2. Agenda
State of the Nation and Importance of Procurement
Your strategic plan
Your challenges
Align your goals with your strategy
Procure-to-Pay Life-cycle
E-Procurement, E-Invoicing and Contract Management
E-Procurement Project Tips
Case Studies
9. Align to Strategic Goals
• Unify decentralized spend through standardized processes
• Leverage spend - increase savings/revenue generation
• Strengthen governance and compliance culture
• Improve auditability and visibility
• Best use of available resource
• Employee Mobility Preparedness
10. Employee Mobility – “Job Hoppers”
Systems must be intuitive. Employee mobility is inevitable.
19. E-Procurement Project Tips
• Get Accounts Payable, IT and “Key Stake-holders” involved early.
• Review current process objectively and in its entirety.
• Agree on more efficient alternatives.
• Concentrate on improving the process.
Ensure chosen solution will improve control
AND streamline processes
20. Case Study – Anne Arundel CC
Strategic Goals:
• Paperless Purchase Order Process
• Increase Control
• Reduce Cycle-time
• Reduce Errors & Double-Handling
• Increase Visibility
• Save Money
Environment:
• $10k requires justification form
• Paper/manual process
• 1-3 weeks for approval
• No visibility of requisition during process
• Documents often lost while being passed around for signatures
21. Case Study – Anne Arundel CC
“[eProcurement] gave us the opportunity to become more efficient.
It definitely gives us the opportunity to leverage our resources.”
Andrew Little - Executive Director of Finance, Anne Arundel Community College
Result:
• Electronic justification form
• Electronic approval process
• Approval time reduced from 1-3 weeks to <48hrs
• Documents attached requisition/PO
• Full visibility throughout approval process
22. • Reduction of Procurement’s workload
• Procurement Staff Reduction:
• One position has not been backfilled
• One position has been reallocated to a Project Manager
• Elimination of Overtime – over $50,000 annually
• End user satisfaction has increased
• Just In Time ordering model has eliminated “hoarding”
• Significant reduction of paper process
• System paid for itself within 9 months
Case Study – Nassau Community College
23. Recommendations Summary
• Business case based on strategic goals
• Focus on campus-wide adoption
• Integrate Procurement and Finance processes
• Address problematic categories
• Make the right way easier than the wrong way
• Market your program to your suppliers
Your contracted suppliers
in eProcurement
Fast and easy to use
Solution
Approved PO, on contract.
3-way match
In the Strategic Skill-based side, the Procurement Life-cycle begins with doing initial spend analysis, through selecting suppliers to invite to an event.
Running strategic sourcing events, either online RFXs or reverse auctions and finally awarding a contract.
Then the day to day business of procurement begins on the Tactical Tasked-based side, where people in the business order things from catalogs/contracts, register receipt, invoices come which have to be matched against supporting records and that invoice data then creates more transactional data which is fed into spend analysis systems to start the process over again.
Although depicted as a signal cycle, a line has been drawn down the side to highlight the fact that the technologies on the right tend to be supporting Strategic and Skill-based activities by category managers or senior sourcing professionals.
The tools on the left are much more tactical/transactional, they are used by people in the business who need to order stuff from catalogs and for administrators in the procurement department who are turning those into purchase orders and/or processing the invoices.
Unimarket is built around the concept of a single integrated Marketplace, where integration for a customer or supplier only happens once and from there rapid, turn-key enablement across multiple customers and suppliers.
Another unique aspect of Unimarket’s approach is our business model. Rather than charge the customer every-time they want to connect with a new supplier (or a “block” of suppliers), we have a value-based supplier transaction fee. The supplier fee not only means that it is free for customers to connect with as many suppliers as they like, it also covers the costs of set-up, integration, testing and support, meaning the supplier pays nothing until they are getting value from the system.
To help articulate the benefit of this approach, here’s is a quote from a new customer of ours who selected Unimarket after a thorough competitive bid process:
“I feel your competitive advantage over [your competitors] lies with the value proposition. Unimarket provides an entire procurement solution for a reasonable price compared to other software solutions that offer modules and add on costs like supplier enablement’s. While it may not be advantageous to directly compare your solution to others, the other software companies frequently said, “we do not charge our suppliers fees.” In the attempt to view your solution as negative toward suppliers. My internal analysis of the transactional fee structure allows for two main advantages
1) Unimarket’s revenue stream as a company is not chiefly tied to only “adding new customers” which could tax existing support in an effort to generate profit.
2) The transactional fee keeps Unimarket engaged for the life time of a customer because the more volume that can be driven through Unimarket generates profit. As more volume is driven through Unimarket the university is also winning because of the A/P efficiencies and data analytics.“