Are You A Buyer? This Is What You Need To Look For In Spend Analysis

Buyers need to consider this!

A procurement professional needs to strategically plan and manage the company’s inventory and take care of information management. They need to be aware of and able to use different types of tools strategic sourcing companies offer which can make their job as a procurement professional easier.

What are the areas which procurement professional can utilize eProcurement tools for the benefit of their company?

Information Gathering and Management

An advanced supplier database and template library foundation is imperative to start a project. It helps procurement professionals with addressing the external data as well as the internal data.

A method which lets professionals to send electronic surveys to resources within various departments in the company quickly and without any hassle saves hours of time in legwork. The method also ensures that the expense calculation you share with your potential suppliers is error-free.

A Smart way to Keep Track of Spend Analysis

Procurement professionals should be able to track and be aware of who in their company is buying what, what they are buying, how much they historically purchased, how much they expect to purchase and whether they like the current product and supplier and other such details. This is possible with a flexible e-procurement tool and real spend analysis is a crucial part of that.

RFx

The concept of moving from Request to Information to Request for Proposal to Request for Quote/Tender is fairly common in every company. E-procurement service providers offer a number of tools or service to support this flow.

The question is: do buyers and suppliers need to learn such tools? While having a basic know-how is important, choosing good RFx solutions which present all steps involved in the process easily is a good approach.

Though, all steps of the RFx process are unique, they have common threads which are connected to each other in some way. Good RFx solutions will tie these threads together in a manner which takes less time from beginning to end and the amount of repetitive tasks required of the suppliers with each step.

A Good Result Management System

Now that the professionals are done with gathering data, the project is complete and the results are better than they expected, they need to have tools to analyze results. Being able to manage the results of projects is considered to be more vital than the results themselves.

A good electronic procurement tool will provide you with an efficient catalog/ordering/purchase order system. This system can be used to make orders at the new pricing you have negotiated. In addition to that, having a catalog system thwarts rogue spending from unapproved suppliers based on past history.

Contract Management

It is important to have solutions for accurate contract management. These tools let you track contracts, dates as well as details. You can make sure that the contract won’t roll over into a situation that costs you more money than you saved. Procurement via electronic methods lets you handle these aspects of the new deal since it is critical to maintaining your project’s success and to keep on top of its spend analysis.