Purchase Order Finance

eProcurement and Purchasing systems normally construct their employees into approved groups who are then enabled to go out and buy goods and services on behalf of their business. The issue is that not much analysis has been done on sorting out the good systems from the bad systems.

eProcurement systems organize your employees into authorized groups who are allowed to go out and purchase goods and services on behalf of their business. The issue here is that not much analysis has been done on sorting out the good systems from the poor systems.

So what hot button items does one look for ? Well in this brief article I go into some of the key factors that you should consider I know this because I performed the same exercise for my own employer.

Without getting too functionally specific, firstly look for a software company that has been in business for a number of years and has good technical support based in the country in which you are operating.

Look for ongoing operational and training costs and also ask what are the fees to change the software to your own specifications.

Find out how the software suppliers approach the required tasks for example if any custom designed software is required, do they send an analyst/programmer to sit with you or do they sub-contract to a firm in India that you have to relay your design ideas to ?

Functionally speaking, purchasing software can contain is a focused set of tools, the specific functions you should be looking into are remote requisitioning, on-line approvals (multi-level), electronic creation/dispatch of a purchase order, goods receiving, 3-way invoice matching and accounts interfacing these are all the obvious areas.

Purchasing systems also contain some non-obvious tools what about facilities for say a supplier portal ? This is a much better approach than a ‘punch-out’ application which is supplier specific, or providing an asset register so that your capital goods do not have to be manually entered into your accounts for depreciation calculations at the year end.

You need to determine what metrics are available for you to measure the success and performance of your new eProcurement system !

When our business went through the exercise of selecting a new eProcurement system we concentrated on select ones and finally ended up by choosing a system from a company called Mikrofax eProcurement Solutions they met our criteria and seemed to have a good knowledge of what we required. We also considered systems from other companies like IBM and Oracle and Software Dynamics all who had an understanding of the procurement system cycle but nevertheless rather missed the point from a small company’s perspective.

This of course by no means an fully extensive list of issues but rather a pointer to get you thinking along out-of-the box lines and help your business weather the current financial climate.

Post a Comment

You must be logged in to post a comment.