What is Procurement Automation?

Procurement automation is the technology that allows procurement teams to digitize, streamline, automate and measure procurement policies, documents and frameworks..

Why is Procurement Automation Important?

Procurement processes have been growing in complexity over the years and now rely on a myriad of policy documents, controls and people to ensure that they are properly interpreted and followed. To manage this, procurement professionals use technology that is often legacy, rigid and not interoperable. This results in multiple disjointed systems that cover at best 60-70% of the work that needs to be done while also being inflexible to adapt to any change in requirements as they arise from the business. To combat this challenge, procurement teams are forced to plug the gaps using DIY spreadsheet-based solutions and manage processes and workflow in email.

This method of working for procurement teams results in the following challenges:

• Difficulty in having organization-wide visibility and centrally tracking and managing procurement activities.
• Risk of non-compliance, incorrect decisions and loss of information.
• Inefficient use of time in administering policies and compliance rather than focusing on getting the best commercial and strategic outcomes for the organization.
• Confusion from the business around where and how to apply procurement policies.

Use Cases for Procurement Automation

Procurement automation empowers teams to digitize and automate many of the manual aspects of procurement processes, for both the procurement function as well as the business undertaking a procurement activity.

At Checkbox, we’ve helped companies operationalize their procurement frameworks and policies on a single, intuitive system that is able to cover and end to end journey including use cases of:

1. Procurement frameworks
   Turn complex paper-based procurement policies into intuitive and efficient digital user journeys, customized to your needs

2. Vendor agreement generator
   Fast track procurements by creating self-service, automated agreements that are ready to go

3. Vendor risk assessments
   Decrease time on evaluating vendors and reduce overall internal effort through automating your vendor risk assessment

Benefits of Procurement Automation

Whilst there are procurement technologies that help procurement teams manage a big part of their work, procurement automation enables many of the capability gaps of these legacy systems to be rapidly covered.

Here are just some of the benefits of procurement automation:

• Give time back to procurement teams – refocus the procurement team on high impact, commercial and strategic work by creating automation and self-service journeys for the low complexity tasks.
• Faster turnaround time – remove bottlenecks for the business by improving accessibility to services through self-service whilst shortening the queue for high complexity procurement requests.
• Higher compliance – improve accuracy and adoption of policies and processes due to the codification of controls, checks and audit trails.
• Standardization – create operational excellence and consistency of service delivery.
• Enhanced visibility – gain centralised management and tracking of processes across the organisation to enable proper risk management and timely decision-making.

Checkbox as a Procurement Automation platform

The Checkbox automation platform empowers procurement teams to build intuitive, end to end digital processes that can be deployed across the organisation, using drag and drop. Trusted by the best brands globally across procurement teams of all sizes, Checkbox has been a critical piece in their transformation journey, providing not only the best in breed automation technology but the expertise to ensure success.

Checkbox is known for being the easiest to use, yet powerful automation platform available for procurement teams. Combined with our deep expertise in automation and transformation, we are excited to demonstrate to you why the best chooses Checkbox and why they always succeed with us.