Procurement solutions: key features and benefits

Procurement software is any digital tool or solution used to manage some or all of the procurement process (that is, sourcing, selecting, acquiring, and paying for goods or services). 

Procurement software can cover the entire procurement cycle from beginning to end—also known as procure-to-pay or P2P—or can be used to strategically optimize key stages, like sourcing.

The right procurement solution revolutionizes how procurement is managed across your organization, with benefits for your procurement team, your requesters, your suppliers, and your business’s bottom line.

Boost efficiency with automation

If you’re still struggling to manage your organization’s procurement with manually updated spreadsheets and siloed emails, you already know how painful and inefficient old-school procurement methods can be.

Cutting-edge procurement solutions (like Keelvar) leverage automations and AI to streamline procurement processes, reduce manual work, and enhance efficiency, reducing up to 100% of manual work for high-volume, low-value sourcing tasks. 

Use autonomous sourcing to enhance your efficiency and automate the sourcing process from beginning to end: 

• Turn your best practices into repeatable workflows that scale sourcing excellence and improve compliance
• Empower requesters to kick off automated sourcing events without needing to go through your team 
• Ensure competitive bidding and drive cost savings in categories you previously didn’t have bandwidth to optimize
• Win back hours for your procurement team to focus on high-stake, high-impact strategic sourcing work

Keelvar’s Autonomous Sourcing automates 100% of the tender process, saving you time and money

Improve supplier collaboration

When supplier information is locked away in individual inboxes, it’s hard to nurture those relationships to get the best outcomes.

A procurement solution brings all supplier and vendor management into one platform, making it easier to communicate and build long-term partnerships. With a flexible bidding process, suppliers can provide conditional discounts, create item bundles, and submit alternative bids, enabling them to showcase their expertise and maximize value. 

A flexible bidding process lets you get the best deals from suppliers in every event

Enhance visibility for greater control

One of the biggest problems for procurement teams is not having the full picture of where money is going, especially for everyday things like spot buys.

Procurement solutions centralize all procurement activities across your business, from large-scale purchases to tactical sourcing. This brings more spend under governance, reducing rogue spend, increasing transparency, and giving you more data so you can make informed, strategic sourcing decisions. The result? More control—without needing to add more headcount or resources. 

Make better sourcing decisions

Adding eSourcing to your procurement tech stack doesn’t just take care of the simple procurement stuff for you: it helps you simplify the complex events, too. With powerful sourcing optimization, you can run advanced scenario analysis to help you make the best decision, every time. 

Sourcing optimization lets you go beyond cost as your main criteria and consider a range of factors that matter to your business, like quality, reliability, supply chain efficiency, and sustainability. It can effortlessly handle hundreds—or thousands—of line items so you can manage even the largest data sets and make informed, strategic decisions that deliver long-term value.

Keelvar’s Sourcing Optimizer performs complex scenario and bid analysis to find the best fit your business’s unique needs

There are a lot of different eProcurement tools on the market—so how do you know which one is right for your business? 

Look for a solution that offers the features you need to improve efficiency, save time, and reduce costs. Some common features include:

• Purchase order (PO) management to easily create, send, and manage POs
• Customizable intake forms to capture the right information from suppliers upfront for speedier, more efficient, and more compliant sourcing cycles‍
• Multi-round RFQs with feedback so you can onboard and and test new suppliers to find the right fit before entering into long-term contracts‍
• Spend analysis to understand where money is going and identify opportunities for improvement‍
• Invoicing and payment processing to streamline payments for your team and suppliers‍
• Workflow orchestration to create repeatable custom procurement and sourcing workflows that follow your team’s best practices‍
• Quick vendor processing to keep procurement cycles moving fast‍
• Flexible bidding to empower suppliers to bring their best offers to the table‍
• eAuctions to drive competition via a dynamic, transparent bidding process‍
• Scenario analysis to analyze large amounts of complex data and make data-driven supplier choices‍
• Autonomous sourcing to automate high-volume, low-value sourcing tasks and manual work‍
• Sourcing optimization to enhance your strategic sourcing and drive time and cost savings in every category‍
• Integrations with the other tools in your procurement tech stack to create a cohesive, synchronized workflow

Look for a procurement solution that lets you create seamless, scalable workflows

The right procurement solution is a crucial part of any procurement transformation initiative. As we’ve seen already, it enhances efficiency, improves supplier relationships, brings more spend under governance, and helps teams make sourcing decisions that align with their business goals and drive maximum value.

All of this frees procurement teams from reactive firefighting mode and enables them to adopt a more proactive, strategic approach that elevates the role of procurement. By making data-driven optimizations—from identifying ways to reduce rogue spend in specific categories to mitigating risk by diversifying their supply chains—procurement teams can make a significant impact on their organization, helping them to reduce costs, stay agile, and maintain a competitive advantage.