What can be automated in procurement

For companies who procure goods in large quantities frequently do many manual and repetitive tasks starting from inventory check to generate purchase order to quality check. For manufacturing units,the most time consuming and boring task is to order low-valued items such as printer paper.

RPA bots can handle all these mundane tasks and take rule based decision making to save procurement cost significantly. Bot can also act as an digital assistant to support purchasers to gather meaningful information on market, pricing, trend etc. For example, a purchaser may need to know pricing index, inflation rate etc. before purchasing a raw material Or the purchaser may need a report on purchase history of a particular product.

80/20 rules for procurement

How to automate of ordering Low-valued items

It is true that 80% of efforts of the procurement team goes in ordering 20% items which are low-valued. Most of the time, procurement follows some business rules in choosing the right vendor and placing the orders.

A bot or a Digital Purchaser (DP) can monitor inventory or a requisition email/request from workers for low-valued items and follow business rules to select a vendor and send them the PO. A RPA bot can easily be integrated with any ERP system for maintaining records. A bot can automate every steps in the procurement process that are done by human currently unless it is super complex decision making.