eProcurement Meaning – What You Need To Know
eProcurement is time-saving and efficient. The meaning of eProcurement is the electronic handling of all your procurement tasks, this creates a much simpler and streamlined purchasing process. In turn, your transaction speed increases. This can improve relationships with your suppliers. The eProcurement eliminates unnecessary steps, allowing you to focus on other important tasks.
What are the benefits of an eProcurement Process?
Benefits of an eProcurement Process
There are seven main benefits of creating and using an effective eProcurement process.
If the idea of switching to an eProcurement process fills you with equal parts concern and dread, you are not the only one. Purchasing agents and managers often have erroneous beliefs that a shift to eProcurement can be quite difficult. This includes that the influx of new technology could expose their organization up to both security concerns and a greater risk of errors. In addition, the shift to eProcurement could create a dip as their team’s productivity.
More and more organizations are making their procurement processes all electronic. While it’s natural to have concerns, there are also many important benefits to this switch that you may have not fully thought-out.
If you analyze the reduction in mistakes, overall costs and ability to simplify purchasing procedures companywide, shifting to eProcurement may make your purchasing department and ultimately your company run smoothly, with greater employee satisfaction and wind up making the procurement process more eco-friendly.
Here are our top seven benefits to utilizing an eProcurement process.
1. Reduction of Errors
Since electronic paperwork is streamlined, this makes it easier to monitor for errors, and eliminates the printing step to slow this process down further. In addition, past orders are easily to reference, meaning that your company can instantly compare incoming orders to ensure new requests are correct.
2. Cost Savings
eProcurement will save you money by preventing duplicate spending, leveraging your purchasing volume, and reducing administrative costs traditionally associated with paper-based systems. One example of greater efficiency and cost savings is the cost of paper, stamps and manual assembly in order to physically mail your paperwork versus the same task when done electronically.
3. Spending Transparency
Electronically conducting all your procurement allows greater ease when you write and analyze reports on your purchasing systems. This means you can ensure that your procurement procedures will all conform to your company’s policies. You can also easily monitor and adjust for trends and purchases which do not conform to company standards.
4. Productivity Gains
Once you’ve mastered the system, eProcurement becomes far less time-consuming than traditional means of procurement. One example is that when your records are stored electronically, this makes it far easier to submit reusable tenders. Meanwhile, having templates in the system means your paperwork can be filled out and submitted more quickly.
5. Paperwork Reduction
No one likes having Banker’s Boxes full of the previous year’s records and having to find available space to warehouse all that paperwork. By using e-procurement, all your records can be stored and saved electronically. You can even host these records remotely on a cloud server. This benefits your company in many ways. It saves you from needing more physical room, it makes the process of finding older tenders more simple and it gives everyone who needs it uniform access to your records.
6. Increased Transaction Efficiency
eProcurement is both time-saving and highly efficient. With n electronic handling of all your procurement tasks, this creates a much simpler and streamlined purchasing process. As a result, your transaction speed is also increased. In addition, with e-enabled relationships with your suppliers, the procurement cycle times increase. The eProcurement process eliminates unnecessary steps, allowing you to focus on other important tasks.
7. Uniform Purchasing
When various departments are in the mix of making procurement decisions, there can be discrepancies in both the items they purchase as well as the criteria on how they purchase. When purchasing is conducted electronically, this regulates every department to match the company procurement standards, often without realizing it.
While concerns for making such changes are natural, a switch to e-procurement will allow your company to have greater operational efficiency, purchasing consistency and employee satisfaction while making your process more environmentally responsible.