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Jul 10

Procurement Contracts

By Procurement No Comments

Procurement contracts are more than mere pieces of paper requiring a signature; they are the bedrock of successful business transactions and play a vital role in procurement.

What is a Procurement Contract?

A procurement contract is an agreement between a buyer and a supplier to manage a project. This agreement obligates the supplier to provide the necessary materials and services at an agreed price, providing the foundation for successful project execution.

The Procurement Process: More Than Just Buying

The procurement process often starts with the buyer, who must determine whether a potential supplier can meet their needs. Through this process, the most suitable supplier for a project is selected, helping to minimize procurement fraud and misunderstandings down the line.

Why Are Procurement Contracts Important?

Procurement contracts are crucial to business transactions. They contain all negotiated terms and conditions, including payment details, a list of orders, delivery schedules, and correction measures. By fostering trust between the buyer and supplier, these contracts safeguard both parties from fraud and misrepresentation, ensuring smooth project management.

Advantages of Procurement Contracts

  1. Transparency: Procurement contracts establish transparency between the buyer and supplier, preventing deception and building a solid relationship. Full disclosure of prices and receipts strengthens the bond between both parties.
  2. Clarity: With everything stipulated in the contract, misunderstandings are minimized. Both the buyer and supplier understand their obligations, promoting cooperation and diligence in their performance.
  3. Legal Protection: Both parties are liable to perform their duties under the contract. Legal actions can be taken against a party that intends to defraud, providing safety in every business transaction.

Different Types of Procurement Contracts

  1. Fixed-price Contract: This is the most common type of contract used in business transactions. Regardless of any internal or external factors, the price set during the signing of the contract remains constant until the project ends.
  2. Cost-reimbursement Contracts: Here, the buyer agrees to pay the supplier for the direct and indirect costs of the project. The supplier only gets paid once the expenses have been validated, placing much of the risk on the supplier’s side.
  3. Time and Materials Contract: This type of contract reimburses the vendor for the materials and time spent on a project. It is most commonly used on projects that are not easily quantifiable.

With the rise of technology, procurement processes are becoming increasingly streamlined and data-driven, leading to optimized spending and reduced risk.

Tools like Icertis and SAP Ariba’s Contract Management Software are revolutionizing this space by providing contract intelligence and services that drive compliance, minimize risk, and maximize business impact.

In an ever-evolving business landscape, understanding and leveraging the power of procurement contracts is a vital strategy for any organization, particularly for finance and procurement executives in the midmarket and large enterprise space.

 

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Jul 12
Premikati Marketplace best Procurement Software for SMBs

Don’t Let These 8 Things Happen To Your Procurement Team

By Procurement No Comments

Is your purchasing software pulling its weight? Poorly executed purchasing platforms not only cost you time and money, they put your company at legal and reputational risk. If any of the following sound like you, it might be time to kick your lazy procurement software to the curb and trade up for a real man—uh, business marketplace. We meant business marketplace. 

Spending 19 hours reconciling invoices

PO recon—while it sounds like some cool Navy SEAL mission, the reality is far less glamorous. In 2020, there is literally no reason to manually reconcile purchase orders with invoices or your accounts. Process automation here saves time and prevents costly mistakes, so you can focus on what really matters in your business instead of putting out fires or wasting time using outdated methods. Automated reconciliation ensures that everything matches up all of the time, without you ever needing to think about it. 

Buying from the wrong supplier

Your purchase order is a legally binding contract—so what happens when you buy from the wrong supplier? Not only might you have to adjust the purchase to show the correct supplier (which is going to be a real doozy if you’re manually reconciling invoices and it’s already been reconciled) to keep a proper audit trail, you may also face legal repercussions. 

Alternatively, you may be buying from a supplier that’s wrong for you. Perhaps you could reduce costs by using a supplier for multiple types of purchases in order to facilitate a loyal working relationship. Or, maybe you just picked the supplier that costs way more than the rest. The Premikati Marketplace can help you cut costs by offering new sources of savings via a list of high quality, trusted suppliers—many of which offer up to 35% discounts on frequently purchased products. The right supplier is waiting for you at Premikati Marketplace. Already have a couple of the right suppliers? We can add your own suppliers too!

