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October 2020

Oct 13
Virtual Card

5 Reasons Why Virtual Cards Are The Future of B2B Spending

By Procurement No Comments

Virtual cards offer added safety, reduced costs, reduced waste, boosted cash back, unprecedented spend visibility, and instant reconciliation. That’s why we partnered with Ramp to bring our customers all of these benefits and more. 

In order to explain why virtual cards are such a boon for business expenses, it’s important to first understand what a virtual card actually is. A virtual card is similar to a credit card in that it has numbers, a date, and all of the information you’d normally use when inputting your card information for an online purchase. However, unlike a regular debit or credit card, you don’t keep using the same virtual card for years until it expires. 

Instead, a virtual card is like a disposable credit card that’s linked to your actual credit or debit card. A virtual card may be good only for a single purchase, a set duration, or up to a certain spend limit. After that, it’s done. You just get a new one.  Why would you want an endless stream of card numbers for your business? Well, there are actually a lot of reasons, especially if you’re still using paper checks or paper invoices. Some of the most important reasons to use a virtual card for your B2B spend include: 

Safety

Think about this—you don’t carry around the originals of your most important documents, do you? Like your social, birth certificate, or marriage license? Usually, we just give someone a copy. A disposable version that won’t really impact our lives if it’s lost. 

Virtual cards are kind of like that from a safety perspective. Avoid having your personal information stolen as well as interruptions that are likely to occur if you have to report fraudulent activity on your account and wait for a new card. Hackers and fraudsters alike are stopped in their tracks with a virtual card, though. And if you suspect suspicious activity while the card is still active, no big deal. Just cancel it and grab a new card number, leaving all your actual accounts in tact and safely away from the outside world. 

Even outside of privacy invasions and malicious actors on the web, internal fraud also has no room to grow. Because spend can be set for a specific limit and purchases are visible in real-time, there’s not much room for internal fraud to take hold. Consider it damage mitigation and risk prevention.

Obligatory COVID-19 tie-in: 

It’s 2020. We’d be crazy not to mention how (or if) virtual cards can help during the pandemic as business processes are completely upended in the name of social distancing. While some analog businesses are stuck dealing in papers and in-person contact, businesses that use virtual cards can manage their jobs quicker, safer, and from the security of home minus all the security risks. Virtual cards are one way to boost business continuity during the coronavirus. 

Reduce Costs (And Save The Trees)

Money is expensive, am I right? Not only is it costly to have people working to collect paper invoices, print paper checks, reconcile spend, and on and on and on, the simple materials cost alone is staggering. 

“Paper checks account for $12.5 trillion of business spend every year in the US alone.” –Tracy Kellaher

I don’t even want to contemplate what that means for the environment, especially if you start looking at envelopes too. 

Make two strategic strides at once by reducing paper waste and excess spend with the switch to virtual cards. 

Cash Back

Sure, some banks offer a little cash back on purchases, but what if you could get rewarded in ways befitting to a business? Not only do you get the added benefits of ditching the expense reports and the paper piles in favor of automated accounting, you could earn 1.5% cashback and possibly even more in rebates just for spending in the same ways you already do. 

Plus, you can maximize that cashback by utilizing dozens of cards across the company, because it will no longer be such a risk to equip your employees with a little company plastic. Cha-ching! 

Spend Visibility

Spend visibility is basically a buzzword now. It’s something you need in order to accurately track your finances and make wise choices about your suppliers. Through the use of virtual cards, you become equipped with basically instant full spend visibility for every analog method you replace. Easily view the 50k foot overview or a granular, single-user, single-purchase snippet of data, all updated in real-time. No more waiting. 

This offers a major boost to spend forecasting that can now be easily viewed filtered by category—e.g. department, merchant, or employee.  You can search, get customized alerts, and even find automated savings. 

Instant Reconciliation

Tired of chasing people down? Equally tired of waiting and waiting only to spend a bunch of time reconciling invoices? If you’re doing it the analog way, then that’s good—it means your brain already knows there’s an easier way. 

With virtual cards, you can experience the efficiency of instant reconciliation. Automatic categorization and receipt-matching plus accounting integrations let the old expense report take care of itself. With cards from Ramp, modern finance teams can save 5.4 days and $15k per month. And the really cool thing about that is… 

Premikati has partnered up with Ramp to provide unlimited virtual and physical cards to make managing your spend a breeze. Earn cashback, access more than $150k in partner rewards, easy accounting integrations and no fees. Plus, Ramp boasts 10-20x the limits of traditional credit lenders thanks to their novel underwriting system and a 30 day payment schedule with no interest. We’re excited to join together to help you find strategic savings from the best suppliers, safety, spend visibility, and a big win for the environment.  

