All purchases require a distinct level of planning, the intensity of which is based on the type and level of purchase being made. Let us say for instance that you’re required to install a new piece of software for your department. You will evaluate the software on all the features and functionalities that the software is expected to have, negotiate for costs and quotations from various vendors and then assess if the price is justified depending on the value it offers to the organization.

Hypothetically, after donning your thinking hat, you were able to plan out a complete procurement project and were able get the project going, does that mean that your project has been managed successfully? The answer to that question is a big NO. Here is a list of problems associated with your procurement project planning-

• Inefficient Tracking – Inability to track and monitor the status, progress and key metrics of large projects
• Insufficient Integration – Projects unable to be linked to other procurement tasks
• Operational inefficiency – Incongruity of data stored at multiple locations
• Lack of Compliance – Difficulty in maintaining and ensuring adherence of projects as per category rules
• Unstructured Reporting – Poor reporting mechanism through excel or word based manual processes

This calls for automation for your project management needs, a solution that will not only ease the above problems but also give you a real time visibility in your procurement project. Manually carrying out all these activities is not only time consuming but also can be hazardous to the organization.

Planning for procurement includes more than window shopping. Think a long way back to the dawn of any procurement project.  In the earlier stages of project planning, it was easy to identify those products or services that you are required to source for the project to succeed. As the project moved forward, \”emergencies\” popped up, requiring you to procure more stuff: cables, software, additional hardware, tools, training, updating, change management and what not. So how did you go about getting all this stuff? Did you go to the top management directly or did you directly request and order a new software?

How you go about purchasing, depends on the structure within your organization. In today’s time and age defining a universal approach to procurement is an extremely difficult task, but a priority for sure. Every employee, every department and every organization, has a specific approach to procurement. The moral of the story? Follow the rules. Once you know the rules of how, when, why, where and what to procure, you are in the game and can play it real good.