Procurement

  • 6 min read

5 Best Practices to Improve Your SaaS Procurement Process

Rohit Rao

9th January, 2023

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The initial stress of enhancing your procurement process can be high, but it doesn't have to be complicated. In this article, you'll learn about SaaS procurement and its impact. You'll also learn about the best practices to create an effective procurement process!

A business needs to purchase several goods and services from different suppliers to enhance profitability; it is imperative to keep costs low, including the procurement cost. An organization's tactical and strategic goals are achieved with the help of a proper procurement process. And to make that possible, improvements must be made from time to time after evaluating the efficacy of current processes.

But first, let's understand what SaaS procurement is and why you need it. 

What is SaaS Procurement?

SaaS procurement is a process that allows you to choose the right SaaS tools and vendors for your organization, assess their compliance and security standards and implement them properly.

You'll need in-depth knowledge of each vendor's product offerings and an understanding of their security protocols to determine which products will work best for your company.

So, what does SaaS procurement mean for you? First, it means that you have to be aware of a lot of things—like how much time it will take to get the software up and running, what kind of support you'll get from the vendor, whether or not their security practices are up to par with industry standards, and so on.

This is where Zluri comes in. Zluri is a SaaS management platform that can help you automate your SaaS procurement and make informed purchase decisions. It does all the work for you in one easy step: Zluri chooses the right software for you based on your needs, assesses its compliance, implements it correctly, ensures that it's secure, and provides ongoing support so your team can use it seamlessly as time goes by. 

A good procurement process can help you save money, but it's also important to remember that improvements will be made from time to time as new methods are discovered and old ones are discarded. So if you're going through the process of improving your procurement system, focus on making improvements where they will have the most impact. 

Speaking of impact, it can be challenging. Regarding SaaS procurement, you must overcome specific challenges and avoid certain traps, similar to any established procedure. For instance, refusing to compare prices or demanding a pre-purchase test shouldn't be ignored; demos are always nice. On the other hand, ignoring the ROI or assuming scalability without evidence can prove to be brainless in the world of trial and error. Well, there are ways you can improve the procurement process and avoid any blunders during the SaaS buying process.

5 Best Practices for Effective Procurement

A company's ability to create an efficient process is directly tied to its ability to create a culture that values efficiency and quality. By developing and implementing organizational best practices, growth-minded companies can help avoid many of the obstacles to revenue creation. 

Outline objectives for establishing improvement

How can a company improve its procurement practices? Well, the first step is to identify your goals.  

It's easy to feel overwhelmed by the sheer volume of tasks and responsibilities that come with running a business. The first step in improving your business is identifying your goals. It can be easy to get overwhelmed when tackling different things simultaneously. That's why outlining desired first-phase objectives for the business can help highlight best practices to prioritize. Deciding where your business should go next will allow stakeholders like employees or customers to make informed decisions about their role in driving change.

Once you have those priorities, focus on other aspects of your business. Document expectations for procurement best practices in a well-designed document (and ensure everyone reads it). This will help ensure that everyone knows what's expected from them and their suppliers; if they need to know what they're supposed to do, how can they do it well? 

Implement these new practices with proper education and feedback cycles so everyone stays on top of things. 

Centralize processes & create standard procurement policies

Gather your information like a farmer gathers his crops. Likewise, to grow your business, you need an effective information-gathering strategy. Collecting your data in one place is necessary to keep everything organized, but it is also vitally important for efficiency and transparency. 

The best way is to centralize information about vendors, accounts payable processes, inventory records, and so on into a single location. This will facilitate the gathering, storing, updating, and retrieval of data as well as speed up decision-making.

The procurement policy needs to be standardized as the following step. When a procurement process is in place, buying materials for your company is made simple. Rather than tailoring each process based on its own features, it is preferable to adhere to a set of guidelines designed to conduct the acquisition. This standardization will bring consistency, as everyone on your team will adhere to the same guidelines.

