If clients want to realise cost savings in your purchasing management, then effective purchasing negotiations and authorisations are crucial. Another important aspect of purchasing management is compliance with often-complex internal regulations, i.e. tiered authorisations and buying standards. Thus, for many companies it is crucial to balance compliance with a fast and easy to follow procurement cycle.

Challenges

Potential clients are facing the following challenges in dealing with Purchasing Management:

• Procurement process is labour intensive due to largely manual operations
• The process is often paper-based and thus time-consuming.
• Purchasing requests take time to process and are difficult to access at a later stage
• Employees can initiate purchases without a preliminary approval of their managers
• Purchasing department has difficulties to measure and report purchasing productivity

HDS Solution

HDS helps clients implement economical and fast solutions. Even when investment is limited, we can help our clients achieve speed, cost savings, and increased productivity. We can implement our solution immediately, integrating various client ERP systems.

In addition to savings related to more efficient purchasing, our clients can save costs like printing, legal expenses, consulting, etc.

HDS’s solution allows any pre-authorised employees of the client company to place purchase orders on the system. The authorisation and the buying process are done via single platform based on the Internet. It can be tailored to your specific processes, internal rules and organisational structure.

The solution allows for both purchasing based on a pre-negotiated price list and buying specific goods and services that require submission of a quotation request. The solution contains supplier and goods catalogues for pre-negotiated price lists, which are simple to maintain. Whenever new quotation requests are required, the system prepares automatically requests for proposals that are sent to short listed suppliers and manages the process until successful closing. The approval process path can be multi-level, involving different authority levels depending on the purchases categories. A system of notifications and escalations makes sure that the purchasing is done on time.

The solution also allows for measurement of purchasing productivity. Online reports show purchasing by commodity categories and suppliers. The system drill-down capabilities allow for identification of discrepancies.

The solution represents best practice and it was built based on many years of experience with leading multinational companies.

Key Benefits

• Paperless process - No paper anymore, as everything is stored in an electronic database. No need for keeping hard copies either . All purchasing requests history is kept in a secure database together with the original supplier offers. Saves paper, envelopes , tonner, storage materials, and labour. It’s environmentally friendly.
• Increased productivity - The complete purchasing process is now automated from the issuing of the purchase request to the authorization and payment. It is carried out smoothly and efficiently.
• Reduced expenses volume - With the pre-approval system, employees are thinking twice before placing an order. It changes their behaviour. Only real request are put in through system now, which leads to reduction in the expenses volume.
• Ability to challenge supplier prices - The system forces all purchase orders to go via purchasing department. It allows for preparing proposal requests and obtaining offers from suppliers. It gives clients the ability to challenge easily the prices of different suppliers based on comparison of their offers.
• Less time for analysis and reporting - The system offers the capability to retrieve faster more accurate purchasing information. This saves time for analysis and reporting.
• Increased compliance - The system is very useful for internal audit controls. It helps clients be sure that all purchasing processes are compliant with internal and external regulations. Cost of compliance audit is reduced significantly.
• Fewer suppliers - The system helps reduce the number of suppliers and drive demand to specific suppliers. This allows obtaining better discounts.