If your organisation is looking into saving opportunities for 2017, here is a run-through of some suggested spend control and eProcurement goals for the year ahead. These goals are based on key trends that our spend control business partner PROACTIS put together based on growing topics of discussion within their customer base:
- Standardising processes - in 2017, procurement professionals are becoming much more focused on establishing standardised spend control processes that enable and enforce good procurement practices.
- Deploying technology tools - procurement professionals are looking at deploying spend management tools and procurement controls that guide people on their team and throughout the wider organisation through standardised spend control processes.
- Reducing costs - an obvious, but important one, organisations are continually looking to reduce the cost of purchased goods and services. This includes, gaining the best value for every purchase, eliminating unwanted purchases, ensuring only accurate invoices are paid and improving overall efficiencies.
- Working towards end-to-end procurement - today, procurement professionals have a growing understanding of what end-to-end procurement looks like. PROACTIS outline this to be organised around two highly integrated procurement sub-processes – Source-to-Contract (S2C) and Purchase-to-Pay (P2P). S2C includes everything from supplier management, sourcing and content management and P2P provides the framework that guides employees to established suppliers and agreements to fulfil their needs. P2P ensures proper purchase authorisation and drives PO-based purchases to enable automated invoice processing.
- Improving financial control – there is likely to be an increased focus on ensuring compliance and corporate policies. It is also important to maintain clear visibility of the cost pipeline and its impact on budgets.
- Mitigating risk – companies are looking to gain and maintain transparency in the sourcing process, ensure suppliers are properly qualified and effectively monitor supplier performance and compliance.
- Increasing supplier collaboration – organisations are aiming to improve the breadth, depth and quality of supplier information to direct the organisation to buy from the right suppliers and to perform effective sourcing, contract management and supplier performance management.
- Opting for cloud-based procurement – more and more organisations are opting for cloud-based procurement as traditional software licensing, on premise installation and in-house technical management aren’t making sense, due to upfront capital expenditure, technical systems management and the chance of falling behind on software releases.
- Improving integration – no spend control systems should exist on their own. A spend control system needs to integrate with other business systems to ultimately encompass all spend.
These are just some of the goals that organisations may be looking to achieve in order to improve spend control in 2017. Here at Eclipse, we have been partnering with PROACTIS to help organisations streamline spend control and eProcurement processes since 2005. Elements of this blog post first appeared on the PROACTIS blog.
For further information, feel free to call us on +44 (0)203 866 8800, or download the, 'Procurement Automation: Key Trends & Hot Topics' whitepaper:
