Another week, another Sudozi Strategic Procurement series blog! In our first Strategic Procurement post, we covered the importance of building a data-first procurement process. In our last article, we covered the first pain-point: that it often requires multiple iterations for Procurement/Finance to determine if a request falls within budget.
In this article, we will highlight another key pain-point: Teams lack a dynamic orchestration tool to streamline approvals to the right teams and grant holistic spend visibility to the key decision-makers.
Teams waste hours manually stitching together Intake and Approval processes
Without an automated approval workflow, Procurement and Finance teams waste hours shepherding business users and approvers through the Intake and Approvals processes. This is a tremendous amount of manual burden that can (and should) be avoided. In the end, Procurement and Finance are responsible for:
- Involving approvers throughout the review process: Procurement and Finance must ensure that each of the relevant approver groups sign-off on a request. This can lead to manual error where Legal, IT, Security & others are missed in the approval process, and the team has no easy method to track SLAs.
- Leading business users through the request process: Procurement and Finance must ensure that business users surface all relevant information and documentation to prevent risk and minimize costs.
Not only are teams forced to waste hours manually herding their organizations through a proper procurement process, but these teams lack instant visibility into the status of all requests. This manual process is wasteful and limits a team’s ability to engage in truly value-add activity.
Finance teams lack visibility into spend intent and data
When Finance does not have a 360-view into spend intent and commitments, the following questions cannot be answered:
- Can we shift around the budget to have this spend align with company goals?
- Will this request exceed our allotted quarterly budget for this vendor?
- What current contractual commitments do we have with this vendor?
- Are there other open requests for this department, category or vendor to consider?
Finance and Procurement need a 360-view into spend intent to make strategic and confident decisions on requests.
Closing Thoughts
Strategic Procurement is all about making sure the key decision makers have the right data to make the best investments for the company. This includes surfacing key data to approvers in the review process to help drive alignment towards profitability goals.
Sudozi offers intake and approval orchestration, with the insights necessary to make strategic decisions. A robust Procurement process begins when a team has the automation to free their time-up for more strategic initiatives, and becomes truly strategic when a team has the relevant data to make sound financial decisions aligned with profitability goals.