bottlenecks – by automatically issuing POs once due process has been followed, and sharing these on the supplier portal, makes the process so much faster. Also, it ensures purchase orders cannot be issued before the necessary approvals are in place, or to unapproved suppliers.

6. Three-way payment matching

Raise, capture, and pay invoices on the go, by performing quick three-way matching to an issued purchase order, avoiding payment errors, or missing early discounts.

A digital procurement solution must support your procurement process in achieving organisational objectives while delivering reporting that enables the organisation to analyse procurement cycle times, spend, vendor performance, and cost savings.

eProcurement achieves this for our customers – running entire procurement functions and providing a versatile, affordable, and reliable solution. If you’re looking for a comprehensive procurement tool to handle your procurement processes, give us a call so that we can show you how we could help digitise and transform your procurement department.