 

Oct 12
PE Analytics

Spend Analytics At The Private Equity Level Are Critical To Future Success

By Private Equity No Comments

Keeping spend analysis at the portfolio company level results in data silos, missed savings opportunities, decreased negotiating power, increased compliance risks, and a negatively impacted valuation and EBITDA figures at the private equity level. Choosing a PE-level marketplace can eliminate these issues as well as provide long-term strategic perks that come with intelligent spend. 

Spend analytics at the private equity level are critical to continued success. Running a business without data is a real shot in the dark—financial data being among the riskiest options to neglect. Data collection and analysis continue to reign supreme as a major business initiative in nearly all industries and sectors across the globe. Data silos are being eroded. Data is not only being shared between departments, but between brands, sometimes as a primary form of partnership. Continuing with business in the ‘20s without a comprehensive data analysis strategy nearly guarantees that your companies will soon be out of the game, replaced by spry, agile companies who blend numbers and instinct into something that grows like wildfire. 

Choosing the strategy that best suits your business structure is an important step toward spend visibility. In this article, we will discuss spend analysis at the private equity and portfolio company levels. 

Current State of Spend Analytics Across Portcos

Current processes for spend analysis across portcos today are likely to look like this: 

Right, nothing. There’s no process. Portco spend analysis is usually siloed within the portfolio companies themselves, with no analysis of note at the private equity level. If anything exists at all, it’s probably being done manually via XLS—a wildly inefficient method with poor results compared to its alternatives. To swing the other direction, there may be no spend analysis going on whatsoever at either the portco or PE level, a high risk in 2020. 

Problems With Keeping Spend Analysis at the Portfolio Company Level

If spend analysis is only happening at the portco level, then, by nature, there is no PE-wide spend visibility that reaches across portcos. As with siloed approaches in other operational aspects of business, there are costs that come with that level of “convenience.”

Without PE-wide spend visibility, there is also a loss of leverage—leverage which turns immediately into savings—during negotiations and multiple vendor communications. 

This results in a loss of 3-5% of spend analyzed. 

Benefits Of Analyzing Spend at The Private Equity Level

At its foundation, analyzing spend at the PE level offers a clearer picture into what is being purchased and from whom. With this information opens the opportunity to rationalize vendors and standardize, identify savings potential, and spot new sourcing opportunities. 

At a deeper level, developing a spend analysis strategy that looks at all portcos can have a notable benefit on valuation and EBITDA figures, even within months of implementation. Having real-time spend analysis also offers clear visibility into rogue spend so that compliance issues can be tamped out swiftly before major damage is incurred. PE-level spend analysis also lays a solid framework for category management initiatives which are increasing in importance in the PE environment. Spend analysis underpins successful, optimized procurement strategies of all varieties. 

How The Private Marketplace Model Enhances PE-Level Spend Analysis

Rather than organizations adopting purchasing software one at a time in a siloed manner that negates savings opportunities, a private marketplace can improve PE spend analysis opportunities. A PE Owned Marketplace, underpinned by SAP Ariba, is a solution that allows for centralized control with portco-level authority, simple methods to turn on/off portcos as they are acquired or sold, and PE-level-led purchasing that allows for maximization of savings. With immediate spend visibility and  additional savings opportunities, businesses can expect to achieve rapid savings for near-instantaneous ROI plus long-term strategic perks.  

 

Learn More:

Oct 12
Private Equity

Capture And Enforce Savings With A Central Private Equity Level Procurement Marketplace

By Private Equity No Comments

A private equity level procurement marketplace such as Premikati’s PE Marketplace allows firms to maximize on savings utilizing group purchasing power and then enforce those negotiated rates to ensure savings are captured. Opportunities for purchasing autonomy remain at the portco level while spend analysis and sourcing events can be managed centrally at the PE level. PE firms are also able to add or remove portcos at will as they are being sold and acquired—removal occurs within minutes when needed. PE-level purchasing also assists in reducing rogue spend. 

Current State of Procurement Purchasing Across Portcos

The use of siloed procurement technology such as SAP Ariba Snap is common among many portfolio companies. Expense reports are also the norm. Cost optimization processes remain at the individual portco level leading to missed opportunities, compliance issues, and a significant reduction in savings for PE firms as a whole. PE firms may feel overwhelmed by the complexities of cross-portfolio sourcing and may face resistance to a centralized  approach by portco-level executives. 

