Procurement Digitisation: Moving into the next phase of purchase and vendor management

Does operating with reduced costs and risks while increasing efficiency to gain an operational edge over your competitors sound appealing?

Wouldn’t it be convenient to streamline the sourcing process on a single platform without having to spend the day going through dozens of supplier phone calls and emails?

The e-procurement solutions provided by www.procol.in could help you achieve these goals.

Here is a look at what exactly digitisation of the procurement process can help your organisation achieve so you can make an informed decision on whether it is beneficial for you.

A case for automation

A well-established principle of business is that automation reduces costs. In today’s competitive marketplace where customers demand affordable excellence, companies are always looking for ways to achieve greater ROI (Return on Investment). Digitising procurement, thus, has become essential.

Digitisation provides an organisation with new tools to make the sourcing process smoother.

Steps involved in the digitisation of procurement

1. An organisation first needs to recognise the need for procurement.
2. They can then run live online procurement through an automation partner.
3. A partner such as Procol then conducts an online auction among vendors.
4. The organisation can view the results visualised on the partner’s platform.
5. An order is placed digitally after considering all the contract terms.
6. The supplier begins the e-billing process, documents get e-signatures, and the products are procured.
7. The procurement partner can then record and revisit the data to form better cost-saving auction strategies in the future.

But when there is a cost involved in getting an automation service on board, how exactly does it result in cost-saving?

Smarter P2P solutions

Typically, a Procure to Pay cycle requires an organisation to gather data on their requirements, put out a notice requesting vendor quotations, go through the supplier database and the outreach carried out by other vendors to finalise a vendor offering the best price, create a purchase order, checking and approving the invoice raised after the completion of the order, making the final payment to the vendor.

Manually carrying out this Procure to Pay process can take a lot of time and the scope for errors is higher. Automation of the p2p cycle, on the other hand, will lead to long-term cost saving and an improved workflow.

Procol’s custom spend insights also allow organisations to get a visual idea of trends, analyse past data, and make better informed buying decisions in the future. Thus, vendor management becomes a lot more convenient.

But what if you want to work with the same vendor again? Will you have to carry out another auction? Is it possible to have access to past vendor data at your fingertips without even having to visit your office?

Innovative Contract Management

Strategic sourcing aside, an automation partner like Procol will also help a purchase manager revisit past information by creating a digital backup of past orders and vendor contracts. While finding a past vendor becomes a time-consuming task when records are maintained physically, the digital space does away with the need to go through countless documents to find the right vendor contract.

This makes it easier to source goods from trusted vendors repeatedly. The digital backup can be accessed anytime and from the convenience of a purchase manager’s smartphone. This is a stark switch from the traditional, tedious work involved in contract management.

Digitisation of contracts is also safer than managing physical contracts. The terms are readily available for both parties to revisit once they have been set while it becomes difficult for a third party to get access to this information.

Before even going into the process of maintaining vendor contracts, a good automation partner should have an innovative approach towards helping you save time in the auction and procurement process.

Relooking at Auction Strategies

Procol also aims to increase manager awareness about auction strategies so that the procurement process becomes easier. E-auctions, where vendors bid to secure a sales contract with the organisation, require a purchase manager to start getting familiar with digital tools. In today’s world, where work-from-home scenarios are making organisations replace traditional practices with digital ones, this kind of familiarity is imperative.

E-auctions are beneficial to both vendors and companies as they can get real-time data on the auction process. Companies benefit since they don’t have to contact individual suppliers to invite bids. Suppliers are automatically notified when a company is looking to source material and they benefit from the end-to-end transparency involved in the process.

An e-auction portal also makes the payment process transparent so suppliers don’t have to repeatedly get an update from a company on the payment status, reducing effort for both parties.

A reliable partner

While manager awareness about procurement, SAAS, and automation may still be evolving, a partner that has proven results to show can help take your organisation to the next level. How about a partner that boasts of 90% of its customers getting 10X ROI within the first 3 months of working together itself? With such figures to back up its efficiency, working with Procol becomes an easy choice.

When looking at the future, automation is something an organisation will need in industry 4.0 where integration of technology ensures better operations. With everything from your vendor relations, cost structure, supply chain, and risk management benefitting from automation, it is not a question of if but rather of when you make the shift.

Why take the first step towards exploring this change today?