Getting the procurement house in order

Procurement organizations today are moving at the helm of contributing strategically to organizations growth. Having evolved from its traditional role of merely negotiating with the suppliers to reduce purchasing cost, today, organizations around the globe are expecting their procurement functions to focus on value and innovation. As procurement readies itself to shift gears to become agile & proactive to meet the evolving & dynamic demands in a very competitive environment, it needs to ensure its house is in order for the mundane yet important back end tasks viz. managing requisitions, issuing purchase orders, mapping invoices, processing payments etc. commonly referred to as the Procure-to-Pay process.

Often a procurement department has to spend a lot of effort to trace requisitions and purchase orders of materials for which they receive an invoice. In most of the cases the purchase orders for these invoices are non-existent. To correct this scenario of non-existent requisitions and purchase orders, procurement spends substantive time & energy to educate the buyers to follow a particular path and ensure compliance to set processes. Depending upon the size of the organization the time devoted by procurement organizations can vary.

However, irrespective of the size of a procurement organization, with the need of the hour being agility, procurement needs to ensure it spends the minimum possible time on addressing such mundane tasks and devote maximum of its time to strategic activities. So how does procurement ensure its house is in order even as it works towards the strategic objectives?

Imagine a scenario where as procurement professional you do not have to intervene or monitor if your requisitioner is ordering items from contracted suppliers, whether proper approvals are in place for the requisitions, whether your supplier is sending you invoices matching the purchase order, etc. Zycus, with its advanced artificial intelligence powered guided buying functionality makes this scenario a possibility for procurement professionals, thus allowing them to focus on more strategic activities.

To learn more how Guided buying is turning out to be the GPS for procurement, view the archive recordings of the concluded webinar “Forget the Amazon Metaphor: P2P Needs to Be More Like a GPS”