Every company desires to make their purchasing process more efficient. For those individuals that have been involved with procurement, we know that this is often a lofty goal as days can easily spiral into a constant mode of “fighting fires.” Procurement professionals easily spend an excessive amount of time responding to supplier late shipments, tracking down materials specifications, confirming supplier payments, verifying supplier ESG standards and other activities.
Effective procurement is crucial for an organization’s profitability and ability to meet customer demands. As procurement teams consistently focus on cost savings, it is also essential to make buyers more productive, automate internal processes and ensure a steady supply of materials.
Business Challenges
It’s still common for buyers and planners to conduct purchasing and supplier management activities with a mix of spreadsheets, emails, phone calls and buyers’ memories to track hundreds of supplier details. This often results in errors, process inefficiency and slow responsiveness to unexpected supply disruptions.
Manufacturers we work with consistently mention the desire for more automation and a single source of truth that improves procurement decision making and interaction with suppliers based on the same set of information. Along with the swiftly changing nature of purchasing, inbound supply challenges include:
- Carrying too much inventory to address potential supply disruptions
- Excessive premium freight charges to meet customer delivery expectations
- Inability to accurately track and trace purchase orders, shipments, receipts and invoices
- Mismanaged documents and processing errors leading to slow cycle times
- Inefficient procurement workflow and processing causing unproductive supplier relationships
- Buyers spending too much time “fighting fires” and addressing unexpected supply disruptions
QAD’s Purchasing Capabilities
Effective collaboration with suppliers relies on transparency and aligned procurement objectives. QAD’s purchasing capabilities are a part of QAD Adaptive ERP and include the ability to:
- Automate and manage the purchasing process throughout requisition entry, requisition approval, PO creation, PO approval, PO print, PO receipt and invoice payment
- Assign different PO and requisition approval levels based on the appropriate authorization level
- Support different types of orders and contracts including supplier price lists, blanket orders, discrete purchase orders and supplier scheduled orders
- Provide reliable requirements to suppliers allowing them to order raw materials, plan production and improve on-time deliveries
- Accurately track orders
- Schedule supplier milk runs to reduce freight costs and improve transportation efficiency
- Track purchasing spend by commodity, product, product group, supplier and other factors
- Access procurement analytics to gain key insights and enhance decision making
- Streamline invoice processing to reduce workload, minimize errors and speed supplier payments
To find out more about QAD’s purchasing capabilities and Integrated Supplier Management, please visit our website.
