Purchase Order Automation – How to make the right choice

Handling purchase orders in a manual process was a recurring nightmare. With a lot of paperwork floating around, tracking a specific purchase order was like looking for a needle in a haystack. And it’s not just a bad feeling. A recent study by APQC reveals manual purchase orders processing can cost organizations as much as $506.52 per PO.

Thankfully, purchase order automation came to the rescue, but it wasn’t smooth sailing at first.

Legacy systems took months or even years to automate a process. With the emergence of SaaS, organizations of all sizes and budgets got a chance to automate their PO process. Now, everyone has the chance to experience purchase order automation and get out from the rule of manual systems.

Kissflow Procurement Cloud, and picking the right PO management tool

Before you consider automating your purchase order process, it is essential that you pick the right tool. The software you pick should help you reap the full benefits of taking the purchase order process digital.

While there are several purchase order software options available today, a good decision would be to pick a comprehensive procurement software like Kissflow Procurement Cloud. It has a dedicated PO management feature that enables organizations to streamline PO processing, cut down costs, and maintain better records. The following list describes the full capability of Kissflow Procurement Cloud.

The core functions of Kissflow Procurement Cloud

1. Purchase requisitions

Very often, purchase requests can get delayed, taking a lot of time to move through complex organisational hierarchies. Kissflow takes purchase requests digital, not only cutting down the time taken to complete the approval cycle but also removing redundant steps in purchase request management, and enabling purchasing staff to do more in less time.

2. Purchase orders

Nearly 43 percent of organizations surveyed recently admitted to having pressing issues and limitations in their PO practices, despite having a formal PO software system in place. Kissflow Procurement Cloud allows organizations streamline the entire purchase order cycle to deliver improvements in productivity and process efficiency, while saving costs.

3. Invoice management

Manual invoices are a decidedly stagnant thorn in the side of procurement teams, as they are notoriously slow and prone to error. Manual procurement practices drag the payment cycle along, costing your organization early payment discount opportunities.

Using a streamlined digital solution like Kissflow, organizations can keep track of receipts, calculate shipping and taxes, and pay all invoices on or before the deadline with little to no manual intervention.

4. Vendor management

Without clear insights into their own vendor management process (process transparency), organizations often end up putting a strain on their vendor relationships.

With digital procurement, your purchasing team can streamline vendor selection and pick the best vendor available. By taking the vendor management process digital, you can quickly identify and resolve grievances, forming a better relationship with the vendor.

5. Contract Approval Process

In manual contract management, all contracts are just dumped in the same filing cabinet or the local drive. As it is disorganized and unstructured, finding contracts or even keeping tabs on them can be a real challenge. Procurement automation organizes all contracts in a central repository that can be accessed in a single click. Additionally, it also ensures that all contracts stay consistent and accurate.

Why you should say no to manual purchase orders

Traditionally, paper-based purchase orders and emails ferried purchasing details in a PO cycle. With the evolution of technology, you can probably come up with a lot of reasons to stop managing purchase orders manually.

Here are five reasons to say goodbye to manual purchasing process:

1.Volume of data:

As the organization grows, the number of purchases increase with it. They need to be processed rapidly in a secure way and paper forms or emails aren’t just up to the job.

2.Efficiency issues:

The manual PO process is inherently slow, complex, and error-prone. Automated PO processes are fast, consistent, and accurate.

3.Cost factor:

A lot of factors like productivity, storage costs, and admin hours can influence the cost. Eliminating paperwork and manual effort from processes will nearly always save money.

4.Competitors:

When organizations hold back from automating their PO process, they risk falling behind their competitors who are digital-ready. Automation is no longer a choice; it is a necessity.

5.Security risk:

Paper forms, emails, and locally stored electronic files are inherently insecure. Storing confidential information using manual methods will do more harm than good.

6.Regulations:

Ensuring compliance with legislation will be a lot harder when you have no idea where your records are, who has access to them, and whether or not they have been modified.

7.Sustainability:

Paperwork expands your carbon footprint and local storage demands larger memory and investments, and both consume more energy. Purchase order automation will help organizations implement an eco-friendly business process

Summary

An inefficient purchase order process can affect an organization’s bottom line directly. So, it is essential that you take charge of your PO process.

Using a cloud-based digital purchase order solution ensures that all steps in the purchase order process are accomplished without any manual intervention. Additionally, this reduces your chances of losing a PO, miskeying information, and other instances that cause process delays.

Automating your purchase order process with a robust procurement solution like Kissflow Procurement Cloud will cut down the cost and time associated with PO processing substantially. Kissflow’s cloud-based nature ensures hassle-free installation and ease of use.

Bid goodbye to your manual purchase order tools and give Kissflow Procurement Cloud a spin today! See how easy it is to work with automated purchase orders–simply sign up for a free demo.