Procurean will help SMEs fully digitalize their purchasing processes.
Digitalization is using digital technologies to change your business model to increase revenue and value; it is moving to a digital business. Adapted from: https://www.gartner.com/it-glossary/digitalization/
Digitalization is here and in full swing, offering new possibilities for businesses as well as challenging them to change the way they operate and manage their purchasing processes.
Enterprise-sized businesses have welcomed digitalization with open arms and made a relatively smooth transition from rigid, time-consuming processes to more standardized, efficient, automated practices. Large enterprises that can afford pricey ERP software (e.g. SAP) and relevant employee training have a competitive advantage over small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and other late adopters.
But for SMEs, which represent 99% of all businesses in the EU alone, digitalization of their purchasing and planning processes is still a long way ahead.
SMEs are facing very specific challenges
Most often, SMEs have poor or non-existent informational structure, lack shared databases and have no standardized product and process definitions — in other words, they lack the basic conditions they need to leap from analog to digitized processes.
SMEs also often lack the necessary funds to buy the latest digitalized systems. For instance, a smaller business wanting to acquire an existing ERP solution would find it needed to budget strictly and transfer resources from other activities to meet the cost of implementation alone — and that’s without forking out for the time-consuming and costly employee training that would be needed to use the software efficiently.
Additionally, SMEs lack knowledge and highly skilled labor. They don’t have the right “know-how” on best-in-class business solutions and most aren’t using current information technology to their best advantage.
Procurean will empower SMEs with intelligent resource planning and management tools.
Procurean will share knowledge and experience from enterprise-sized businesses with SMEs by providing wholesome machine-learning-assisted tools that will complement and provide standardization and digitalization of business processes:
- Discovery
- Vendor management
- Demand Management
Discovery
Currently, buyers searching for potential sellers are limited to word-of-mouth recommendations or exhaustive, time-consuming processes and unreliable sources. Similarly, sellers are forced to invest exorbitant amounts into sales and marketing just to get discovered.
Procurean will provide access to a global network where trusted buyers and sellers can always find each other.
Vendor management
Procurean will help businesses engage more with their vendors (sellers) and build proactive relationships that will help them come together on value and strengthen all parties involved. Businesses using Procurean’s fully digitalized environment, with best practices, processes and available technologies, will obtain better value control, reducing the effort and costs associated with managing vendor relationships.
Demand management
Procurean will help businesses to plan, forecast and manage demand, while also addressing external spending factors to better handle purchase orders and eradicate wastefulness.
Machine learning will be applied to demand management to further simplify system execution by forecasting demand, automating approvals, and suggesting appropriate procuring time frames and instruments.
Using Procurean will allow businesses to automate processes for identifying potential new opportunities, greatly simplifying or completely automating human work and creating time to focus more on strategic decisions and vendor relationships.
