Is your procurement process fully automated? If not, you’re missing out on big benefits for your company. Let’s look at 5 of the most important benefits automating your procurement process can offer your organization.
Benefit #1: Easier Tracking
Right away, any company that implements an automated procurement process will see how easy it is to track spending. With automation, you can track expenditures by vendor, contract, and category— meaning it’s simple to track everything down to the penny, in full detail.
This brings the huge benefit of preventing excessive spending, because you can keep an eye on the major causes of overspending: poor planning, low year-to-date spend visibility, off-contract spending, overconsumption, and unexpected costs.
Every expenditure is carefully tracked and categorized, which prevents yet another contributor to overspending – uncategorized spending. Traditionally, a company’s uncategorized costs are invisible, unallocated, and can quickly spiral out of control.
This doesn’t happen when you automate your process. In fact, the companies that automate report an overall savings of 3-5% of their total spend due primarily to careful expenditure tracking and better forecasting.
Benefit #2: Accelerated Procurement Timeline
Speed is another benefit. Automating your procurement process accelerates your timeframe for procurement activities. Tasks that used to take weeks can be wrapped up within days or even hours.
Usings a cloud-based self-service format can speed up procurement. Self-service portals are the future of procurement, because they allow people to choose what they need efficiently and place subsequent orders even faster than the original order.
In an enterprise with many different departments, this can yield big improvements. Instead of trying to coordinate everything by hand, they can use system automation to organize orders and make repeat buys – all while maintaining the purchasing standards of their organization.
Automation is faster because questions can be addressed so quickly. If a concern comes up during the procurement process, the person can either find their own answer right in the system or send an alert to someone that can resolve it quickly.
Benefit #3: Better Communication
Without procurement process automation, back-and-forth phone calls can add weeks of lag time between ordering and fulfillment. Emails go unanswered. A “required by” deadline can easily be missed simply because the people involved are busy or disorganized.
Automated platforms create a smooth chain of communication between vendors and buyers, removing barriers that typically create misunderstandings and delays. All communication regarding every order is organized in the system automatically.
This also means it’s easy to collaborate when a group discussion is needed. Your group of stakeholders don’t have to be in the same room, or even the same part of the world. They can join the discussion from any device, at any location.
Benefit #4: Reliable Compliance
Automation is a huge help with compliance. It enforces process governance and tracks end-to-end compliance, to ensure no detail is missed along the way.
The details of every contract can be input into the system and carefully monitored. Receive alerts at key points in the procurement process. Avoid missed activities that cause delays and lapses in compliance.
The company will not only be compliant, but it can prove compliance at a moment’s notice. When you need proof for a regulator or auditor, the data is at your fingertips.
Benefit #5: Happier Customers
Vendors, partners, and customers will be pleased with the benefits that automating the procurement process brings. They’ll experience an intuitive system that feels professional and useful.
It fits right in with how people buy things today: quickly, with no hassle, using a mobile app on their phone. Procurement feels like a smooth digital shopping experience.
Stave ProcurementPath, available on ServiceNow, streamlines your procurement process and supports productivity. We invite you to try it today! See a video about how it works, go try it out in the ServiceNow Store, or connect with Stave to learn more.
