Procurement Automation

A common complaint from procurement chiefs is that their teams spend too much time on administrative tasks. They would much rather they spent more time on growth-enhancing activities.

 Robotic Process Automation (RPA)

It promises to take over administrative duties and give buyers back that precious time. The beauty of RPA is its ability to implement change gradually. If you look at a traditional application integration, it’s usually highly specialised and carried out as part of a major project. Because RPA can be introduced to automate small, individual tasks, it is much easier to integrate because the team can become familiar with the system before it’s rolled out on a larger scale.  

For example, it can be used to have vendor email attachments downloaded into a folder, which while taking an hour or two to set up would help save a buyer ten minutes a day.  

Outside of that, RPA can retrieve sale and inventory data and analyse it to help prepare a demand forecast. While this would take a few days to set up in the first instance, when it’s in place for one product, it can easily be adapted for other commodities and services. 

What’s more, that demand forecast can be integrated with an online vendor qualification and reverse auction tool. 

But RPA is not limited to simply covering the procurement cycle. Over time, it is also likely to cover bidding from the vendor’s side. In this scenario, robotics will be used on both sides of the negotiation. From the human seller’s point of view, they will need to get their cognitive input into the process early to influence the scope of services and specification required to address customer needs. If not, when it reaches the negotiation stage, there will be less of a chance to have a human impact because the robots will already be interacting.

Automation Impact on Procurement

When it comes to automating procurement processes, the automation of invoicing receipt and processing is most widespread, according to a recent survey. The high level of invoicing and P2P automation could be due to an organization’s strategic initiatives such as standardizing and centralizing accounts payable and other shared services, the report said.  

The procurement processes with the lowest level of automation was supplier relationship management, with 68% percent of survey respondents reporting no automation in supply relationship. Half or more of the procurement and finance professionals surveyed also reported no automation in supplier information management, electronic supplier commerce and strategic sourcing processes at their organization.