Drive strategic work to attain the right contracts and organize operational work becoming as efficient as possible.
There are general expectations and there are unique expectations for specific industries and organizations. Purchasing can play a pivotal role in delivering bottom line results, nurturing relationships and providing access to important partners. IFS can help organizations across our focused industries to execute on both strategic and operational procurement.
STRATEGIC WORK
Driving strategic work to attain the right contracts summarizes what strategic procurement is all about. Consider where you are by formulating a baseline spend analysis, intelligent supplier classifications and assortment categorization. Take the future goals of your organization into account when summarizing what cost savings and sourcing projects are needed. Ensure that the purchase department are aligned and delivers on the organization’s overall strategy.
An organization’s purchasing department is expected to have the structure and analysis in place to deliver improvements continuously. Suppliers and contracts should also adhere to the overall mission and vision of a company as it’s no longer acceptable that organizations do not take responsibility for the suppliers and partners with whom they select to conduct their business.
Therefore, the corporate social responsibility agenda need to be considered and compliance, audits, and nonconformance reporting are necessary tools to master. Embedded supplier relationship management tightly joined with supplier master information allows your organization to track all types of activities and ensures that the proper actions are managed in the systems to derive at outcomes such as updated contracts or classifications.
OPERATIONAL WORK
Having contracts managed through proper document management is important for legal, compliance and efficiency reasons. That includes having controlled access to contracts from where, whom and when it’s needed. Traditionally many organizations have not been looking to their ERP system to drive efficiency and structure in their strategic procurement process. This is something you can expect from a modern ERP system like IFS Applications.
Your employees will have access to all transactions and control of suppliers, assortments, products master data and approval matrixes, topped with applicable embedded functionalities like analysis models, quality management, risk management, relationship management and document management. Best of breed systems are applied only when it’s strategically important to do so, and then it’s easy to integrate to ERP systems with an open designed architecture, like IFS.
A focus on delivering expected business value will ensure proper utilization of native business system capabilities and reach alignment on the overall business applications architecture. In my next blog post on procurement I intended to highlight the link between contracts (the outcome of strategic procurement work) and the Procure To Pay (P2P) process.
Don’t hesitate to contact me if you have questions or want to discuss themes surrounding procurement!
Learn more about IFS Applications at ifs.com.
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