procurement spend visibility Archives

Jun 01

Macro Finance and Procurement

By Parker Sproul Procurement No Comments

Macro Financial Concerns and Procurement in 2023: Are You Ready?

The year 2023 has presented itself as a period of financial restraint, as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) echoed. Global growth is forecasted to fall from 3.4 percent in 2022 to 2.8 percent in 2023, and a more pronounced slowdown in advanced economies demonstrates a tightening macro-financial landscape.

Furthermore, the financial sector is experiencing turmoil due to high inflation and ongoing geopolitical tensions, increasing market instability. Despite central banks raising interest rates, underlying price pressures are still proving stubborn, suggesting a prolonged period of financial strain.

The Impact on Procurement

These macro-financial changes are placing a new level of pressure on procurement departments. In this context, procurement’s role has evolved significantly.

The Chartered Institute of Procurement and Supply (CIPS) outlined key procurement trends for 2023, emphasizing the need for sustainability, timely payment to suppliers, investment in technology, and talent management.

Sustainability has become a primary concern, as customers are increasingly sensitive to ‘greenwashing’ and demand more transparency about the environmental impact of their purchases. This trend pushes organizations to ensure sustainable practices in their supply chains and avoid falling foul of regulations.

The challenging financial environment has led to 36% of businesses extending payment terms for suppliers in the last 12 months. This contributes to a vicious cycle that impacts cash flow and liquidity, emphasizing the need for improved supplier relationships and strategic payment practices.

Investment in procurement technology solutions is also growing. Companies are seeking more consumer-like, intuitively designed, and agile solutions to improve efficiencies and work with leaner staff.

Finally, with the predicted economic environment, there’s a new urgency to fostering a company culture and strategic problem-solving to attract and retain talent3

Navigating Economic Uncertainty with SAP Ariba

As predicted by the IMF, the global economic outlook for 2023 presents a complex landscape characterized by financial sector turmoil, high inflation, geopolitical uncertainties, and the lingering effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. In such an environment, businesses need robust, flexible, and intelligent tools to navigate the choppy waters of global commerce.

With its comprehensive suite of solutions, SAP Ariba is perfectly positioned to help businesses adapt and thrive in these uncertain times. Its intelligent sourcing tool, for instance, allows companies to identify savings opportunities and assess market dynamics, giving them a competitive edge even in challenging conditions.

As inflation remains high, the ability to efficiently source and manage direct and indirect goods or services within a single platform becomes a crucial advantage, allowing businesses to reduce their time, effort, and risk associated with sourcing events.

Aligning with Sustainability Trends

Sustainability is no longer a niche concern; it’s a core business priority. Businesses are increasingly under pressure to demonstrate that their operations and supply chains are sustainable to meet regulatory requirements and appeal to increasingly eco-conscious consumers.

SAP Ariba’s Supplier Management tool can be a crucial asset. It provides comprehensive tools to help buyers onboard, qualify, segment, and manage supplier performance according to parameters that matter to them. This means businesses can drive spending towards preferred, sustainable suppliers, reduce overall risk, and ensure compliance across their entire supply base. In doing so, companies can turn sustainability from a challenge into an opportunity, bolstering their reputation and gaining a competitive advantage.

Embracing Technology for Greater Efficiency

SAP Ariba is at the forefront of the trend toward increased investment in procurement technology. Its suite of solutions embodies a consumer-like, intuitively designed, and agile approach that can significantly improve business efficiencies. For example, the SAP Ariba Supply Chain Collaboration tool automates the direct procurement lifecycle, reducing reliance on emails and spreadsheets, shortening cycle times, and increasing productivity.

SAP Ariba Buying and Invoicing further streamlines the indirect goods and services procurement process. Automating and regulating the management of the entire procurement process helps business leaders eliminate errors and exceptions, manage more spending with less effort, maximize savings and profit margins, and respond flexibly and swiftly to changing demands.

