by
Vinod Jetley , Assistant General Manager , State Bank of India
The role of procurement has changed over the last several years; it is now becoming an important part of the business strategy as substantial amounts of money is being spent on organisational purchases. For many organisations though, requisitioning and ordering of goods and services is a very paper intensive, inefficient and costly process. Finance leaders are recognising that there is a need to enhance the speed and effectiveness of their procurement process to help reduce the costs associated with processing paper documents manually.
So how can the procurement department reduce paper and costs? Investing in an automated solution such as Documation’s iPurchase as part of your wider Invoice Management Solution, can help to streamline the procurement process.
There are numerous benefits to automating the procurement process:
Simplifying Purchase Requests
• Users can raise purchase requests online, via the iPurchase portal
• Little or no training required, online help to guide new users
• Simple, intuitive online purchase request completion
• Automatic population of known fields
• Preferred vendor options or enforcement for popular items
• Self-help enquiries to monitor progress of requests
Improving Control
• Multi-level authorisation based on personal limits and expenditure categories
• Option to enforce new vendor approval eliminates rogue buying
• Eliminates rogue purchases and enforces use of approved suppliers
• Management control purchase decisions before orders are committed
• Historical information by business area, purchaser etc. identifies problem areas
Reducing Costs
• Eliminates re-typing of information
• Delegates work away from procurement to business areas making the purchase
• Reduce postage costs by email/electronic order distribution
Retaining Flexibility
• Supports ordering at a central point or by designated buyers
• Flexible authorisation routes for different purchase types, business area or vendors
The above benefits will help the procurement team to reduce the amount of errors that are usually seen when manually processing paper documents. More and more finance leaders are recognising the need to reduce operating costs and the amount of paper that is currently being processed in the procurement department. With the support of iPurchase, the procurement team can effectively process any documents that enter or leave the department.
Another restriction that the procurement department can face is manually distributing documents such as contracts, faxes and general correspondence, which can waste time, money and effort; making the entire buying process slow and inefficient.
Managing audit trails also becomes difficult when procurement materials are a combination of online and paper documents. Investing in Documation’s iPurchase will benefit organisations through early-payment discount capture as well as improved purchasing decisions, faster purchasing cycles, easier auditing and lower costs.
Capturing and managing all the documents efficiently throughout the entire P2P process will help the procurement department to effectively process payments, ensure that prices are negotiated fully, payments remitted in a timely fashion and that PO’s are generated accurately.
If your procurement department has had increasing demands to control administrative costs, improve process efficiency, increase contract compliance, reduce maverick purchasing whilst also accelerating savings; then consider the benefits mentioned above and how an automated solution, such as iPurchase, could do for your business now and in the future.