Problems With Procurement Purchasing at the Portfolio Company Level

Purchasing at the portfolio company level wastes time and resources across the board. If purchasing is happening at this level, it is likely that deals have also been negotiated piecemeal, missing the opportunity to leverage group buying power as well as consuming employee hours across each individual organization for a process that only needed to occur once.   

Data is siloed between portcos and, because of this, there is a major lack of spend visibility which also results in its own savings reductions. Compliance issues such as rogue purchases can quickly arise when purchasing occurs at the portco level instead of in a controlled, centralized, PE environment with full cross-portfolio spend visibility. 

Purchasing at the portco level results in:

  • Lack of controls
  • Inability to enforce negotiated rates / prices
  • Rogue purchases

Savings lost due to purchasing at the portco level equates to 2-4% of spend. 

Benefits Of Purchasing at The Private Equity Level

The most obvious benefit of purchasing at the private equity level is savings. Purchasing at the PE level allows for strategic choices that result in obtaining the lowest possible price. These prices are only available due to PE-level spend analysis which allows for the identification of spending patterns that could lead to potential deals. This leads to the PE firm’s ability to effectively source and leverage group buying power to purchase at the best rates and prices. 

By completing the entire procurement journey at the PE level utilizing a private marketplace, PE firms can achieve an expected >%4 spend savings achieved across portcos. This is a quick and sizable win for PE firms struggling to meet requests for procurement savings—a notable, even trendy area of critique among PE firms in recent years.

Additionally, rogue spend becomes more apparent in this model and quick action can be taken. 

How The Private Marketplace Model Enhances PE-Level Purchasing

Using a central, PE-level procurement marketplace, PE firms are able to ensure that items and services are being obtained at the lowest prices possible resulting in enforceable savings. Because portcos retain some procurement autonomy with full approval controls at the portco level, the switch to a PE-led procurement model becomes smoother. Premikati also offers change management solutions to guide each portco’s adoption. Because PE Marketplace sits alongside other technologies—it is a non-integrated solution—portcos can continue to use additional technologies as they see fit.

On the PE side of the equation, PE Marketplace offers the ability to easily remove portfolio companies from the system within minutes if divested. The addition of new portcos takes only a few short days and is based around the company’s current eprocurement solutions.

 

Learn More:

Oct 12
Private Equity

Private Equity Firms Gain Quick Wins With Optimized Sourcing

By Private Equity No Comments

Sourcing at the private equity level offers maximized savings via leveraged buying power, the ability to standardize processes and best practices, increase spend visibility and analysis capacities, and improve valuation and EBITDA figures. 

Why source everything separately across each individual portfolio company when private equity-level sourcing can increase rate of return, maximize savings, efficientize SOPs, and lead to insightful spend analysis across all organizations? Prior procurement platforms kept power at the portco level, but PE firms have a notable leg up in their sourcing efforts when they can utilize their full, leveraged buying power, resulting in quick, sizable savings. 

Current State of Sourcing Across Portcos

In many PE scenarios, all sourcing is executed at the portfolio company level—there is no PE-level control whatsoever. This caution-to-the-wind approach results in a lot of lost savings and opportunities. Of these PE-firms that do not utilize a more inclusive strategy, there is often mounting pressure to generate good returns, and procurement can be seen as a quick win for savings with sizable long-term potential as well. While some portcos may seek to retain autonomy in procurement, insightful spend analysis figures and a well-planned roadmap can often combine to make a compelling argument for PE-led sourcing. 

Problems With Keeping Sourcing at the Portfolio Company Level

When sourcing is only happening at the portfolio company level, there is a tremendous hit to savings potential as well as a higher likelihood of siloed data practices which open the company to a wide range of risks and other detriments. When portcos retain full autonomy in sourcing, this usually results in:

  • Lack of aggregated spend across portcos
  • Lack of standardization of sourcing processes and best practices
  • Overpayment due to minimized savings and potential discounts. 

In terms of savings lost, this can equate to 9-16% per event. This lack of visibility and reduction in savings is often enough for many PE firms to consider moving sourcing to the PE level, because it can result in fast and impactful ROI. 

Benefits Of Sourcing at The Private Equity Level

How do things change when sourcing moves from the portco level to the private equity level? The magic word of the day is “leveraged buying power.” Sourcing at the PE level offers a major boost attaining the best possible prices from vendors. Partner-led execution of sourcing events ensure maximized savings that hinge upon best practices. 

