How much does your purchasing really cost your organisation? We don’t often consider the cost of a sale or purchase to encompass the whole chain from deciding the product needed, right through to the purchase and beyond. This isn’t just the physical cost of goods purchased - What is the real cost to your organisation? Getting 10% off the latest piece of tech is great on the surface, but the overall cost involves much more than the ticket price!

The life of a tech buyer…

If you consider request handling, search, selection, multiple supplier engagement, quote handling, order placement, order confirmation, receipting, goods checking, invoice handling and account reconciliation, the time (and cost associated with it) adds up. On top of that errors, remedial action and administration can get very expensive. The larger your organisation, the more likely it is that the human involvement cost increases. Therefore, anything that can be done to reduce such a costly process is worth investigation.

The purchase pathway

We believe that proper eProcurement can benefit every person engaged in the purchase pathway. eProcurement delivers efficiencies and a tangible cost saving to both the buyer and supplier, but it’s more than just a way of ordering. It goes beyond the order, to the paperwork. Invoices, purchase confirmations, order reports and more, are all often still sent via e-mail, resulting in a manual, time-consuming way of managing and monitoring purchases. When those emails reside in an inbox, un-viewed, it’s easy to understand the benefit of managing everything together, in one account, online. Not only for you as the buyer, but everyone else in your team that needs access to the same paperwork. That’s why we highly recommend eProcurement - it securely stores your data for easy and quick reviewing of your spending.

Taking back a bit of time

There’s no doubt that we’re all busy, and it’s human nature to take the path of least resistance! Most of us have wide and varied workloads, and the responsibilities and time pressures associated with them. Quite often the next purchase that needs to be made seems to be getting in the way of the day job, even if it is the day job to get it done. As such, our philosophy is that buyers want to make purchases as quickly and smoothly as possible.

Benefits of eProcurement

eProcurement platforms make purchasing easy and quick. This ensures that your inbox is clearer; multiple members of your team can access purchase information, including historical purchases; and you can easily see what you’ve spent with each vendor – both the products you’ve purchased and when. There’s crisp, clear product information right in front of you, without having to browse thousands of review websites, as well as management information and rich product details to review before making a purchase.

Are you signed up to eCAT?

We have our own eProcurement platform, eCAT – that aims to make eProcurement easy, our mantra is ‘Sign in, Search, Sorted’. If time is money, and in every business it is, online eProcurement, when done properly by supplier, and adopted by the customer is a very real, efficient transformation and always improves the cost of the sale, and we respect that. If you’d like to find out more about eCAT, click here, or you can get in touch with us using the button below, or with your Softcat Account Manager.