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.
Drive Early Adoption
Creating a single front door for every procurement process ensures company-wide adoption of purchasing policy and makes adopting spend controls easy for employees.
Influence Spend Earlier
Because all requests go through your intake door, you get early visibility into upcoming spend before it’s finalized, giving you time to shape requirements and proactively negotiate.
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 Requests Occur Across Your Entire Process and Drives your Orchestration Framework
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.
You need to fully understand your intake points before you build out your orchestration.
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. onboarding a new supplier, initiating a renewal, request a NDA etc.
Identifying when and where stakeholders collaboration points take place throughout the end to end process, what are their pain points and the required activities, is critical to creating a successful orchestration framework.
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.
Kick-Start Your Transformation With a Six-Week Procurement Intake and Orchestration Pilot
To help identify how procurement orchestration can help drive efficiencies across your source-to-pay processes, we have developed a 3-step pilot approach at a category/commodity level that can be delivered in just six weeks.
Step 1 – Identify further opportunities for S2P end-to-end process improvements across a pilot category/commodity
Step 2 – Define a future state S2P category channel across a pilot category/commodity
Step 3 – Shape a business case and define requirements for intake & orchestration
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