Automating the process from procurement to payment can speed up the procurement process dramatically. It frees up your team from repetitive and manual tasks, and minimises error, anomalous spend and governance oversights. A team once drowning in paperwork, audits and compliance are empowered to make strategic decisions again, releasing value to the company and keeping costs low.

So, what are the six key processes you should be automating?

1. Purchase requisition

Organisations often find this is the first sticking point. Complex hierarchies and busy managers slow down the approval cycle. Digitise your requisitions to flow automatically to pre-determined authorised roles, with alerts when requests are delayed.

2. Quotation requests

Put an end to unending emails, briefings, and unnecessary time wasters when preparing requests for quotation or similar. Assign your pre-approved suppliers to requisitions and allow them to do the work on a shared portal against your set requirements.

3. Assessment and negotiation

Overwhelming data is not something humans compute quickly. Pressurise procurement teams need support to evaluate suppliers based on their responses, fairly and accurately weighing up value, lead times, discounts, and terms. Automating adjudication and sifting out digital responses lightens the load and turns your team from pen-pushers to negotiators.

4. Approvals

No matter how small or large the organisation, the risk is always there of a slip-up or oversight on the manual approval route. Keep an audit trail of approvals and ensure approvals are only made through a compliant workflow with the right lever of authorisation.

5. Purchase orders

There is no room for bottlenecks – by automatically issuing POs once due process has been followed, and sharing these on the supplier portal, makes the process so much faster. Also, it ensures purchase orders cannot be issued before the necessary approvals are in place, or to unapproved suppliers.

6. Three-way payment matching

Raise, capture, and pay invoices on the go, by performing quick three-way matching to an issued purchase order, avoiding payment errors, or missing early discounts.

A digital procurement solution must support your procurement process in achieving organisational objectives while delivering reporting that enables the organisation to analyse procurement cycle times, spend, vendor performance, and cost savings.

K2 eProcurement achieves this for our customers – running entire procurement functions and providing a versatile, affordable, and reliable solution. If you’re looking for a comprehensive procurement tool to handle your procurement processes, give us a call so that we can show you how we could help digitise and transform your procurement department.

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As the first wave of response appeared in the form of preservation, cost-cutting and cashflow protection have been the order of the day. However, a light of hope glimmers on the horizon for a new commercial awakening. It is critical that organisations can innovate and respond to meet the changing customer needs and behaviours.  

Some of the key questions facing executives and risk officers are:  

How do we manage the risks and intricacies of an empty supply chain?  

Can our procurement processes help accelerate our fulfillment ability? 

How flexible can we be in a fluid lockdown, within a highly regulated environment?  

What can we do to cut delays and be faster to market, save time on production processes, and most of all ensure that every cent spent on human capital is on critical tasks that require human input and cannot be automated or digitised.   

The degree of success or failure hinge on how quickly these challenges can be addressed. 

Effective procurement and supply chain planning will see organisations bounce back more quickly and more convincingly. Their ability to ensure that procurement processes and red tape do not impede the supply chain. It allows them to fulfill orders without obstruction or hindrance will be critical to recovery. And, this recovery will springboard the best to long-term growth, success, and resilience in the ‘new normal’. 

Choosing a digital procurement solution should not only automate costly manual processes. It should help achieve business objectives through accelerated cycles for spend, performance and fulfilment.  Analysis, reporting, and rich data needs to be constantly available to underpin a more fluid, agile process, driven by customer requirements and business objectives. And it should not make a massive dent in your budget! 

With K2 eProcurement we cover all facets of digitising and automating the procurement process. We believe that a holistic system that meets both internal and external compliance and requirements is critical for success.

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