Ensure that all procurement requests are complete, accurate, and aligned with your organization’s goals

Procurement Intake is the organized method of capturing and processing new requests within your source-to-pay processes. It starts with collecting new requests from internal stakeholders, which are then assessed based on criteria like urgency, importance, and alignment with business objectives.

Once approved, these requests are directed through pre-determined and automated workflows. By systematically capturing and processing requests, organizations can enhance visibility into incoming requests and ensure they are managed efficiently and in accordance with company procedures.

Orchestrate Your Tech

As the intake door sits on top of your ERP or S2P solutions, it grants requesters visibility into the open POs, invoices, and payments, without needing a license to your other systems, ever.

Intake Management is the Cornerstone of Orchestration

In recent years, intake management has become increasingly important as organizations seek to overhaul their procurement processes and achieve better visibility into their spending. The importance of intake management in procurement is immense. It establishes the groundwork for an efficient, cost-effective, and risk-averse procurement system, ultimately enhancing value across the organization.

Whilst many people view intake management as primarily linked to initiating a purchase request, its scope is actually much broader than this, covering any activity across the entire source-to-pay process e.g. onboard a new supplier, initiate a renewal, request a NDA etc.

The intake management process typically involves the following steps:

• Receiving requests: Procurement requests can vary in nature, requiring a user-friendly single front door interface for all employees
• Qualifying requests: Once a request is received, it is important to qualify it to ensure that it is legitimate, and that the organization has the budget and resources to fulfil it.
• Prioritizing requests: Not all requests are created equal. Some requests may be more urgent than others, or they may have a greater impact on the organization’s bottom line. It is important to prioritize requests so that the most important ones are processed first.
• Automated workflows: Once the requests have been assessed, automated workflows ensure that that the requests are handled quickly and in-line with company prolicies, driving compliance and reducing timeframes.

Key Components for Effective Procurement Intake

For many employees, they have no direct knowledge of the procurement process — where to start, what steps were required, which forms or what systems needed to be utilized. This confusion often leads to frustration, along with the chance of risk to the business as they either evade the process entirely or push the work onto others.  The same can be said for approvers and stakeholders, where the prospect of navigating complex procurement tools can be daunting.

This transforms the role of procurement from a strategic lever of growth and savings, into a function scrambling to manage rogue spend and risk exposure. However, by following these best practices, you can create a well-oiled intake management system that efficiently handles incoming requests, fostering a positive experience for everyone involved.

Introducing ZIP’s Procurement Intake Solution

Zip offers one of the world’s leading procurement intake solutions. It provides one place for any employee to initiate a purchase or vendor request. Each request is correctly routed for approval across procurement, finance, IT, data security, legal, and other teams, and Zip integrates into all major ERP and P2P solutions to create a PR or draft PO.

Zip mimics a more human-like interaction between users and the system by making the interactions more natural, driving increased adoption across all stakeholders.

Key functionality:

Kick-Start Your Transformation With a Procurement Orchestration Diagnostic

With your Procurement strategy in place, the best place to start is by taking the pulse of your current procurement platforms, processes, and workflows to help you determine its fitness for the future and to assess how procurement orchestration could provide a more automated and user-friendly solution.

Our Procurement Orchestration Diagnostic is a comprehensive independent assessment. It evaluates and provides recommendations as to how well your existing approach supports both your procurement strategy and engagement across the business.

Using a combination of workshops, interviews, and system analysis, it is a comprehensive review that not only incorporates solution and process design, but also user adoption and future scalability.