Making the best choices for your IT procurement is essential. The best choices save you time and money. The opposite can be said of making uninformed decisions or going with the wrong vendor. Here we take you through some of the challenges and rewards of effective IT procurement and how you can make the most of it.
IT Procurement Challenges
Research shows that inadequate procurement practices reduce your profit and also have the potential to increase your costs 5-fold. This is not something that you want. Here are the top 5 IT procurement issues:
- Inability to reduce costs of hardware, software and IT services. This impacts your overall budget meaning that you will need to increase the cost of your products or the services that you offer.
- If vendor lead times are too long, your employees will not have the tech that they need to do their job resulting in a loss of productivity.
- Ensuring high-quality hardware is vital – you don’t want to replace something 3 months down the line. Remember that means reordering, a time delay and even more capital down the drain.
- In any procurement process, seamless communications are essential – both internally and externally. Miscommunication can lead to order and payment duplication, loss of valuable data and lack of transparency.
- Humans make human errors which means that more time and money is wasted doing procurement tasks over again.
Improving Procurement Strategy
Here are some great ideas to improve your IT procurement strategies.
- Use supply chain management that can monitor the entire supply chain. Supply chain management will also improve communication between the departments in your company.
- Use technology to automate workflow and improve communications – the benefits here speak from themselves. Technology can reduce the cost of invoicing by 90%, help minimize errors in procurement by 40% and give you more control and transparency over your expenses.
- Don’t jump from one vendor to another. Find an IT procurement vendor that works for you and stay with that supplier. By having a solid supplier relationship you’ll great the best deals and advice. And the longer you maintain the relationship, the better the deals will become.
- Don’t focus on the initial outlay for procuring your IT. Understanding the Total Cost of Ownership is just as important. When you identify all the factors that impact your hardware and IT services, you’ll get a much better picture of all your procurement costs.
- Implement effective supply chain management policies and procedures. When you control your supply chain, you’ll dramatically improve communication, transparency and significantly reduce error.
Streamlining your IT procurement processes ensures that you:
- Get the best price for your hardware, software and IT services
- Same time and money
- Work with reliable and dependable vendors
- Minimize order delays
- Minimize human error
IT Procurement Automation
Automating your IT procurement can only make good things happen. By this, we mean greater speed, accuracy and efficiency and also getting the very best price for your tech. Here are just a few benefits of automating your IT procurement:
- You can reduce the cost of processing a PO by up to 20%
- You can reduce PO placement by a factor of ten
- You can get fantastic discounts, maybe even in the region of 75%
- You will reduce errors by 40%
- You can reduce cost-per-invoice by nearly 90%
IT procurement automation will also help you streamline invoice approval, improve compliance and transparency, increase productivity and build strong ties with your suppliers.
Procurement Management Software
Tapping into procurement management software for your IT will have a host of benefits. Here are a few:
- You will improve your workflow and efficiency
- You will much more control overspending
- You will have spend analysis visibility
- Orders will be processed much more quickly
- Cloud-based document management will mean significantly less paperwork
- Human error in invoicing and payments will be reduced
- You will have a full audit trail for each and every order
