The Essential Guide to Streamlined Procurement Workflows

Not having total control of procurement processes has serious knock-on effects. Not just in delays, overspend and compliance as mentioned above, but also in how it causes more strategic issues. 

We surveyed over 300 senior procurement leaders to discover their top challenges:

Many of these issues can be traced back to procurement not having the control, oversight and visibility that they should.

But establishing control is hard. 

And all too often, attempts result in time-intensive procurement processes with too many steps. The average SaaS procurement process, for example, has been shown to require 22 steps that cost 385 hours in meetings alone.

In this guide, we will show you what you need to build an expertly crafted streamlined procurement workflow. 

With insights from leaders at Vertice, industry experts and more, you’ll learn how to create an automated, flexible and efficient procurement process - and one that gives procurement back control, while equipping the business with what it needs to grow.

Centralized 

• Requests are made through a single portal or space, and the whole process is governed and managed by the procurement team in a single workflow hub. 
• Every request and piece of information is readily available to view. 
• All stakeholders can see what they need to in one place, making collaboration far easier.

Automated 

• Steps and streams are intelligently automated and routed to reduce bottlenecks and accelerate purchasing. 
• Rejection handling, reassignment and notifications are automated so the workflow does the heavy lifting, meaning much less manual input and therefore room for errors and delays.

Pre-defined 

• Approval steps are pre-agreed and created at the point of workflow build.
• Different paths exist for different needs, such as for specific departments or when security review is or is not needed.

Reassuringly complex 

• The complexities of re-routing, threshold criteria for rejections and acceptance, and stakeholder management are taken on by the technology, so there is more space for checks, approvals and deeper data analysis than before.

Trackable 

• Visibility and control is guaranteed by knowing both the status of any request at any given time, and overall process performance.
• Contract information is readily available, as well as updates and communications.

Why is it so difficult to streamline procurement workflows?

So if streamlined procurement workflows are so valuable for businesses, why aren’t they more widespread? The simple answer is that businesses have gone too far the wrong way:

And the workflow itself is not the whole story. You need to ensure it works seamlessly. 

That’s where procurement orchestration comes in.‍

Procurement orchestration is the connecting, coordinating and synchronizing of systems and people within a workflow to ensure the smooth exchange of information and data.

It’s the glue for any procurement workflow - the critical component that ensures any procurement project runs smoothly and without constant manual assistance or having to chase internal stakeholders. 

Integrations

Let those in the approval chain complete their tasks from the platforms they prefer to work in, whether Jira, Slack, Teams or others.

Routing

Correct routing ensures that the right tasks are automatically directed to the right stakeholders at the right time - and no matter what the scenario. 

Rarely will a simple linear process be enough. Alternative routing will be necessary when approvers aren’t available, or object to a purchase, or when additional expertise is required. Ordinarily, this would require manual intervention and redirecting - unless these scenarios can be foreseen and planned for.

Threshold criteria

Threshold criteria are automatic conditions for a procurement request to determine the next action.

For example, if a contract is over a certain amount, it’s sent to the right people with the necessary sign-off authority. 

Or if the tool will process PII, then IT and compliance are automatically included in the workflow.

Having these criteria in place in advance removes the risk of stakeholders being invited into the process too late, or even not at all.

Better visibility

Procurement teams and stakeholders can see the entire process from start to finish, and know exactly where a contract is at any given time.

Clearer, more defined roles

Everyone in the workflow knows where in the process they sit, when and where they need to hand over once finished, and have the right information they need to perform their task. Perhaps more importantly, they also know where they don’t need to be involved. 

Procurement is linked more closely with company goals

Being able to correlate procurement goals with wider company objectives positions procurement as a fundamental contributor to business output and growth. Procurement earns its role in influencing business performance by being a central cog to it, not the afterthought that it otherwise can be.

Helps establish a cost-aware culture

With readily-available cost information, threshold criteria and company-wide buy-in, better procurement workflows help foster a cost-aware culture. This reduces maverick spending as stakeholders are encouraged to more deeply analyze and understand the total cost of their purchases, as well as widening overall buy-in with procurement by making it easier to process a request.

More procurement control

Procurement always knows where a contract is, what it consists of, and its status, at all times - meaning more control, visibility and therefore reduced delays, costs and maverick spending. But crucially, this control comes with greater efficiency, meaning teams can still access the tools they need quickly.

Adherence to industry compliance standards

Including key approval stages, such as for stakeholders to review contract terms and conditions, keeps organizations on top of legal and technical legislation that is legally required for their business operations when choosing suppliers and tools. This de-risks any new purchase and helps guard against possible investigations and penalties being leveraged against the business.

Higher savings and better-sized contracts

Fundamentally, the best negotiations rely on time and understanding your objectives. 

