The New Role of Procurement

Over the years, the role of procurement has evolved from just being the “buying” department to an internal consultant team. The “policy” or “procedure” watchers of the past, now have a proactive role to help colleagues and decision makers to buy what they need for their jobs while managing risk.

The duty of the Procurement team to negotiate deals and looking for the best providers, can deliver significant value to the organization. They facilitate appropriate products and services for their business units and maintain the established internal requirements.

Procurement teams of today are leaving the reactive mode behind and propose ideas to improve internal operations. The traditional approach of “sit and wait” for a cut cost plan has been replaced by a proactive consulting role. This role promotes changes to increase efficiency in the process and while helps the organization to prepare for an uncertain economy. Some of these initiatives are:

Increase cost savings: Avoid unnecessary costs by digitizing invoices and minimizing traditionally paper-based exchanges.

Improve supplier relationship: By promoting on-board campaigns with suppliers, which makes it easier to connect, and improving this relationship by (both) following a common goal.

Simplify approvals: Remove excessive -or unnecessary- approval requirements and steps that add no value to the process. Small but frequent bottlenecks add up waste to the entire process life cycle.

Include technology: The right technology allows the procurement process to be more engaged and to empower organizations with key analytics. Daily transactions can be used as source data to make strategic decisions – months or even years in advance.

Procurement has the privilege –and responsibility- of having an overview of the entire organization. They are the only ones who have a visibility of how all departments are doing/spending their budget. The challenge is to comply with the business requirements and identify the scenarios where the organization can increase efficiency and cost saving.

In our mission to become your financial process advisor, we focus our efforts on selecting the best options in the market. For procurement teams, we have chosen the Coupa Spend Management Suite as the best tool to help them to achieve their goals. This solution will help to reach higher operating profits, as the overall procurement costs will be significant lower over time.

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