Through the combination of spend analysis and sourcing at the PE level, private equity firms can immediately increase visibility, reduce compliance risks, boost leveraged buying power to negotiate the best deals, and standardize sourcing processes across the board—all of which add up to notable savings. 

How The Private Marketplace Model Enhances PE-Level Sourcing

To nix the siloed approach to procurement across portcos, PE firms can adopt a private marketplace model as part of a greater e-procurement strategy. With Premikati Marketplace, PEs can take advantage of PE-negotiated contracts and catalogs while utilizing the Private Equity Marketplace underpinned by SAP Ariba. No matter the current state of e-procurement technology within organizations at the start, Premikati Marketplace is a quick-to-deploy, lightweight solution with lighting-fast time to ROI. Plus, it can easily integrate into pre-existing procurement processes for fast adoption—with change management services provided to each portco to ease the transformation. 

This PE-level option offers the ability to quickly turn on or off portcos as they are acquired or sold, retain centralized control with  portco-level authority, and numerous ways to maximize savings across all participating organizations. Using this sourcing approach comes with the additional benefit of deep spend analysis at the PE-level which has been known to boost valuation and EBITDA figures even after only a short duration of use.  

 

Learn More:

Oct 05
Contract Management

5 Ways Legal Teams Gain A Boost From Contract Management Software

By Procurement, Procurement Managed Services No Comments

Navigating procurement contracts as a legal professional and feel like walking through a minefield, especially if your company is still relying on outdated procurement practices. A good, digital contract management system such as SAP Ariba causes risk to plummet using mitigation techniques like full, auditable visibility and alerts about potential risk factors. It also saves legal departments a lot of time reviewing almost-identical contracts. Here are a few reasons contract management software is critical to modern legal professionals working in the procurement:

Verifiably Maintain Compliance

Compliance is non-negotiable within your organization, but verifying and maintaining compliance can seem like an insurmountable task. Proper contract management using SAP Ariba software offers legal teams many compliance protections including clear visibility into the entire contract lifecycle, alerts for nonstandard contract agreements, and a full audit trail along the way. 

External compliance such as rules put in place from regulatory bodies like state and local governments can be handled within the system as well as internal compliance concerns such as quality expectations. If any issues arise, they can be quickly addressed to avoid any further risk while still fostering a trusting relationship with your suppliers. 

Gain Unprecedented Visibility Throughout The Entire Contract Lifecycle

On the point of visibility, contract management extends from the initiation phase through to negotiation and onward into contract renewal. Being able to see the entire lifecycle can help legal professionals spot risks before they become an issue, so they can be addressed with urgency.

Traceable Esignatures

Esignatures have put pens on the backburner. Not only is the digital signature completed online without the need for paper mail or tedious faxing, it is traceable in ways that a pen signature cannot be.  Esignatures also offer a boost to contract accuracy because it guides suppliers through each step of the signing process (sign here, initial here, etc.) so your legal team no longer has to deal with missed steps and incorrectly managed paperwork. 

Additionally, esignature platforms offer reminders for suppliers who take a bit longer to add their signature. This helps ensure that all contracts are signed fully to avoid any legal snafus that can arise from liabilities caused by incomplete contracts  (which are ,effectively, no contracts.) 

Controlled, Automated Processes You Can Rely On

Using templates and clause libraries, procurement teams are able to put together their own contracts using pre-approved language. In the event that a nonstandard  contract needs to be created, a notification for review will be sent. This helps ensure that all contracts are legally admissible without consuming focus and massive swaths of time. Legal professionals can use their time providing greater value for the company than constantly reviewing nearly-indentical contracts. 

Reduce Risk With Performance Insights 

Whenever supplier deliveries aren’t meeting standards, or if a supplier chooses to utilize non-compliant tactics, the issue must be dealt with swiftly in order to avoid as much damage as possible.  The SAP Ariba contract management system makes it easy to track performance and view the information from a centralized dashboard. Intervening early can help salvage supplier relationships as well as reduce overall legal risks associated with defective or non-compliant parts.

If you want to see what we can do for you with our SAP Ariba-backed contract management system, reach out to us today. 

About Premikati

Premikati is a woman-owned business of procurement experts providing best-in-class software to maximize your company’s ROI.  

