Requisition management is a balancing act. Procurement leaders must balance priorities like available budget and inventory optimization against concerns about risk mitigation and maverick spend.
However, balancing these priorities and concerns requires in-depth, actionable insights, and process transparency. This is precisely why procurement leaders take a greater interest in streamlining the requisition management process.
Before we dive deep into how it can be transformed, let’s take a closer look at the existing situation.
What is requisition management?
Requisition management is the process of creating, processing, authorizing, and tracking purchase requests within an organization. Once a valid need is identified, a formal request is initiated, typically using a purchase requisition form. The purchase request is then validated by the initiator’s manager and the procurement team to control spend and prevent potential frauds.
Disadvantages of manual requisition management
Archaic tools like paper forms and spreadsheets are flexible and up to the task when an organization’s purchasing needs are minimal. As teams expand, the process of managing multiple purchase requisitions and evaluating them gets out of hand. As a result, maverick spend and dark purchasing start to thrive.
A manual requisition management process is:
- Erroneous and inaccurate
- Time-consuming and expensive
- Neither transparent nor consistent
- Prone to potential frauds and risks
- Complex and labor intensive