The decision of a procurement department of any organization is critical as they significantly affect cost savings. To deliver consistent cost savings and enhance process efficiency, the procurement professionals are now looking for automation of a procurement cycle.
Even though procurement automation is one of the viable options, it has its risks and complication. But does all the benefits realized till now are worth taking all these risks. Well! To know the answer, lets us know about procurement automation.
What is procurement automation?
Procurement automation is one process to automate the manual, repeating steps along with the labor-intensive works in procurement.
By assisting the procurement workflows to self-implement, procurement automation allows the procurement team to focus on other essential business activities while making the process fast and decreasing the error.
Now know what the procurement process that every business should now automate are?
Purchase order
Purchase order is one of the best examples of a repeating process that needs automation. Most of the organizations do purchase order approvals with much frequency. But it is not a powerful, complicated workflow. With automation, the repetitive task for various stakeholders is reduced. It is effortless to automate the purchase order process with the help of purchase order software.
Purchase requisitions
It is a very common internal workflow that employees use to request purchase approval. The whole process needs several approval stages, which get accelerated with automation. By automation of the purchase requisitions, the procurement team gets several benefits. It helps in freeing the employee time for carrying out several other crucial pursuits and make sure that projects don’t get delayed because of missing materials.
Approval of invoice
The suppliers’ invoices have to go through an approval process before the finance department sends any money to the supplier. The invoice approving software helps in automating the whole approval process that saves the time of the procurement team, and makes it very easy to support the invoices from anywhere.
Record Keeping
To remain in compliance, it is vital to keep accurate and complete records. Record keeping in papers is slow, but they are also highly prone to so many errors and lost paperwork. With procurement automation, you can easily incorporate the existing systems to update all records automatically to get a complete and accurate auditing trail.
The procurement philosophy for any business is procuring the correct item at the right time from the right seller. It is the main backbone of any procurement cycle. With the automation of the manual steps of the procurement processes, one gets clear visibility inside the organization. There is reasonable control of all procurement activities and a decrease in manual errors. In addition, it helps in proper streamlining of the sourcing, maintaining the supplier relationship, and controlling the spend analysis.
Now let’s have a look at the significant benefits of procurement automation for any business:
It speeds up the whole approval process
Sometimes, a purchase request gets stuck in the process of approval. And sometimes, the process request also takes time because of the hierarchical approving structure. By automation of the purchase order processing, the order placing becomes fast and cuts down the time of the ordering cycle. It eliminates the redundant procedures and allows the procurement staff to achieve more in a short time. Significant benefits are decreasing the cost of staffing and offer more time for planned tasks.
It offers good visibility to historical spending
The undoubted fact of automation stays in producing accurate data. The procurement process refers to delivering a perfect description of purchases, quotes of the supplier, order history, and many more things. By implementing procurement automation, it is possible to consolidate the view of the actual expenditures, which assists in taking some of the well-informed decisions while making some new purchases. In addition, it also helps in reducing the cost consistently and also assists in recognizing the gaps. The primary benefit is providing cost savings and streamlining the spend management.
It helps in promoting transparent communication with the suppliers
When you have excellent clarity, disclosure, as well as transparency with the suppliers, is essential for successful supplier management. With automation, it is easy for both buyers and suppliers to maintain real-time communication and keep track of the order status. With automation and a highly responsive system, suppliers can quickly respond to bids, and the buyers can assign an order to all of the best quotes available. As a whole, we can say that automation ensures the optimal cost, rapid resolution of all grievances. The significant benefit here is efficient evaluation of all suppliers, real-time bidding, good supplier relationship, and high-cost savings.
It helps in maintaining a contract repository
An organization works with several suppliers. Maximum time all terms and conditions remain the same while onboarding a new supplier or renewing the deal with an old supplier. With procurement automation, all contracts can easily be stored in a central repository which is easily accessible with a single click. It assists in the rapid onboarding of new suppliers and ensures all essential terms and conditions and guidelines that remain constant across all contracts.
Conclusion
Thus, to summarize, we can say Procurement Solutions brings enormous benefits to an organization. Every business should adopt Procurement Solutions to streamline the whole process of procurement.