The Challenges Faced by Procurement are Real
Procurement professionals face constant challenges–such as trying to control tail and maverick spend, managing an indeterminate number of requests from employees, lack of request status transparency – the dreaded “black hole”, manual processes, fragmented systems, and inefficiencies that limit their organizational impact. The challenges don’t stop here, employees (procurement’s customers) also face challenges knowing who to make requests to, what an organizational policy or process is, and what the current status is for a request.
The Procurement Paradigm is Shifting
The procurement landscape is evolving significantly, influenced by several key trends. Procurement professionals are facing an expanding scope of responsibilities, including managing new and more risks, compliance, and sustainability initiatives like carbon management, which requires innovative strategies to maximize efficiency with limited resources.
The rise of technology is facilitating self-service procurement for end-users, enhancing automated compliance and reducing the burden on procurement teams. Additionally, modern procurement organizations are increasingly adopting technologies that streamline processes and support decision-making, ensuring that the right stakeholders are involved at the right times to enhance agility and responsiveness.
A shift could be extremely beneficial. According to Deloitte’s 2023 Global CPO Survey, 71% of procurement’s time is spent on operational and transactional activities. This finding underscores the magnitude of the opportunity that a shift presents. To accomplish this, organizations are turning to Intake Management solutions to optimize processes, enabling procurement teams to focus on strategic activities that add greater value to the organization and adapt to the demands of a dynamic business environment.
In Gartner’s 2024 report, “Innovation Insight: Procurement Intake Management Boosts End-User Engagement”, they anticipate that “by 2027, 50% of procurement organizations will use intake management capabilities to simplify the procurement intake process,” and “…70% of procurement intake requests in the organization will be assisted by AI and generative AI (GenAI).”
For Starters: What is Intake Management?
Intake Management is a critical process that begins with the systematic collection, organization, and evaluation (or “triage”) of requests or questions from employees within a business or organization. It serves as the gateway through which new requests, tasks, projects, or cases are initiated and managed, and orchestrated across various supporting teams and systems, ensuring that they are handled efficiently, in compliance with policy, and aligned with strategic goals.
Simplify the Procurement Experience with Intake Management
Effective spend management involves more than simple orchestration; it necessitates seamless communication between systems. This requires a common framework that allows data to be understood across various tools and applications. Spend management platforms such as Ivalua serve as the foundational backbone for managing supplier and spend data, establishing a reliable system of record. By providing a unified data source, these platforms facilitate smooth, bi-directional integration of information and processes across diverse systems, promoting connected and efficient procurement operations.
This is where Ivalua’s Intake Management Solution can help. It is a purpose-built orchestration solution that solves various challenges by streamlining processes, workflows, and operations, reducing risk, and delivering measurable business value. Intake management and orchestration is changing back office services as we’ve come to know them. With Ivalua, organizations will benefit from:
- Conversational AI Guidance Throughout the Process: An AI assistant guides employees every step of the way, helping them provide all the right information (e.g., extracting key details from documents), asking follow-up questions, and offering suggestions when they are stuck.
- Seamless Integration Across Systems: A robust event-based integration layer to coordinate flows across Ivalua and third-party applications, making sure everything works together smoothly.
- Actionable & Collaborative Tracking Interface: An easy-to-use dashboard allows teams to track the progress of requests, collaborate with stakeholders, and ensure everything is on the right path.
- Built-in Compliance: Intake flows designed to make process compliance effortless and aligned to existing policies, contracts, and spend strategies—helping organizations mitigate risks like tail and maverick spend.
- Flexible, Easy-to-Use Configuration: Ivalua’s no-code platform lets procurement teams set up and adjust intake forms and distributed orchestration workflows easily, without needing technical expertise.
- Data-Driven Insights: The solution’s centralized dashboard provides access to valuable analytics and KPI, facilitating informed decision-making and continuous process improvement.
What Makes our Intake Management Solution Stand Out from the Crowd?
By utilizing a user-friendly and conversational intake and triage system powered by generative AI, businesses can enhance their procurement workflows, making it easier for teams to manage requests and data entry. Ivalua’s single data model and no-code / low-code platform are essential for achieving seamless process and data orchestration, and much needed extensibility to address different intake types. Because Ivalua is regularly recognized by industry analysts as a leading solution in the source-to-pay (S2P) landscape, customers can gain convenient access to comprehensive capabilities to support procurement’s technology transformation. Ivalua’s extensibility along with a robust workflow engine and an add-on store, empowers users to shape the solution to meet the current and future needs of their process and organization, without extensive technical expertise. This do-it-yourself extensibility provides a future proof evolving needs while leveraging market-leading execution solutions in a single, convenient platform.
Conclusion
Ivalua’s Intake Management solution also provides the ability to incorporate best-of-breed (BoB) solutions into the procurement process, meaning that organizations are not confined to a rigid technology strategy. Ivalua’s flexibility allows for a streamlined tech stack that enhances security, reduces costs, and simplifies support. With a cohesive data model that spans the entire S2P process, built-in safeguards and tools are available to maintain data integrity, ensuring that procurement operations are both efficient and compliant. Overall, this comprehensive approach positions organizations for success in their procurement endeavors today, and into the future!