Our award-winning team has a 100% success rate implementing on-time and on-budget, due to our agility, leanness, operational experience, and the ability to tailor the transformation process from C-level to end user. (For more information, visit www.premikati.com)

Oct 05

Contract Management Software Boosts Quick Wins for Procurement Teams

By Procurement No Comments

Contracts are the heart and soul of procurement operations. Even a few outdated processes can slow down your team and impact supplier relationships. A modern contract management system, however, can eliminate many long-standing painpoints, save time, and even enhance communications with suppliers in ways that may lead to greater trust and better deals. The following are just a few reasons that robust contract management is a big win for your procurement team:

Easily Search Using Keywords

Do you know where all your contracts are? Do you know which suppliers provide which items without having to go on a wild goose chase? A good contract management system helps centralize your contracts in an indexed database so you can easily search for whatever contract information you need, even on the go.

Blaze Through Contract Processes With Templates

Most procurement teams send a lot of very similar contracts that go on to follow very similar processes. Instead of starting over from scratch every time or using makeshift methods (like the “find” function) can result in errors. Contract management based on SAP Ariba enables the use of templates to manage contract cycles that behave alike. By using templates, your team can ensure that all changes relevant to the supplier at hand have been made accurately and consistently across the board, more effectively and efficiently than other, outdated methods. Even if entire contract templates don’t sound suited to your business, SAP Ariba can handle a full clause library so your team can pick and choose as needed.

Templates help ensure agreement terms are in line with your company’s legal advice from the start, speeding up contract creation and completion to unprecedented speeds. This doesn’t mean you’re locked in, though. SAP Ariba-based contract management also allows for non-standard agreements which require closer review. 

Information Dashboards and Notifications

When one of these nonstandard agreements comes through, all relevant parties can receive a notification to review the requested changes. This helps eliminate minor changes that can turn into big risks that might otherwise go unnoticed without a templated system. This helps ensure a healthy start for buyer and supplier alike. 

Other information dashboards can present important info in a quick, digestible, easy-to-under format. Find data on all of your contracts like contract duration, bids, and upcoming important dates.

Alerts for impending contract renewal dates can offer teams enough time to re-evaluate each supplier and research alternatives before the renewal date instead of being blindsided when the renewal date has come and passed. This way, your team can enter negotiations well prepared as well as save everyone time in the process. 

Manage Compliance And Performance

Including managing compliance for nonstandard contracts and mitigating many of the associated risks, a good contract management system can manage both internal and external compliance concerns. Whether compliance from a regulatory body or an internal expectation of performance and quality, SAP Ariba can ensure that the entire procurement process is visible and everyone involved is compliant to all relevant standards so any issues can be dealt with early, not once they’ve already caused a problem.

Esignatures For Better Speed and Accuracy

Pens are a thing of the past for procurement contracts. Esignatures bring a lot of benefits to the table for procurement teams. Not only is it much, much faster for everyone to sign online than to fax or snail-mail back and forth, it’s also safer (in Covid-19 terms and compliance terms!). Esignature software like DocuSign which is the platform of choice for SAP Ariba users walk suppliers through every box that requires a signature or initial to ensure that nothing is missed in the signing process. Esigning software can also send automated reminders to clients to ask them to please sign the contract, saving your procurement team a lot of time, leg-work, and chasing. 

Nurture Supplier Relationships

All of the things combined help you nurture relationships with your clients. Your team will have more time and more energy to truly engage with suppliers to establish trust and rapport—two qualities of a great buyer-supplier relationship that can easily net your team better deals and priority communications. 

See Your Best-Value Suppliers At A Glance 

A proper contract management system is also able to pull all of the above together to show you which of your suppliers are the best value based on the data you have provided. Based on data, good procurement software can let you know which suppliers to focus on in order to make the greatest impact. That may mean deepening partnership opportunities with some suppliers but it may also call attention to low performers so changes can be made as soon as possible. 

If you want to see what we can do for you with our SAP Ariba-backed contract management system, reach out to us today. 

About Premikati

Premikati is a woman-owned business of procurement experts providing best-in-class software to maximize your company’s ROI.  

Our award-winning team has a 100% success rate implementing on-time and on-budget, due to our agility, leanness, operational experience, and the ability to tailor the transformation process from C-level to end user. (For more information, visit www.premikati.com)

Oct 02
procurement spokes of the wheel

The Spokes in the Wheel of Procurement

By Procurement No Comments

So many things have changed in 2020, what a year! But, what matters most is ensuring the spokes of your procurement wheels are all there. It really comes down to the most important fundamentals within the entire procurement space.

