Effective eProcurement provides supplier integration and enablement

eProcurement is not just about making things easier internally, but also making the supplying process simple for your suppliers.

PROACTIS provides a number of elements within their eProcurement system to make working with suppliers a more collaborative approach.

Supplier Outreach and Engagement

The ability for suppliers to register on the cloud-based PROACTIS Supplier Portal makes things open and easy; buyer outreach programs need only direct potential suppliers to the portal as the first easy step.

For instance, this is the first step buyers generally take with their existing suppliers when they first deploy PROACTIS Supplier Portal.

Buyers have visibility of all registered suppliers. They can search by spend category, find and investigate potential future suppliers, and invite select suppliers to go through their qualification process and participate in their private marketplace.

Supplier On-Boarding

With PROACTIS, supplier on-boarding is quick, collaborative, and easy for both parties. Once a buyer tentatively approves a supplier, the supplier can add their own profile information, including contacts, capabilities, risk elimination etc. The buyer and supplier can then use the portal to exchange any documents involved in the buyer’s supplier qualification process.

PROACTIS provides a number of ways to automate creation and scoring of supplier questionnaires to streamline qualification.

Once the supplier is approved, the buyer can give the supplier further portal-based capabilities as described below.

Catalogue Management

Certain spend categories having the availability of catalogues can have a big impact on the success of an organisation’s

Spend Control efforts by making it easy for employees to find and buy what they need from within the approval controls and spend tracking framework of the P2P system.

PROACTIS provides several different capabilities to streamline management of catalogues:

• Hosted Catalogues on the supplier portal maintained directly by the supplier with a buyer-controlled update approval process
• External Catalogues accessed via a punch-out defined on the supplier portal that enable PROACTIS to access catalogue information already held on a supplier website. This same method can be used to access a specialised supplier network or eMarketplace a buyer may use
• Internal catalogues managed directly by the buyer within PROACTIS Purchase-to-Pay for certain supplier catalogues and “generic” items

Most suppliers can maintain their own catalogues using either the portal-hosted or external catalogue method, thus relieving the buyer’s procurement team from the burden of keeping them up to date internally.

The advanced multi-source search capability available within the PROACTIS P2P system accesses all catalogues (and other sources such as stores inventory) as part of a single query. This enables employees to easily find, compare, and select the best item for their need across all suppliers and sources.

Sourcing Document Exchange

In addition to supporting routine daily purchases, the PROACTIS approach to supplier integration and enablement also supports the sourcing process utilising the same cloud-based Supplier Portal platform.

PROACTIS sourcing capabilities go well beyond what is found in most supplier networks and eMarketplaces to support sourcing processes that are appropriate to all spend categories, including such things as high value capital equipment purchases, services contracts, and ongoing supply agreements. Capabilities include:

• Online buyer posting of electronic RFx documents for public or limited supplier visibility
• Supplier RFx response submission
• eAuctions