Procurement solutions today are high in demand. Businesses have come to realise that having a procurement software can indeed help with increasing the overall productivity of an organization.
But finding a procurement software that best fits your business infrastructure can be difficult.
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Before you make the purchase, give a look at the below list of the must-have modules of procurement system:
1. Automation
Essentially, this is the whole purpose of contemporary business tools. If they don’t relieve you of some of the most tedious jobs, they simply aren’t worth your time.
A workflow should be included in procurement automation to handle purchase orders, obtain managers’ and executives’ approvals, and provide straightforward tracking without the need for data entry.
In short, a good platform should do away with all the troublesome modules of procurement system.
2. Monitoring of the Spending Plan
The most crucial component of procurement management, aside from actually making the payments, is reporting. You must constantly be aware of how much money you are spending with which providers in order to reduce costs as much as you can.
Therefore, if you’re going to invest in a tool, it needs to be much superior than your present Excel sheet in all of these areas.
Look for these pointers in your modules of procurement system:
- Real-time oversight is provided, including for money that has already been committed to but has not yet left your bank account.
- Budgets for teams and projects: You must be extremely clear about what teams are spending money on and why.
- Comparisons with earlier periods: It’s always useful to observe when spending either increases or decreases in light of recent months or quarters.
Most importantly, ensure that you can obtain these items without having to manually change the data. It ought to be simple and accessible anytime you need it.
3. Tracking of Approvals
Someone must bear ultimate responsibility when corporate funds are lost. Additionally, in many companies, the managerial approval process entails a chain of emails that must be reviewed each time a purchase is made, which means that finance has more job.
Your modules of procurement system should instead have restrictions on who can spend money and how much. It might not be necessary to ask any questions if it’s a management or executive. But before the purchase order can be processed, the manager should be notified (automatically) when an average employee places one.
Naturally, the procurement manager or the finance team should be informed of all of this and it should be documented. Because you don’t want to have to ask everyone for a payment individually in person or via email.
4. Teams May Collaborate Easily
Theoretically, buying isn’t all that complicated. As long as you have a trustworthy source and know what you want, making a transaction is straightforward.
But if you want to involve others in the process, it becomes more difficult. The level of experience and expertise in procurement that you possess is not shared by your coworkers. Furthermore, it is quite improbable that users will go through a time-consuming onboarding process or read the full product manual just to make a few payments.
You require a programme or platform with modules of procurement system that will direct users through each transaction while upholding regulations and streamlining procedures.
5. Required Integrations
You probably already employ accounting and spend management software. Without you needing to spend hours copying and pasting, your procurement platform ought to communicate with the others.
Verify that a tool will be simple to link to the other essential components of your finance ecosystem before you decide to use it.
6. User-Friendly Interface
It is crucial for an e-Procurement to have a user-friendly interface. You don’t want to be in a position where you have to spend extra money on educating your staff about a challenging platform or, worse, on a costly e-Procurement that your team refuses to use. A user-friendly e-Procurement solution would result in speedier user acceptance and quicker adoption at all organizational levels with the least amount of resistance. An important component that can aid your company in improving its procurement management process is an easy-to-use interface.
Choose an e-Procurement solution with modules of procurement system that will be easy for your team to use once it has undergone minimum training.
7. Asset Administration
An efficient e-Procurement solution streamlines the procurement process to make asset management simple. It avoids hiccups like human error in the manual process that could lead to poor asset management. Make sure the e-Procurement platform you choose has tools for managing assets.
