3 tips to properly master and manage indirect purchasing in the company

Indirect procurement is essential to the company’s overall business. It represents financial savings of 10% to 25% and can account for up to 50% of the total procurement volume.

Managing indirect procurement well is a criterion of performance, profitability and competitiveness for companies. To control this type of purchasing, several levers require particular attention. Here are some tips and avenues for reflection:

- Process automation:

To get a global and effective view of procurement processes, the ideal solution is to make them more automated and fluid. To do this, implementing a digitalisation solution through a fully digital Source-to-Pay system frees you from many low-value tasks and gives the company a better view and more performance.

By digitalising procurement with suitable software, indirect purchases are automatically centralised and the risk of errors caused by manual processing is reduced.

- Digitalisation of transactions:

To control operating costs and company spending, digitalisation is now an essential solution for tracking this process, from order taking to invoicing. By adopting such a system, the company and its various users become more responsive and autonomous, and buyers can track and control their purchases effectively. As a result, buyers can negotiate better prices with suppliers.

- Centralisation of invoices:

To ensure good management of payments and indirect purchases, and instead of spending hours retrieving invoices, centralising them saves considerable time thanks to automatic collection. The buyer also gets a global view of upcoming payments.

Improving indirect procurement management requires a change in operating methods, based on digitalisation and SaaS management solutions, as well as the implementation of an automation system.

Abdelilah EL ATTARI

Expert in digital transformation and Artificial Intelligence (AI): Procurement digitalisation (S2C, P2P), HRIS, Civic Tech and participatory democracy, Marketing and customer relations