Do you want better performance and more accountability from suppliers? Do you want more communication between silos, more streamlined procurement and document management processes, and more transparency in purchasing?
You need to automate your procurement processes with a comprehensive modern tool. Old, outdated procurement management systems can cost your company time and money and leave you floundering while competitors pull ahead. Procurement automation can remove many tedious manual processes from your workflow, give you a solid foundation for better collaboration with suppliers and between departments, help you manage documents more effectively, and more. Read on to learn how you can strengthen your company with an integrated procurement management tool.
Get Better Performance and More Accountability from Suppliers
Suppliers are so important to your business, but if you’re still using a manual procurement management process or even an outdated procurement tool, you’re missing out on getting the best from yours. The right procurement tool lets you keep historical records of supplier performance, which can help you weed out poor performers and negotiate better performance and more accountability from those who remain.
Automating procurement with the right tool gives you the chance to stay on top of past-due orders or poor quality materials. You can track supplier performance over time, and you can give them more transparency, too. Suppliers will be able to log into a vendor portal to update shipping notifications, access specifications and other documentation, submit invoices, and see payment statuses. With the visibility into supplier performance and enhanced communication provided by most procurement automation tools, you’ll be equipped to hold suppliers to a higher standard than before.
Enhance Communication and Collaboration Between Silos
If you’re using outdated procurement workflows, you’re creating a culture in which wires can easily get crossed in communication between different teams and departments. Automating procurement and purchasing processes allows you to put all the relevant information about a given purchase order in one place, so that employees can see the information they need with a glance at the dashboard. Communication will improve, and there will be less of the siloing that can so often lead to mistakes and oversights.
Do Away with Tedious Manual Processes
It’s no secret that people are more likely to make mistakes when they’re doing boring work, so the more you can do away with the most tedious manual processes in your procurement workflow, the fewer errors you’ll have to fix later on. You could save millions by simply placing most manual tasks in the hands of a computer algorithm that’s equipped to handle repetitive work much more accurately and effectively than human beings. By reducing the potential for human error in the procurement workflow, you’ll save money, and your employees will appreciate not having to do soul-sucking data entry and other manual tasks anymore. Plus, things that used to take hours upon hours will now take just seconds — and that will free up your employees for more interesting work that only humans can do.
Clamp Down on Spending
When you’re managing procurement manually, stakeholders don’t know what’s being ordered, when it’s being ordered, or even why it’s being ordered — and that creates an opacity in your workflow that fosters dark spending and maverick spending. These are expenses that fall outside of authorized procedures, like unnecessary or unapproved purchases, or orders made from unapproved suppliers.
Modern procurement management tools cast light on spending so you can pinpoint unused subscription services, maverick purchases, dark purchases, and off-contract purchases — and then eliminate them while creating a clearly defined avenue for employees to make their purchase orders. You could see a drastic reduction in maverick spending by simply implementing a new procurement tool.
Manage Documents More Effectively
You had better not still be keeping your documents in hard copy form in a filing cabinet — because if you are, they’re costing you money and you’re not making the most of your hard-won contract terms. You might not even be adhering to the terms you agreed to or honoring changes that were discussed via email and in updated contracts.
You need to manage your documents digitally, storing them in the cloud for easy access, but you also need the brawn of a procurement tool to help you keep your documentation organized. Your procurement system can link all relevant documentation — manuals, purchase orders, invoices, specifications, contracts, and so on — together in the dashboard so everything is right where you need it. It’s a must these days, because your employees are definitely swapping documentation and communication back and forth via email all day long, and those stacks of documents are just growing and growing.
There’s just no way you can run a successful business in this day and age without the right procurement tool — and even if your business is doing alright with a manual procurement workflow, you don’t know what you’re missing in terms of cost and time savings alone. Make the switch to automated procurement, and watch your business take off.
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