Procurement is crucial for most organizations in the manufacturing industry in order to effectively procure products and services from third-party vendors. To procure items, procurement managers must deal with everything from identifying the right vendors, negotiating terms, submitting purchase orders, and paying invoices in order to receive the final product delivery. The inefficiencies in managing the procure-to-pay cycle make it imperative for businesses to invest in advanced electronic procurement software which can streamline the complicated procedures.

Here we have discussed a few processes that e-procurement software streamlines:

Generate Purchase Orders

Although the ‘No Purchase Order (PO), No Pay’ statement bought the spending transparency, it slows down the overall purchase process. Manually generating POs for every purchase in today’s market, where prices are volatile, and vendors fall apart without a faster response, is invaluable. Automated procurement software adherence to strict PO protocol, thereby enabling your procurement team to generate automated digital POs. It also saves sensitive vendor data digitally in a secured cloud platform for future reference. The standardized POs reduce the accounts payable department workload by minimizing the time involved in creating POs manually and processing re-orders.

Documents Authorization process

Authorization/Approval of various documents involved in the procurement process, such as purchase requisition, purchase orders, invoices, and more is time-consuming. However, most of the advanced procurement management systems are integrated with electronic signature software, which streamlines the entire authorization process. The e-signature platform highlights all mandatory fields within the documents and enables the supervisors at every level to sign the papers securely in digital format from anywhere. Top-notch encryption within the software ensures all the documents are protected against fraud and unauthorized access.

Business Process Management Operations

The process of manually reviewing all invoices to determine if they are in compliance with company policies is time-consuming and prone to errors. With the e-procurement software solution, you can enforce the policy compliance to minimize the unauthorized purchases and set up rule-based payment approvals to process payments for various kinds of POs. The software allows you to automate the most difficult tasks of the procurement process, including purchase requisitions, sourcing, invoicing, purchase orders, inventory management, and payments. More importantly, the digital record maintenance functionality allows you to track the status of each document accurately.

Invoice Management

While managing the invoices manually, there is a high possibility for the procurement team to lose or misplace paper invoices. In some cases, even if the invoice is stored, the data of the invoice may not be clear, which results in data inaccuracy. Lost, misplaced, or poorly managed invoices and purchase orders, and goods receipts mean unreliable data which can lead to delayed payments and compliance issues. The e-procurement software stores all the crucial documents and other sensitive information securely in a cloud-based platform. So you don’t have to worry about any data inaccuracy. With various advanced functionalities, it automates the entire procure-to-pay cycle and streamlines the process effectively.

Vendor Management

Businesses have to maintain good vendor relationships in order to continue in the market successfully. Also, due to the lack of transparency with the manual processes, enterprises may end up dealing with vendor issues as well, which could take weeks to get resolved. However, the e-procurement software allows businesses to identify these grievances quickly and enables them to take the necessary steps to resolve the issues to maintain a better relationship with their vendor.

The Bottom Line

It has become imperative for businesses to invest in procurement software to compete in today’s fast-paced competitive market. So, before you buy software, analyze the issues within your existing system, and list-out your requirements needing to be achieved by implementing the new software. Shop around and purchase the e-procurement management software with the functionalities that you need to achieve the goals and enhance your organization’s overall productivity.