Making eProcurement Make Sense
WeProcurement is the next revolution in advancing the value of eProcurement, or Purchase to Pay. In this blog series, we’ll be taking a deep dive into the three key pillars of a WeProcurement system: Relevance, Intelligence, and Awareness. This post is focused on the first of those pillars: Relevance.
The number one key to success of an eProcurement project is getting everyone across your organization to use the eProcurement system for all of their ordering needs. Architecting a system that optimizes user adoption requires understanding and overcoming the most common barriers:
- Failure to communicate the value of the system – Employees who don’t understand why they have to follow a process, or how they add value to the process, typically find ways to circumvent it.
- Making it inconvenient to use the system – If your workforce is on the go, they will find ways to purchase goods and services where they are. If they can’t access the system remotely, using devices they are accustomed to (e.g., smartphones), they will find a way around the system altogether.
- Delivering poor results to the employee – either poor quality products, costly products, the wrong products, or delivering those products too late to be useful.
- Creating system interaction that is complex or confusing – If the system doesn’t speak the user’s language, requires them to understand complex procurement practices, or doesn’t present the information they need, they will give up and become more and more resistant to change.
- Excluding key participants in the procurement process – While many P2P systems in the market have been architected for finance or procurement, few have been built to cater to the largest group of users – requestors, approvers, and suppliers.
A WeProcurement system changes those responses to an eProcurement rollout by making the process as relevant as possible to each person’s role, department, category of spend, and industry – this approach makes sense of eProcurement for the users. Instead of trying to force people into a mold with a system that caters to procurement or finance, WeProcurement seeks to understand the nuances of each requestor and deliver a system that is the easiest thing to use in their natural course of work. Ultimately, WeProcurement must be easier to use than options outside the system.
Why is Relevance so critical for getting the greatest ROI from eProcurement?
Today’s users expect technology to deliver convenience in ways that feel personal – think about Apple products, Uber, Amazon Prime, Netflix and others that have soared to the top of their industries because they cater to their users. Enterprise software and eProcurement should be no different. With a rising workforce of millennials, companies need to rethink the tools they provide to employees.
The Millennial’s expectation of immediacy, transparency, simplicity, and relatability are the mandates now driving disruption in every industry – not only from the aforementioned examples in consumables and fashion, but also heavy industries such as healthcare, finance and enterprise software. ~ Forbes Magazine
A WeProcurement approach offers customized workflows that users actually like using, simplifying every step, and creating obvious efficiency. These workflows do not require users to understand processes outside of their scope of work – they are given only the information needed and not more. Relevant workflows not only include all of the appropriate people in the process, but also remove users, steps, and tools that are unnecessary.
Relevance enables users to follow the process and comply with policy because it’s the easiest thing to do in the natural course of their daily work and does not require them to understand the inner workings of the Procurement Department. Making a process relevant to the people that use it is the ultimate way to encourage people to follow it. And, as we discussed before, that is the number one factor for success of an eProcurement system.
In our next blog post, we will describe the Relevance of WeProcurement in practice with a case example from a leading healthcare organization.
The post WeProcurement™ Key Pillar 1: Relevance appeared first on Verian.