Acquiring or buying goods, services and work often via tendering or competitive bidding process is known as procurement. Corporate and public sectors unit seeks it to be a fair and open competition process of trade for their business with minimizing risks, such as exposure to fraud and collusion. Procurement process includes business affecting factors such as marginal benefit, shipping, delivery and the fluctuating prices of many goods and services. Conventional procurement process generally consumes a certain amount of resources such as employees, time and money of an organization, which is counted in general as the non-liable assets and it affects the growth of an organization in the current tech-arena. The advancement in technology has given a boom to the procurement process and for the leading procurement organizations; it does not just act as quick decision enabler but also a key driver of next-level performance and results.
Procurement teams are now capitalizing on innovative sources of technology to optimize processes, building trust, and to enrich relationships to improve their strategic reach and deploy cutting-edge procurement resources. Technology is continuously driving improvements in processes, data, insights, and as all technologies are ultimately implemented to savings. Following are the current market driving technology, which are affecting procurement processes:
Cloud Services
The ease in buying, selling and getting the right resources across a full array of business services and goods are the natural needs for the young generation of tech-professionals to drive into budget management roles. This has now become possible due to cloud-oriented services available in the market for procurement professionals. Leading to a quickening pace in cloud services, the companies are now looking to ditch clunky, in-house systems and are replacing it with accessible cloud solutions to avoid being lumbered with rapidly superseded systems. Cloud is proving to be very helpful in determining services such as supply chain, a process to pay, purchasing, and much more.
Online Global Access to Marketplace
Technological advancement in procurement processes is helping to recede geographical limitations, resulting in the greater participation of organizations to access global pools of suppliers for business services and resources. With this advancement, larger enterprises will achieve greater efficiencies and can easily identify hidden cost savings factors across the wider areas of their business, particularly within their indirect spending. Online platforms are streamlining their purchasing potential and helping them to get quick access to high-quality suppliers while ensuring in-house compliance.
Expenditure Management
Many organizations are strong at expenditure analysis but still, this only proves to be a little aspect of expenditure management. Even this task is full of difficulties, with no set of particular standards to define how much and what goes into which category during operations. Once an organization starts looking at the details of its budgets, it gets really difficult to understand its level of expenditures and whether the best value is achieved. With the availability of technology, organizations are improving their view on future expenditures.
Artificial Intelligence & its Future Scopes
AI is gaining trust across different sectors in almost all leading organizations and will continue to evolve till we adopt more consumer buying behaviors at different workplaces in leading procurement organizations. The area of expertise, locations, size and the credit score requirements of almost every supplier is required to get clarity over project deliverables. Organizations are getting support from AI platforms to increase the spectrum area of search, speeding up their processes and avoiding the risk of bias, fraud and error rectifications produced by humans.
AI is proving to be a boon for Procurement organizations but still, there is a long way to go in advancement. AI can help in submitting e-bidding of tenders or in a purchase of material by relocating resources according to requirements, the arrangement of data and sheets in array fashion, special dedicated software’s and many more things will get lined-up in accordance to time evolution.
Mobile Applications
Mobile channels are helping micro-services like raise of purchase orders, approvals & continuous checks on delivery times, and billing especially for procurements goods to get faster and reliable. These services will continue to adopt lighter client-side mobile apps. Apps also help with measurement. Business goods are on tight timeline and data from Apps will improve measurement of each step on procurement journey. Mobile applications are also helping in the transfer of data through secured channel, cost-cutting and better resources utilization.
Summary
Technology has provided the ability to deploy spend management platforms that will help in automating or enable employee self-service for tactical procurement activities and due to it, procurement organizations will find mundane supplier activities waning. This will provide procurement professionals with extra hands-on time to focus on higher value-add from suppliers. Further, technology will continue to evolve over the medium to longer term to a mode with a core “container” with a myriad of transactional apps. Companies will see the impact as they start to control a much larger percentage of indirect spend. With the integration of sources, purchasing and procurement technology, and its interface, into wider and specialized business applications, has been single-handedly transformational for every organization that has had the acumen to implement it to date. If organizations haven’t done it yet, it is imperative for them to start today!