Winning the Talent War

In the predicted economic environment, fostering a strong company culture and attracting the right talent will become even more essential. SAP Ariba’s user-friendly, intuitive design is crucial in this regard. It makes procurement tasks more engaging and less cumbersome, improving employee satisfaction and retention.

Furthermore, the Guided Buying feature of SAP Ariba makes the procurement process more intuitive and compliant, making it easier for employees to adhere to procurement policies and procedures. This enhances the effectiveness of procurement teams, freeing them to focus on strategic problem-solving and relationship management, which are crucial skills in the modern, complex business environment.

In conclusion, SAP Ariba is a powerful tool that can help businesses navigate the challenging economic conditions predicted for 2023, align their operations with key procurement trends, and drive significant efficiency and cost savings. By leveraging its comprehensive suite of solutions, businesses can position themselves to survive and thrive in the uncertain times ahead.

In a time of financial restraint and uncertainty, organizations must leverage tools and strategies to help them navigate these challenges. Armed with solutions like SAP Ariba, procurement departments can play a pivotal role in driving cost savings and efficiencies. The time for organizations to act is now – to survive in the current financial climate and thrive in the years to come.

Feb 16

Five Ways to Ensure your Sourcing Strategy Never Disrupts the Supply Chain

By Parker Sproul Blog No Comments

Because sourcing is at the heart of any procurement strategy, it is critical to the success of your supply chain.

Poor sourcing strategies have a negative impact on the supply chain such as downtime, low inventory, and a lack of supply chain transparency.

Here are five things you can do to protect your supply chain from disruptions:

1. Assemble the Right Team

It goes without saying that your supply chain requires people to function. More importantly, it requires the right people.

Consider the following when assembling your sourcing team; such as the ability to quickly learn, analyze large amounts of data, build long-term relationships, communicate, and negotiate.

2. Provide the Right Tools

In today’s supply chain climate, your productivity depends on the tools you make available to your team and the tools and solutions they have at hand can make all the difference.

With emerging technologies across the globe, the supply chain has never had the potential to be more efficient.

A great example of a sourcing solution is SAP Ariba’s Sourcing tool.

3. Have a Solid Sourcing Strategy

Your sourcing strategy is used to find the most effective, efficient, and reasonably priced solution to your supply chain needs.

So, how do you identify the right product or supplier?

Here are some tips:

Understand the market trends.
Always pick quality and time over price.
Build relationships with several vendors in the market.
Have clear expectations or targets.

4. Have Multiple Vendors for Each Product Supplied

Building long-term relationships with your vendors or suppliers is extremely beneficial to the supply chain. However, if the pandemic taught us anything, it’s the importance of having backup plans.

Supply chains are more flexible, visible, and resilient than ever before. Despite this, there is still an element of uncertainty surrounding supply chains.

To be better protected, it is critical to work with more than one supplier. A great place to start is the Ariba network where over you can connect with over 40 million suppliers and growing!

5. Constantly Review Suppliers

A supplier review provides insight into the supplier’s performance.

Constantly reviewing a supplier ensures that potential disruptors are identified as soon as possible; giving you the opportunity to prevent them from causing harm to the supply chain.

To get the most out of your supplier’s performance, make a list of performance indicators. Quality, service, delivery rate, damages, compliance, innovative ideas, and cost are some examples.

Summary

Disruptions in the supply chain are undesirable. It’s not just that they cost the company time and resources, though those are significant. The unfavorability stems from the impact on the company’s customers.

What are some common disruptions in your supply chain?

One of your primary responsibilities as a supply chain or sourcing manager is to prevent disruptions. Particularly artificial disruptions. One of the most effective approaches is to develop an effective sourcing strategy.

For your procurement solutions and services, click here at www.premikati.com

Oct 13

5 Reasons Why Virtual Cards Are The Future of B2B Spending

By Parker Sproul 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.

Jul 12

3 Ways for CFOs to Increase Spend Visibility

By michael Procurement No Comments

Summary: Premikati Marketplace bolsters the efforts of CFOs by offering an easy-to-use consumer-style B2B purchasing platform with deep, enterprise-grade spend controls and analysis tools. Premikati offers trusted suppliers with steep discounts on repeat purchases, supplier importing, rebates, automatic approval workflows, pricing thresholds, and money – and time-saving process cost reductions.

