Guide to the Best Procurement Software

Procurement software platforms are business tools that automate large parts of the procurement process to improve its functionality. 

As part of any healthy procurement cycle, businesses should first monitor the performance of their current solutions, identify their business needs, research various products, and engage in tactical contract negotiations. 

Additional steps for responsible accounting and financial planning include issuing purchase orders, spend analysis, order management, invoice processing and more.

There’s a lot to cover, and the rise of SaaS adoption in modern businesses exacerbates the problem. Where businesses used just a handful of software licenses before, now the average organization subscribes to well over 100 SaaS products to conduct their day-to-day operations.

Maintaining robust procure-to-pay processes is increasingly challenging in this context. With over 100 platforms to review, contracts to manage, and supplier relationships to nurture, procurement teams are leveraging cloud-based software solutions to help ease the procurement management burden. 

These solutions streamline the entire procurement process, stimulating higher quality decision-making and driving cost savings wherever possible, from supply chain to inventory management. 

Business needs addressed by procurement software

Procurement is a multi-faceted discipline. It takes time to execute a well-planned procurement process, which often requires collaboration from team members across a number of departments. Procurement software therefore addresses various business needs throughout the procurement process. These include:

• Identifying knowledge gaps — The first and most important part of procurement is understanding the reason why your business requires a new solution. Procurement software solutions monitor SaaS subscription performance, highlighting the platforms that aren’t performing as they should. These insights inform the first procurement stages, giving decision-makers the knowledge required to find the kind of solution the business needs moving forward. 
• ‍Automation — Businesses of all sizes and industries are looking to software platforms to realize the benefits of automation. There are many stages involved in the procuring of a new SaaS product – procurement solutions integrate these into one central workflow, reducing the burden of previously manual tasks like order processing, purchase requisition, forecasting, spend analytics, and more. Automating these processes frees up valuable time and produces more accurate data to help make better decisions in the future.
• Contract management — One of the biggest challenges for modern procurement efforts is the chaos of contract management. Many software suppliers develop their business models on the assumption that the majority of their customers simply don’t have the time or technological resources to effectively monitor all of their subscriptions — and they’re right. But procurement management software addresses this issue by highlighting key dates for contract renewal well in advance, giving stakeholders the time they need to work out how subscriptions can be improved or altered, or indeed retired altogether. Customers then avoid the pitfall of automatic contract renewal, which often locks them into agreements at inflated prices.

Benefits of adopting procurement software

Investing in procurement software can deliver a number of benefits in a relatively short space of time, including:

• Real-time visibility — Gaining visibility of the products within your SaaS ecosystem is becoming harder to achieve through manual processes. Without clear understanding of your subscriptions and the purposes they serve, licenses quickly become neglected, hidden and forgotten about altogether. Subscribing to a procurement platform that constantly monitors the performance of every solution in your stack is crucial. Only then can organizations claim with confidence that they have real-time full-stack observability across their systems.  
• Security — SaaS visibility leads to higher security levels, since every platform is accounted for in the procurement system. This eradicates shadow IT and its subsequent threats, shedding light not just on the platforms under license, but also on the stakeholders interacting with those licenses on a daily basis. This means any device accessing IT assets is monitored and approved as a pre-requisite, reducing the likelihood of a security breach.
• Cut costs — The ultimate aim of most SaaS purchases is to reduce overall expenditure. Procurement software aids cost reductions by making recommendations on how licenses can be improved, trimming the fat from every subscription. Perhaps there are features of specific platforms that can be scrapped, or modifications made that increases profitability in a specific area — just two examples of how procurement software can lead to improved enterprise resource planning.  This kind of spend visibility enables finance teams to create more accurate budgets, while specialist purchasing teams — who often deliver services alongside procurement management solutions — can help negotiate optimized pricing at the start of a new partnership. 
• ‍Time savings — Automating large parts of procurement also leads to inevitable time savings. By centralizing the approval process, the purchasing process, spend management, and other facets of procurement onto user-friendly dashboards, businesses can dramatically reduce the time taken to complete these tasks. Time savings often bring with them increased productivity, allowing employees to spend their time on more important work.
• Strategic sourcing — Procurement teams can more effectively engage in the strategic sourcing of products with a management solution under their belts. Insights gleaned through higher levels of visibility and detailed platform appraisals allows purchasing team to think clearly about the solutions that would enhance current business operations. Strategic sourcing is perhaps the most vital cog in the procurement machine: without sufficient research and insight here, there’s a high chance that the overall procurement process won’t be as successful as it could be.
• Supplier management — Successful procurement initiatives consider the long-term benefits of purchases. As such, a key tenet of procurement is to develop and maintain relationships with suppliers you trust — to ensure that both parties are extracting as much from the partnership as possible. These mutually beneficial relationships are symptomatic of effective vendor management. Procurement software supports these relationships through onboarding services and accounting systems that ensure payments are never late or missed. 

Get in touch to supercharge your IT procurement

The Vertice SaaS Purchasing platform provides all the benefits listed in the section above. It surfaces every SaaS license in your stack, providing analysis on the platforms that are hitting their KPIs and the ones that aren’t. 

This allows IT and procurement teams to conduct thorough reviews of their SaaS products and make accurate decisions about the platforms they need to procure in the future. This all happens automatically, quietly monitoring your platforms as they work, leading to significant time and money savings while also enhancing strategic product sourcing.

Vertice customers work alongside our customer purchasing teams, who utilize their unparalleled access to supplier transaction data to negotiate optimized contracts on your behalf. This is the first step in our efforts to reduce your company’s annual SaaS spend by up to 30%, regardless of the solutions it needs.

For more information on how we can boost your IT procurement operations, get in touch via the form below.