… Or a supplier you don’t even have a contract with

Maybe your contract has expired. Maybe it was never a valid contract at all because its still sitting in a pile on someone’s desk, waiting to be signed and faxed and filed. Do you know which contracts are active and valid? 

Don’t subject yourself to the legal risks that come with doing business without valid contracts. 

“On average, 94% of tail spend comes from uncontracted suppliers.” —Premikati Marketplace

With Premikati Marketplace, you can automate old, analog systems and see which suppliers you’re working with—with the click of a button—in order to gain both efficiency and visibility.

Buying a mountain of stuff you don’t need

Would your warehouse and office closet make Marie Kondo giggle with maniacal glee? Space is a precious commodity especially as consumers and other businesses expect faster and more personalized experiences with every passing day. Every dollar spent on useless things that you don’t need is a dollar you can’t invest in moving forward with your business or keeping an edge on your competitors. 

With good B2B procurement software, you can easily see what you’ve already bought so you don’t double (or triple!) up on what you need.

Buying things that are probably illegal

You want a supply chain that is socially responsible and legal at every link. The Premikati Marketplace is underpinned by SAP, a world-renowned company that is a leader in sustainability.

Shipping your orders to your house

There’s nothing else to say about this. You know who you are. Prevent it with a good procurement platform like Premikati Marketplace. 

Tight budget with no approvals

Especially if you’re a startup or you’re maximizing growth or perhaps if you’re using a zero-based budget, money can be tight. Competition can be stiff. And sometimes, to make the move that will really help your revenue, differentiate you from a competitor, or skyrocket your growth, you have to make swift decisions. If your purchasing processes are bogged down by archaic methods and you’re waiting by the telegraph—err, email—for your PO approval, guess what? Your opportunity may have already passed. If you were making hand sanitizer in January 2020, you better bet you needed to scale and scale fast before the supplies were gone. 

With a good procurement platform, you can control your spend to the cent but also implement automated purchase approvals. Stop leaky spend and without slowing progress… that’s the dream, eh? 

Multiple logins

How many users and passwords do you really need to fulfill your procurement needs? Stop sacrificing security because Lilly is keeping her password taped to the bottom of her keyboard because she has too many to remember. Free up your tech support from endless verifications and password changes. Keep your purchasing processes safe and efficient by reducing the number of accounts you need for purchases.  With the Premikati Marketplace, each member of your procurement team will only need one login total, not one login for EACH supplier portal.  One and done – quite a nightmare saver for your tech support team.

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!

 

Sep 12
Procurement Analytics and Rogue Spend

Procurement Analytics and Rogue Spend

By Procurement No Comments

Summary: Rogue spend—unmanaged spend—puts businesses at risk of noncompliance, creates unpredictable budgets, reduces forecasting accuracy and completeness, and overall reduces business profits. By using spend analytics, rogue spend can more quickly be spotted and managed, reducing fraud, duplicate purchases, noncompliance risks, and allows leaders to make better-informed decisions based on complete and cohesive data. 

In procurement, an and unwatched budget can quickly spiral out of control, sometimes in ways that can be severely detrimental to the organization both culturally and even legally. Spend analysis is a vital aspect of any procurement strategy and allows decision-makers to gain an accurate snapshot of spending, reduce fraud, and optimize and strategize at both a high and granular level. Failure to control rogue spending can result in over-stretched budgets which are draining to the organization and the employees who must deal with it.

What Is Rogue Spend?

Rogue spend is often mentioned in the same breath as maverick spending and tail spend. No matter what you want to call it, it’s spending that you don’t want in your organization because it is unmanaged and unpredictable. Of course, unmanaged and unpredictable spending means your business’s budget, forecasting, and insights are incomplete at best and completely inaccurate at worst. Issues with rogue spend may also place your business at a much higher risk for non-compliance. 

Rogue spend can happen for a variety of reasons, from the innocent to the ignorant to the downright fraudulent.

On the innocent side of the spectrum, employees may not work within an organization where clear spend policies are in place, causing businesses to lose out of discounts. Procurement professionals may have been directed to focus on other objectives. Lack of proper tools and procedures for contract management may prevent procurement from properly managing spend.

On the ignorant side of the spectrum, there may be a cultural mindset that small purchases are “too small to matter” even though they can quickly add up. Management may accept unmanaged spend because they are unwilling to or do not understand the need to put manpower or money towards managing spending, because they do not understand that, left unchecked, unmanaged rogue spend can quickly spiral far out of control.

And on the fraudulent side of the spectrum, rogue spend can occur in many different ways. For example, in August and September, office supply spend may spike because employees take supplies home to their children to use at school. Similarly, employees may make miscellaneous purchases on personal cards then request reimbursement. Also on personal cards, employees may pay for flights and conferences, request reimbursement, and cancel the flights and tickets in order to pocket the money themselves. According to a white paper from Chrome River titled 10 Ways to Prevent Business Expense Fraud and Abuse, some employees may report many purchases barely below the audit threshold in order to steal money from the company—this sort of risky behavior can quickly be caught using automated spend analytics.

How Can Spend Analytics Help Find Rogue Spend?

Maintaining and clear and accurate picture of your company’s spending data can reveal many insights, not the least of which is rogue spend. Especially if your company utilizes machine learning technology, objective data can be utilized to spot risky behaviors, target spend that is likely to be out of compliance, and find key opportunities to reduce spend by utilizing and strategizing with key suppliers in order to maximize discounts and efficiency. ERP solutions like SAP S/4HANA can be especially helpful in aggregating and analyzing these sorts of spend data into one integrated dashboard.

Spend analysis, by its very nature, increases visibility, allowing decision-makers to make better-informed choices regarding the company’s finances.

Spend analysis can be used to analyze uncategorized spending and assess risks associated with it, determine if there’s a high likelihood that the spend is fraudulent, and help clarify where rogue spending can be reduced in exchange for managed, strategic spending that benefits the company’s bottom line and supplier relationships alike.

Sep 12
Premikati and SAP improve the lives of students

SAP and Premikati Improve the Lives of Students

By Press No Comments

SAP Ariba silver partner Premikati recently completed a project that provides students, parents, and schools in Florida with much-improved access to services and financial support through the Step Up for Students (SUFS) organization.

The non-profit SUFS manages funds for The Gardiner Scholarship Program , which provides up to $10,000 each for K-12 students in Florida for tuition, equipment, therapy and other supplies. Prior to implementing SAP Ariba, parents had to pay expenses out of pocket and submit invoices for reimbursement.

The system financially strained many parents and featured an inefficient, manually intensive process for nearly 1,300 reimbursements every day. A team of 75 people manage invoices and the organization printed 100,000 checks on a quarterly basis, said Marisol Buczynski-Buchanan, CEO of Premikati, which handled the implementation.

“Their process was not sustainable nor scalable,” she said. “They were looking for technology to manage the funds and put all approved products and materials into a marketplace where parents and guardians could click to purchase.”

Vendors such as Best Buy, Office Depot, Lakeshore Learning, and School Specialty are onboarding their catalogs into the SUFS marketplace, with more on the way, allowing parents to purchase educational materials, services and tuition online.

The tuition reimbursement process and marketplace is expected to go live in January 2018, serving more than 100,000 students in 2,000 schools.

“Going forward, parents can just order the goods and services they need for the education of their children online using their smart phones while the software tracks the balance of their scholarship funds,” Buchanan said. “And SUFS can spend their time working closer with the families to provide additional services and support.”

Additionally, the 2,000 private Florida Schools also reduce their administrative costs associated with tracking parental signatures for tuition reimbursement checks as well as additional costs.

“This is the first time a real business to consumer system has been built on SAP Ariba. In fact, this is one of the largest SAP Ariba implementations to date in terms of buying organizations, which has only been made possible by the advancements to the user interface and the addition of guided buying,” Buchanan said. “Essentially, we are applying the most sophisticated procurement software available and offering it to families so that they can spend more time with their children and less time and headaches dealing with paperwork and stressing over financial burdens.  This is a true business case of procurement with purpose driven by SAP Ariba.”

Sep 12
Premikati Transforms Contract Management with SAP Ariba

Premikati Transforms Contract Management with SAP Ariba

By Press No Comments

Certified WBE outsourcing firm leverages cloud-based solutions to fuel efficient digital process that delivers savings and compliance

PALO ALTO, Calif., November 16, 2016 – The cloud is where efficient contract management is happening. But many businesses lack the technology and resources to get there. Premikati is out to change this, with some help from SAP Ariba. The business process outsourcing and management consulting firm today announced that it will leverage Ariba® Contract Management Professional™ to drive an efficient, digital process for managing contracts that delivers savings and compliance.

“We have seen clients of all sizes and industries struggle with contract management,” said Marisol Buczynski Buchanan, CEO of Premikati. “Lack of tracking with respect to items such as expiration dates, renewal terms/price increases, service level agreements, notice provisions, and even counter signatures is all too common. With SAP Ariba, we can help them overcome these issues.”

An SAP Ariba BPO partner, Premikati will use SAP Ariba’s technology to perform contract management services not only for large enterprises, but for companies under $500 million in annual revenue. And in doing so, it aims to eliminate many of the barriers that prevent them from pursuing digital strategies such as a lack of resources to implement and manage software. “We can have them up and running in two to three weeks at a very cost-effective price point,” Buchanan said.

Ariba Contract Management Professional is the industry’s leading SaaS solution for contract management. Uniquely designed to eliminate the paper and ink from the creation, execution, and management of any type of contractual agreement, the offering enables companies of all sizes to efficiently:

  • Automate and accelerate the entire contract lifecycle
  • Standardize and control contract development
  • Collaborate with all stakeholders
  • Strengthen operational, contractual, and regulatory compliance

“Contracts are the lifeblood of any organization and managing them effectively can deliver strategic advantage,” said David Johnston, Senior Vice President, Partner Ecosystem, SAP Ariba. “With SAP Ariba’s technology and Premikati’s contract management expertise, companies of all sizes can get on the road to automation and drive an efficient process that lowers both their costs and risk.”

To learn more about SAP Ariba’s contract management solutions and the value they can deliver, visit: www.ariba.com. Learn More.

About Premikati

Premikati is a WBENC certified WBE Management Consulting and BPO firm that is specifically tailored to Contract Management and Procurement. Premikati helps its clients with all facets of contracting and procurement strategy as well as outsourced Contract Management Services including the drafting and negotiation of contracts.   They employ procurement executives, attorneys, contract management professionals, Six Sigma Black Belts, and certified Change Masters with extensive experience either inside or consulting with the world’s top companies.

About SAP Ariba

SAP® Ariba® is the marketplace for digital business, creating frictionless exchanges between millions of buyers and suppliers across the entire source-to-pay process. Our market-leading solutions enable companies to simplify collaboration with their trading partners, make smarter business decisions and extend their collaborative business processes with an open technology platform. More than two million companies use SAP Ariba solutions to connect and collaborate around nearly one trillion in commerce on an annual basis. To learn more about the company’s offerings and the transformation they are driving, visit www.ariba.com. Learn More.

About SAP

As market leader in enterprise application software, SAP (NYSE: SAP) helps companies of all sizes and industries run better. From back office to boardroom, warehouse to storefront, desktop to mobile device – SAP empowers people and organizations to work together more efficiently and use business insight more effectively to stay ahead of the competition. SAP applications and services enable approximately 335,000 customers to operate profitably, adapt continuously, and grow sustainably. For more information, visit www.sap.com. Learn More.

 

 

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