In the digital world, it’s surprising to see just how many businesses are still using manual procurement processes. Organizations across the world are still using spreadsheets that are time-consuming, error-prone, expensive and inefficient. The solution to these woes is in the utilization of procurement software.
Is Your Manual Procurement Process Hurting Your Business?
Manual processes are holding businesses back and costing them in a way they often don’t realize.
Lost Hours
Tracking down vendor information in email chains or through multiple spreadsheets, reviewing contracts, and manual sourcing all take a toll on the efficiency of employees and the procurement department as a whole. To solve these issues, organizations can leverage e-procurement software that automates time-consuming tasks and creates a centralized location for purchasing decisions.
Messy Documentation
Too many files and too much paper can result in messy documentation. When contracts are stored in hard copy or PDF, it’s difficult to access the details of the contract, including negotiated terms and conditions. The result is far too much time spent looking for documents, or the info and details within those documents.
Investing in procurement software solutions means no more hard copies and no more PDFs of important information. Instead, everything is stored in one place, making it easy to find, exactly when you need it.
Missed Savings Opportunities
When you speed up tasks like creating invoices and vendor selection, you can make faster and more valuable decisions. Automating processes means that your staff can focus their energy on other tasks, such as building beneficial vendor relationships.
No Centralized Location
When you use a manual procurement process, you don’t have a go-to source of data and information. Without this location for information about suppliers, the purchasing department must go through various internal and external sources to find the information they need.
Decentralized tools mean that the staff doesn’t have a whole lot of visibility into the procurement process, which can lead to savings leakage and risk. Often, the details get overlooked, and communication begins to break down between the procurement team and customers or suppliers.
With purchase order software for small businesses, you can more easily store and find information in one easy to use platform.
Inefficiency
When you get down to it, a manual process isn’t efficient. When a part of your business is inefficient, your business itself is not as efficient as it could be. Inefficiency leads to your business losing money. For every simple task that ends up taking tons of time out of your employee’s day, your business is losing money.
You can avoid losing money when you automate the procurement process with online procurement management software that allows anyone involved in the procurement function to easily and quickly find the information they need.
Why Invest In Procurement Software?
Depending on your business needs, investing in procurement software is a big decision. Many businesses believe that manual processes are cheaper, but when it comes down to how much time is being wasted, that assumption just simply isn’t true.
Now that you know the risks of continuing to use a manual, spreadsheet-based procurement process, let’s discuss the advantages of procure to pay software for small businesses.
Eliminate Paper-based Systems
Paper-based systems are time-consuming and can lead to confusion. Purchase order software creates electronic purchase orders with all of the necessary information automatically. Those purchase orders are then accessible in real-time from anywhere when using a smartphone or computer.
Purchasing Based on Your Policies
The automation of a cloud-based procurement solution makes it easy for you to create hierarchies and rule-driven workflows to ensure your purchase orders are accurate and comply with your (and your vendor’s) policies.
Boosts Productivity
With less busywork comes productivity. Task automation requires little to no human intervention and provides routes and alerts for approval workflows, automatic collection, and cross-referencing of transaction data. By boosting productivity, you can free up time for your employees to focus on more important tasks.
Fewer Errors
With a pre-selected vendor list and integrated inventory and contract management, procurement solutions make compliance easier. There will be no more duplicate orders or invisible spend.
Efficiency
Automated procurement platforms boost purchase order processing speed and improving workflows. The purchasing process that may have taken days will now be condensed into just a few hours.
Cost Savings
Streamlining the purchasing process results in significant cost savings. Less time and fewer resources required for procurement mean that you can save money and spend it in other areas of your business.
Actionable Data
Actionable data is stored securely on the cloud for easy analysis. You can quickly gain insights into the potential issues in your workflows, create financial reports and budgets, and even identify areas of potential in your supply chain.
Spend Management
E-procurement solutions structure spend across vendors and provides detailed tracing information. This spend management allows you to track cost reductions continuously and identify gaps.
Integration
Purchase order software integrates with your accounting software to create purchase orders and invoices with just a few clicks of a button.
Bellwether: A Valuable Investment for SMBs
You can harness your business’ potential by using automation to increase the efficiency of your procurement process. By integrating a purchase order system that meets all of your business needs, you can expect higher levels of productivity, efficiency, and a better bottom-line than ever before.
Bellwether’s solutions mean that your procurement department will never drop the ball again, lose valuable paperwork, or get lost in the mess of manual operation. Instead, use the time saved to invest in building relationships that can result in even more cost savings.
Discover exactly how (and how much) Bellwether can save your business money with our new procurement ROI calculator.
Contact us today to learn how automation is the key to the success of your procurement function.