Strategic Sourcing

It's no secret that sourcing is complex. With a tight budget, it's tempting to skip the strategic sourcing process and go for the cheapest option. But before you do that, think about how your supply chain works. When you're trying to minimize cost, what does that mean? Does it mean lowering the quality of your products? If so, you're probably going to end up with many unhappy customers and a bad reputation—which could hurt your bottom line even more than paying more for better quality.

So instead of cutting corners on your suppliers or suppliers' processes, try looking at other ways to improve your supply chain resiliency. For example, strategic sourcing techniques such as preferred vendor lists, competitive bid processes, and sustainable procurement practices have the dual benefit of reducing bottom-line costs while improving your supply chain resiliency. Strategic sourcing is also vital to risk management and reducing potential costs from third-party liability in the procurement process.

Select the right tools for your Procurement Process

The procurement process is a big deal. The procurement team handles all the messy details associated with getting supplies and services into your organization, like procurement orders, supplier details, budget management, and purchases. If a similar case exists in your organization, you need more tools to ensure this part of the process runs smoothly. Therefore, it's crucial to assess and implement the appropriate procurement system. 

After identifying the bottlenecks in your process and the areas that require automation, it's time to start strategic sourcing that chooses tools that best assist in completing tasks. For instance, your procurement team would know how to seek and showcase those exact features if you require a SaaS management solution to expedite how you manage license renewals and minimize expenses. You might even seek machine learning capabilities to advance your automated procedures.

Software applications are simple. Managing them should be simple, too. Zluri offers an AI-driven SaaS platform that helps automate processes and reduce manual work. It provides all the necessary data on one dashboard to see exactly what's happening with your organization's software applications and their performance. 

And what's more? Zluri helps in cost reduction. Zluri makes identifying unused applications and tools easier, ‌ reducing SaaS spending, which the procurement team can invest in other business areas.

Analyze procurement metrics

What's the best indicator of future potential? The past performance. 

Many people need to realize the importance of data analytics for procurement. It's true; you can't measure what you don't have. But by establishing KPIs and regularly adjusting procurement strategy to meet them, procurement professionals can drive value creation within the organization.

Data analytics is an integral part of your role as a procurement professional because it gives you a way to track progress toward goals and identify areas where you could improve. By using data analytics tools such as Trello or Slack, you'll be able to track how many proposals are being generated each month, which ones generate the most interest from clients, etc. 

Data analytics also gives you a way to measure how well your team is performing in terms of accuracy and response time—if something needs immediate attention. Still, it takes too long for someone else on your team to respond because they're buried in workload from other projects (or worse, they just aren't paying attention), then that's a problem!

How Zluri brings efficiency to procurement?

It's easy to see why procurement is such a crucial function of any business—you spend money on everything from office supplies to machinery. And since it's one of the most strategic functions of a business, you must understand how best to manage your procurement process. And Zluri helps you do the same. It's the most effective solution that helps procurement teams make the selection process hassle-free with formulated best practices. 

Zluri's AI-driven SaaS management software can intuitively comprehend your SaaS ecosystem. It assists in understanding the SaaS landscape and further helps negotiate for the appropriate tools. Zluri ain't just an outsource; consider it an extension of your procurement team. All processes with Zluri are transparent, and there is trust between both parties. In addition, Zluri communicates with a vendor on the company's behalf, giving the company more leverage for negotiations. 

Zluri knows the SaaS marketplace like no other and can help you get the best SaaS stack for your business within your budget. Zluri helps you save by planning your SaaS buying. The renewal window period has an added advantage, with savings of up to 50% on subscriptions and zeroes upfront cost. Not just that, within 12 to 18 months of engagement with Zluri, you also get set in-order governance around all contracts and payments.

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About the author

Rohit Rao

Rohit works in the Community and Marketing Team of Zluri and is a strong advocate of community led growth.