Streamlined workflows support this by buying time at every step from intake onwards, giving procurement the most time and the greatest leverage. For instance, pre-approvals are data-driven and automated, and stakeholders are fed all the information they need to make quick, informed decisions. 

Similarly, workflow thresholds can ensure that contract terms match the business’ requirements and objectives. For example, SaaS contracts may need to be built to accommodate a team’s growth, else costs will spiral as new users are added over the contract’s term.

When you start building out your automated process, these are the key steps you want to ensure you’re getting right:

Benchmarking

Start using your own data and industry intelligence to create benchmarks for how you accept and analyze requests. This should focus on quotes/prices you receive for SaaS, vendor T&C’s, and even how similar tools stack up against each other.

These benchmarks can determine whether requests can be pre-approved, or determine the information you require for requests to be submitted, and of course inform your objectives for negotiations. Ultimately, these benchmarks will give you the confidence that your contract is right-sized and value-optimized.

A company-wide singular intake process 

There should be only one point of entry for any intake requests. Using a dedicated project management or productivity platform for this purpose, or setting up a vendor portal, helps bring everything together, so you can get clarity over all requests. 

Build a triage process

Not every request should go into a full procurement process straight away. A sub-process, called triage, is needed to decide the necessary steps and stakeholders each intake request should go through, what level of priority it is, or if it should be put into a process at all. 

Effective triage helps keep the workflow moving without causing blockages. It also helps cross-department coordination and collaboration by keeping all intake requests and communications together. 

As part of the triage process, ask yourself:

• How urgent is this intake request?
• Does this tool meet our compliance standards and certifications?
• Where are other contracts in the workflow at the moment?
• Do we have the budget to explore this intake?

Create visibility, communication and coordination across the process

Consider who does what, when, and how long they need to do it. Then organize in line with overall workflow timescales, and who is before or after them in the process so they can prepare for handovers. Coordinating this effectively can create a smooth and seamless workflow.

Does your process have to be a linear one? Various steps only need specific pieces of the contract to review, such as IT compliance approvals, so they can work in tandem with other stakeholders’ review of other contract areas to limit the number of stages from start to finish - creating a faster process.

And our research shows you can reduce the different number of tools used throughout the purchasing process by 65% by centralizing the workflow’s communication structure. Not only does this decrease the amount of communicative admin, but also decreases costs whilst enhancing how effectively stakeholders communicate transparently with each other.

Think about what can be automated

Automation takes time-consuming processes away from the busy procurement team so they have fewer administrative tasks, and fosters reliability when moving from one step to another. 

Analyze your current tech set up and process map and consider what you can automate right now. Set up your default workflows with automation in mind.

An easy win is automating notifications at key process steps. For example; when a task is finished, a notification is pinged to the next stakeholder, with key information, to tell them to start their step.

Lastly - evaluate your vendor negotiating strategies

Not necessarily part of the workflow itself, but a depth of knowledge into your vendors is crucial to a good negotiation strategy. 

Think about what you already know in terms of list prices, common feature bundles and discount options, and how they’ve operated in previous negotiations. Consider allying this with third party data and industry research too.

Look at your own tech stack to identify strategic partnerships or good relationships with vendors versus more unknown suppliers (relationships, list prices, tech features etc). Leveraging these can also create more beneficial negotiating circumstances.

And there are third-party SaaS procurement experts, such as the buyers at Vertice, that can give you access to relationships with thousands of vendors you may not have prior access to.

Now you’ve got the knowledge to get started, what should you do next?

You can build it yourself with pre-existing tools. However, the tools you have are unlikely to be able to offer the flexibility, parallel routing, intelligence, preset thresholds etc in a single place - meaning you will likely rely on a collection of connected tools, or worse, point solutions. And it is this fragmentation that creates inefficiencies.

Or, you can work with a specialist third-party procurement partner like Vertice that not only supports your ongoing procurement needs, but can provide a fully-established, robust and effective streamlined workflow and productivity hub that integrates seamlessly into your ecosystem.

Vertice Intelligent Workflows helps finance and procurement leaders gain complete control over their purchasing processes. 

Reduce maverick spending, streamline procurement process, drive stakeholder accountability, and ensure purchasing compliance.

Intelligent Workflows enables this by giving you:

Transparency: Granular visibility into all ongoing purchases, renewals and intakes.

Simplification: Easy-to-build customized workflows and frictionless intake requests that accelerate and integrate into any existing procurement process.

Control: Automate accountability and tasking of stakeholders across all complex procurement workflows.

Capture: Track all purchasing documents and approvals in one consolidated place for streamlined compliance, and record all maverick spend.

With Intelligent Workflows, you can: