The procurement process made seamless

This article originally appeared on Workflow.

In business, minor headaches can be a symptom of much bigger challenges. A clunky employee experience can be the result of departments functioning in silos, systems that can’t communicate with each other and processes that haven’t been automated fully—or at all.
Procurement offers a striking example of this phenomenon: Almost all companies today rely on a patchwork of systems to address the various needs and tasks in the procurement process. Too often, employees are overwhelmed with status request emails or manual data-entry tasks that burn time and energy without adding value to the business.

Organisations understand the benefits of addressing these kinds of problems and improving the quality of experiences they deliver to all stakeholders. Seamless employee experiences help improve an organisation’s efficiency, making it possible to do more with less.

Taking experience seriously

“Employee experience is the biggest pain point in how procurement operations are handled today,” says Ravi Vaidya, a senior director of digital technology at ServiceNow. “Right now, these are all very manual processes, and employees’ visibility into these are limited. Providing the right tools with the right user experience to your entire employee base enables employees to be productive and focus on the tasks that really matter.”

There’s no question that taking experience seriously pays dividends. More than three-quarters of companies identified as experience leaders in a survey of 1,000 global C-suite executives by ServiceNow and ThoughtLab said their experience investments helped them cut costs, increase revenue and grow profits.

Hyperautomation and AI play crucial roles in unlocking these benefits. It’s no surprise that companies that lead on experience are rapidly deploying these technologies. Self-service portals, chatbots and workflow automation are among the solutions these leaders are turning to as they prioritise making it easier to get work done, according to the survey.

Supercharging efficiency

How does this play out in procurement? Companies that deploy these technologies can make the procurement process almost invisible to their employees, freeing them to spend time on more important work. They also supercharge the efficiency of their procurement function.
Requests can be seamlessly routed to the correct department, invoices automatically analysed for exceptions upon receipt and returns and replacements simplified. That allows for a leaner and more productive procurement process that contributes to a great employee experience, rather than being a tax on employees’ time and energy.

These benefits can extend outside the organisation as well, as suppliers automatically validate customer purchase orders, handle customer queries through case management and even automate replies. That creates an end-to-end solution that automates an entire workflow, eliminating the silos and manual processes that can make seemingly simple tasks maddeningly difficult.

As for what’s next, improvements in generative AI may be able to further simplify the procurement process. The chatbot that makes it easier to place an order or initiate a return will soon be able to learn from users’ past behaviour and anticipate what they might need to do next, for example. The result: Getting work done takes less work than ever—and is an even better experience for employees.

Find out more about how you can improve the procurement process.