What Is an E-Procurement Platform and Why You Need One

E-procurement usually refers to an online B2B procurement platform or an internal company system that enables your company to purchase supplies using digital channels. An e-procurement platform may well work as a local or a global B2B marketplace where purchasers and suppliers meet to explore supply and demand bids and respectively procure and deliver goods and services.

A modern digital e-procurement platform aims at facilitating commercial transactions by offering professional tools for placing purchase orders, sending invoices, making payments and shipping goods and supplies.

Features of B2B Procurement Platforms

A viable e-procurement platform features the same capabilities as an internal company system for procuring goods and services. Hence, an online B2B marketplace that you can use as a procurement platform for all your company needs should offer a set of specific features we will explore below.

• • Purchase requisitions capabilities that keep track of all received and approved purchase requests.

• • Vendor management functionality to find, onboard and manage vendors and suppliers in an efficient manner.

• • Purchase orders should be generated automatically once you have an approved purchase request in place.

• • Purchase invoices should be issued effortlessly and should allow for three-way matching.

• • Cost control functionality should be offered in order to optimize your overall spending by applying your custom rules.

• • You also need easy customization for workflows, fields and profiles.

These are just the mandatory features a B2B procurement platform should offer online. You can have many other additional features if you opt for a specific SaaS marketplace serving a specific industry vertical or a niche market.

Benefits of E-Procurement Platforms

E-procurement platforms offer some common advantages associated with enterprise software but they also provide unique advantages related to your company’s supply chain management. Let’s now look at the major advantages of using a digital B2B procurement platform.

• • You reduce costs by eliminating a lot of paperwork and by stopping duplicate purchases.

• • You benefit from transparent spending where data for all transactions is stored in one place and you can easily analyze data and make reports.

• • An e-procurement platform boosts productivity by storing all data in digital format and saving your requirements, specifications and other documentation for later use e.g. by creating order or tender templates.

• • E-procurement allows for fast or real-time transactions, which in turn shortens the entire procurement cycle.

• • Marketplace software for e-procurement enables you to introduce standardized purchasing processes and procedures across your departments and your company as a whole.

• • An e-procurement platform protects you against common human errors once you have set up your processes and after you have approved document templates in place.

At the end, a reliable B2B procurement platform gives you more control over the way your company spends money on supplies and speeds up all components of the procurement process.

Concluding Words

Taking into account the advantages e-procurement is offering and the overall shift toward digitization of business processes and procedures, it is not a question of when your company should adopt a procurement platform but how to best implement the most suitable platform for e-procurement processes in your company.

You can discover more about the Uppler solution for E-procurement platform here.

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