Typically, procurement involves designing and deploying strategies that will drive value from the supplier base. To start this process requires in-depth research on current and emerging trends to help determine new solutions and which suppliers are the best fit. Then, it is about managing relationships, conducting best practices in negotiation, and driving a cost-effective plan. Tools to ensure best-in-class procurement can vary from business to another, but here are the essential practices.

Use cloud-based procurement tools

There isn’t a better time than the present to implement future-ready procurement activities. Make sure team members have more time to spend on strategic initiatives, as well as reducing repetitive manual tasks are all vital for continuity especially in the face of unprecedented circumstances.

Invariably, technology plays a massive component of everyday activities. As such, a procurement digital transformation becomes inevitable. Moreover, competitive organizations are the ones taking the lead around implementing digital procurement processes.

Initiate supplier evaluation

Unquestionably this is a crucial step. It takes analytical insights and data to evaluate a potential supplier comprehensively before sending out the contract. In addition, you must execute due diligence around quality, delivery, pricing, and supply chain transparency. Some say this is one of the most important spokes of your procurement wheel.

Many businesses consider procurement as one of their top priorities since it can take up a significant portion of their overall spend. While many companies still have manual procurement practices in place, it’s critical to transition to and embrace relevant technology solutions to keep up with evolving business and consumer demands.

Interview prospective vendors

It is imperative to interview vendors to learn more about their services and products. Every business has a set of suppliers who deliver essential products and services. Yet, qualifying and managing suppliers can become quite complex. It begins with identification of a prospective supplier, then onboarding, scheduling, invoicing, and payments. When executed manually, these processes can take hours each. Other ways to improve supplier engagement include:

  • Viewing suppliers as strategic partners
  • Setting parameters around specific KPIs
  • Creating a mutually-beneficial partnership based on trust
  • Facilitating easy communication and collaboration

Optimize inventory

Depending on the economy, and shifts in the market, profit margins can shrink. As such, it is crucial to constantly be on the lookout for ways to improve profits and control spend. So then, procurement should be involved in optimizing inventory as the cost of “holding” inventory is much greater than ordering products. Generally, holding costs should be no more than 30 percent – this includes consumable items, electronics, clothing, and more.

So what causes an unbalanced inventory? Usually, it is the result of ineffective forecasting and planning. To improve inventory management requires data-driven analytics and insights. Ask these questions to help optimize your inventory:

  • Have any products or services been over-or-under purchased?
  • What is the ratio of operating inventory relative to excess stock?
  • What is the desired rate of purchases?
  • Do purchase orders align with current inventory levels?

Incorporate spend transparency

Transparency opens opportunities for finding savings and enhancing operational efficiencies. Not to mention, spend transparency enables accountability while mitigating the potential for fraud. What steps can you take to incorporate spend transparency? Below are a few of the fundamentals:

  • Spend time defining and deploying procurement policies
  • Document every step of your procurement wheel and monitor progress
  • Make sure your contracts are fool-proof
  • Execute audits frequently

The objective is to decimate maverick and dark spending. With procurement technology, you can use the power of automation and analytics to do just that.

Improve contract management

How would you rate your bargaining abilities? Negotiation skills are paramount in terms of procurement. You don’t want to bend on either quantity or quality. When you embark upon a well-negotiated partnership, you improve your competitive edge while inducing cost savings where needed. One of the most common issues in procurement is contract management.

Why do contracts matter? For many reasons including consistency, supply chain continuity, and budgeting. And, it’s also critical to have a central repository where you can quickly review, manage, and audit your contracts at any time – accessible from anywhere.

Collaborate with suppliers

Now that you have initiated the contract, it’s time to ensure a steady workflow to ensure product shipment or service delivery remains smooth. This is also the time to have backup plans in place in the event of an unforeseen scenario. Supplier management is all about people management.

Manage in-house expectations

Remember that you will still need to win over the confidence of your team members regarding both quantity and quality expectations. As a result, it is important to be prepared for any potential issues, to be transparent with your responses, and to be open to team suggestions.

Review periodically

You might have signed the contract, but it’s not over yet. Now, you must be vigilant to keep suppliers on task with fulfilling their agreements. Still, you must be diplomatic at all times. Keep an eye on the contracts, market conditions, and evolving business requirements.

Final thought

You are now aware of the spokes of your procurement wheel. Some of these processes might seem familiar while others could be new. Nonetheless, procurement excellence mandates proper implementation. The first step in creating a competitive and sustainable procurement process is with the right technology tools. Only then can you make data-driven decisions, maintain compliance, reduce expenses, optimize inventory, and more. Contact Premikati today if you’re ready to take the spokes of your procurement wheel to the next level.

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