Procurement and Purchasing
4 min read
Procurement intake is much more than just helping employees get the goods and services a company needs. In fact, the process can be a lot more stressful than one might imagine. Between supplier onboarding risk, procurement policy compliance, and rogue spend control, there are a lot of pitfalls finance and procurement departments need to consider. For those who have a headache just thinking about it, intake-to-procure technology might be the solution you’re looking for.
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Intake-to-procure solutions provide a centralized interface for all stakeholders to request, approve, and collaborate on procurement processes. It’s a one-stop shop for all teams, enabling collaborative, cross-functional approval processes for procurement, IT, controllers, security, legal, and executive teams. With intake-to-procure, companies can see through their procurement processes from start to finish.
Finance and procurement departments are stretched thin, and now more than ever, all employees need to be able to view, monitor and approve purchase requests without relying on manual methods like email or Excel. Before intake-to-procure solutions, procurement was a slow and choppy process. Automating the procurement intake process enables all employees to compliantly add vendors and see their requests through to final approval, all while managing risk.
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Many procurement organizations today already have systems such as procure-to-pay or contract lifecycle management in place to handle purchase requests. But these systems often come with usability and adoption challenges, especially for procurement stakeholders. When cross-functional approvals come into the mix, the problem gets even hairier.
Without an intake-to-procure solution, many businesses have a less-than-ideal employee experience for purchasing:
Intake-to-procure solutions reduce purchase request cycle times by creating a single front door for procurement intake. They also address risk management requirements by integrating cross-functional systems like GRC and CLM into the approval process, saving time and improving visibility for procurement stakeholders.
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For many companies, procurement tends to focus on compliance. The stakeholder user experience of vendor onboarding and procurement intake tends to fall by the wayside, much to the detriment of the company.
Intake-to-procure melds procurement intake, vendor onboarding, and cross-functional approval processes under one streamlined view. Automation provides tangible metrics so that companies can focus on optimizing procurement.
Employees can track a purchase request from vendor onboarding, through approval, purchase order creation, invoicing, and contract renewal.
Intake-to-procure creates better visibility into procurement. It provides insight for anyone from the C-suite down — finance, IT, security, and legal monitor the process throughout, helping unblock purchase requests while saving companies time and money. Â
Zips’ intake-to-procure solution is designed to be the “start button” for a company’s procurement process. Its solution is simple, user-friendly, and effective. It removes the headache from procurement intake, helping companies revolutionize their procurement process to fit their aspirations.
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Procurement intake is a comprehensive process that includes many repeatable steps. Automated intake-to-procure tools make for smooth and efficient processes.
Implementing an intake-to-procure solution at your company may look something like this:
Step 1: Create an intake form that is dynamic and comprehensive. It should include information like vendor, type of work, desired result, ideal completion dates, budget, contact points, and people available to approve.
Step 2: Design purchase request approval sequence to orchestrate the process to completion.
Step 3: Pull in the proper stakeholders by assigning tasks to different team members. Intake-to-procure automates the process of notifying as many employees as needed.
Step 4: Align the team on any details or questions that might arise so that everyone is on the same page.
Step 5: Confirm the launch of the process and roll out to stakeholders with executive alignment.
Step 6: Monitor intake processes for risk, approvals, and necessary roadblocks. Insert stakeholders to approve or answer questions as necessary.
Step 7: Finalize the process and look at the results. Intake-to-procure can offer detailed reports and summaries to confirm if the request was a success.
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By unifying the traditional fragmented request and approval processes, procurement intake solutions can help a company improve employee adoption of procurement processes, increase efficiency, reduce supplier risk, and control spend.
Intake-to-procure solutions allow all employees access to the procurement process from a centralized interface. When information is presented in a concise and clear manner, it becomes much more accessible. And having more employees on the platform will result in better oversight.
With an optimized user experience, your procurement team will find themselves capturing more spend. Companies will have better buy-in, giving employees more agency and buy-in for compliance.
The automated systems within intake-to-procure let procurement teams sit back and know that things are happening behind the scenes. From start to finish, intake-to-procure will monitor and flag issues that may arise. It frees employees up to focus on other needs.
Intake-to-procure ensures companies are running efficiently and speedily. Nearly every aspect of the process happens on one platform – vendor onboarding, approval, oversight, risk management, IT/security checks. This makes for a strong and healthy procurement process.
Along the process, intake-to-procure flags for risky situations. Whether in the early contract stage or near delivery, you can be assured that intake-to-procure is watching over your organization. As more employees have access to the platforms, it also allows for even more oversight of different processes while enabling hybrid procurement structures.
Better efficiency and lower risk through intake-to-procure mean that a company will find better budgetary outcomes. Intake-to-procure solutions provide request routing to preferred vendor options, allowing companies to choose the best fit for their financial goals. The automated processes of intake-to-procure allow for turnkey results.
To learn more about how to enable these benefits, download the “Establishing Frictionless Intake-to-Procure as the core of procurement experience” eBook.
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Procurement
Finance
IT
Security
Legal
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Let’s say procurement has three main KPIs — quality, delivery, and cost-savings. Intake-to-procure can hit all three of these by delivering on some specific KPIs.
Quality KPIs
Delivery KPIs
Cost-saving KPIs
Adopting intake-to-procure will result in quality, delivery, and cost-saving KPIs that will leave organizations much healthier.
Zip is the world’s leading intake-to-procure solution, providing a single platform for any employee to initiate a purchase or vendor request. Zip’s seamless upstream procurement intake experience guides requesters to preferred suppliers while automatically routing the approval workflow for every new purchase or vendor to the right team, at the right time.
With Zip intake-to-procure, businesses gain full adoption of the procurement process. This leads to clear and timely visibility across all purchases, increasing operational efficiency, mitigating business risk, and controlling spend while dramatically improving the employee experience.
Zip offers one intelligent procurement intake process that acts as the front-end to ERP or procure-to-pay, which reduces redundant vendors. Approvals with Zip are quick – with configurable approval chains built for collaboration on a no-code platform where anyone can change workflows.
Ready to modernize your procurement intake experience? Request a demo so that you can see how Zip addresses your intake-to-procure needs.
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