If you work in procurement, you’ve likely heard the saying that effective procurement management is about ‘procuring the right item at the right time from the right vendor at the right price’.
In order to make these complex decisions simpler for staff, automation is taking organisations from tedious manual operations into the world of highly efficient and seamless procurement processes. The result frees employees from repetitive and time-intensive tasks, so they can instead focus on business-critical activities that enhance overall organisational efficiency.
So if you’re still on the fence when it comes to procurement automation, let’s take a look at the top four benefits it can bring to your business.
Benefits of procurement automation
1. Reduce risk by eliminating manual errors
Whatever the size of your organisation, procurement is likely a vital function in which there is little room for human error. Procurement automation enables more stringent risk controls by:
Ensuring your data – such as tasks to be executed, products and services to be delivered, delivery schedules and approved budgets – is always accurate, secure and easily accessible.
Enabling the quick and reliable exchange of important documents, so the risk of issues such as duplicate payments is heavily reduced.
Offering the capacity to create rules within systems, so it’s easier than ever to enforce buyer and supplier policies relating to budgets, processes and restrictions.
2. Make your team more efficient than ever
If you’re sick of being bogged down by endless paperwork, lost documents, and network drives overflowing with unprotected data, then automated procurement is your next logical step for driving team efficiency.
Electronic forms and a seamless all-in-one-place system make it easy for your team to complete their daily tasks, empowering them to spend time making better strategic decisions for your business. Whatever they need, whether it’s POs, purchase requisitions, supplier information or anything else, they can easily access it in seconds.
3. Free up manual process bottlenecks
If your manual process constantly ends up with approval bottlenecks at one person’s desk, you’re not working as efficiently as you could be. Between dealing with purchase requests, purchase orders, invoices, receipts, agreements and stakeholders, just a few simple mistakes could lead to huge delays and be of major detriment to your business.
Using a procurement automation system to manage your purchasing will free up these manual process bottlenecks and allow your business to run smoothly and quickly.
4. Meaningful insights for business success
Procurement automation also allows you to understand more about your existing procurement processes – such as, where your risks and opportunities are -, so that your organisation can perform at its optimal level.
For example, Portt enables enterprises to conduct spend and performance analytics on demand so you can gain valuable insight into how your business and your suppliers are tracking – whenever you choose. The automated software takes away the significant cost and complexity of performing such a massive task manually.
3 procurement processes every business should automate
Invoice and vendor management
Manual invoice and vendor management usually means delayed payments and compliance issues. However, an automated procurement system with a detailed and robust record keeping capacity makes these tasks seamless.
In terms of vendor selection, automated procurement allows your team to streamline their selection process and choose the right vendor for your business every time.They’ll be able to quickly and easily solve problems, as well as build positive, professional relationships with suppliers.
Purchase requisition and purchase orders
Purchase requisitions can easily get stuck at different levels of the business hierarchy. Automating your procurement system will streamline your approval cycle, saving you time and removing unnecessary steps in the process that consume staff time.
In terms of purchase orders, even if you have a formal PO system in place, it can be easy to slip into inadequate handling resulting in confusion and time inefficiencies. Procurement automation allows you to organise your entire purchase order cycle, delivering cost-saving improvements in productivity and efficiency.
Contract approval
Forget about the days when all your contracts were thrown in the same Google drive and employees were left scrambling to find them months down the track. Procurement automation ensures all your contracts stay organised, accessible, and up to date by giving you a central repository to work from.
Disadvantages of manual procurement processes
Still undecided about making the switch to automated procurement? Consider the four main drawbacks of a manual approach:
- It’s slow – Due to hefty data requirements and delays in approvals, manual procurement processes are time inefficient and tedious.
- It’s expensive – With all that data entry, your business ends up paying a lot for those hours of labour!
- It’s prone to error – On top of the many hours spent doing manual processing, your staff will likely have to spend extra hours fixing mistakes and re-doing lost paperwork, adding to your labour costs.
- It leaves you open to risk – In comparison to automated procurement, manual processes leave you exposed to risk; whether it’s late or missing paperwork, incorrect product orders, non-compliance, or late deliveries.
Bring your business into the digital age with automated procurement
Ready to automate your procurement efforts and increase business efficiency?
With Portt you can make it happen. Get in touch with us to benefit from:
- Automatic risk generation for individual procurement activities
- Automatically produced workflows tailored to each sourcing event
- Automated benefit capture for efficient reporting
- Visual analytics and models that update automatically, giving you end-to-end transparency for each procurement event.
Simply fill out the contact form or call us for a no-obligation chat on 02 9079 1908.
