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, and how today’s Procurement tools lack the budget context and financial analytics necessary to accelerate profitability goals. 

In our last article on Strategic Procurement, we covered the first pain-point in today’s Procurement market: that it often requires multiple iterations and distracting cycles for Procurement/Finance to determine if a request falls within budget.

In this article, we will highlight another key pain-point that Finance and Procurement teams face in the review process: Teams lack a dynamic orchestration tool to streamline approvals to the right teams and grant holistic spend visibility to the key decision-makers.

When teams do not have the automation to streamline intake and approvals, and gain visibility into all spend and commitments, procurement processes are manual and decisions are made in a vacuum. We’ll see more on this below, and we’ll highlight how a team can avoid this pitfall."Is this request in budget?!"
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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:

• Leading business users through the request process: Procurement and Finance must ensure that business users surface all relevant information and documentation given the type of requests to prevent risk and minimize costs. This can lead to manual errors in the request submission process and wasteful iterations between the Procurement function and business users.
• 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, where process inefficiencies exist, and more.

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, especially if there are communications with the vendor directly. This manual process is wasteful for both Procurement and Finance, and limits a team’s ability to engage in truly value-add activity for the business. 

Procurement automation is an obvious progression for organizations to gain control of spend and risk, and to engage in truly Strategic Procurement.

‍Finance teams lack visibility into spend intent and data, limiting ability to achieve profitability goal

When Finance does not have a 360-view into spend intent and commitments, the following questions cannot be answered:

• Are there other open requests for this department, category or vendor to consider?
• What current contractual commitments do we have with this vendor?
• Will this request exceed our allotted quarterly budget for this vendor? 
• Can we shift around the budget to have this spend align with company goals?

Finance and Procurement need a 360-view into spend intent to make strategic and confident decisions on requests.

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Sudozi is one solution here, serving as the only holistic solution to help a Procurement team navigate these crucial questions.

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.

A robust Procurement process begins when a team has the automation to free their time-up for more strategic initiatives and analysis, and becomes truly strategic when a team has the relevant data to make sound financial decisions aligned with profitability goals.

Every Procurement team benefits from a full orchestration tool like Sudozi that automates intake and streamlines the approval review process, all while surfacing the relevant budget and financial insights to key leaders and approvers.