If you’re a CFO, you care about your company’s bottom line. If the health, wealth, and profitability of your business is being hindered by less-than-ideal procurement practices, then a marketplace, like Premikati, that offers deep spend visibility and approval controls while also reducing hours needed to manage purchasing tasks may be right for you. Read on to find out how Premikati Marketplace can increase spend visibility and cut costs in your business.

Know Your Sources

Suppliers are the lifeblood of any business, so it’s important to know that you’re using the right ones. What that means will be different for every business. Sustainability, cost, quality, relationships, and contract terms all play a role in maintaining a healthy, visible spend and supply chain.

Because Premikati is underpinned by SAP—a leader in sustainability—CFOs can help ensure a healthy supply chain in terms of social and environmental impact as well efficiency via streamlined processes. What does this mean for your bottom line?

“…the majority of Generation Z (54 percent) state that they are willing to spend an incremental 10 percent or more on sustainable products, with 50 percent of Millennials saying the same.” –Greg Petro on Forbes

Plus, Premikati offers new sources of savings across the board through a high-quality, trusted list of suppliers. Many companies see up to 35% savings on frequently-bought products.

Do you already have a supplier your company trusts? Premikati supports custom catalogs with suppliers you already know with very little overhead to get started.

With Premikati, you not only gain access to a list of reliable suppliers, but also an interface that allows your procurement team to quickly compare prices and aggregate suppliers in one simple, easy-to-use platform.

Reduce Time And Costs

Clunky, outdated buying processes can become time-consuming and burdensome. Every hour wasted on reinventing the proverbial procurement wheel is a billable hour from an employee or contractor, hours that can quickly cut into profitability. Premikati helps you streamline the entire buying process and simplify vendor management, saving you time and money.

Gone are the days of needing a password for every single supplier. Premikati lets users access the entire marketplace from a single user account. That and process automations such as automatic spend approvals can reduce the ad-hoc buying process down to hours instead of days or weeks. Controlled spending also limits costs in predetermined ways that keep spending from spiraling out of control.

Plus, Premikati lets your team quickly and easily see which suppliers they are utilizing for which products and at what price point—this helps reduce buying things you don’t need because procurement wasn’t able to locate a pre-existing contract with a supplier. Easily search product categories and types to see where your money is going or view an automated report at a schedule set by you.

Beyond the 35% savings seen by most companies on products they use often, most also receive a typical rebate of 1% on all Premikati purchases made with your P-card—a system which, itself, reduces unexpected costs.

Control Your Spend

Spend controls with Premikati are as simple as ever. The P-Card lets you set exactly how much can be spent ahead of time. Automated approval workflows and reporting, user access controls, the ability to control specific commodities as well as create price thresholds make spend control and analysis easier than ever before.

Premikati balances the ease of a consumer-grade platform such as Amazon with deep, enterprise-grade control, analysis, and automation tools. This makes for a fast, reliable, and truly visible purchasing experience that increases profitability by cutting costs and heavily reducing time expenditures over analog processes and disparate toolsets.

About Premikati

Get what you really want from your purchasing software. The Premikati Marketplace offers procurement that is as intuitive as online shopping with the robust data of Fortune 100 companies and extensive customization options, all with no IT required and no commitment.

You can order what you want—where, when, and how you want it. Diversity filtering? Sure thing. Support local? Absolutely. We even support custom catalogs and customer-specific vendors.

Merge that with full spend control and visibility, real-time reporting and analytics, custom approval flows and automation, and you’ll find a best-in-class software that’s tailor-made for small- and medium-sized enterprise businesses.

Premikati scales seamlessly with your business with no impact to end-users and no additional training required. We have prices to fit every budget, and we can have you up and running in hours.

All of this with white-glove customer service included at no charge, so you can always trust you can talk to a real person when you need them.

Don’t settle for anything less. Contact us today!

procurement spend visibility