Cimmra Brings Order to the Chaotic Procurement World: Purchase Requests.

Posted by Fazal Sayyed

Inroduction

Procurement is a critical component of every firm. A buying mechanism must be in place to meet the needs of each department. After all, a workplace requires a plethora of supplies, including raw materials, stationery, and various devices

Most businesses do not enable workers to directly make purchase orders. This is where purchase requests come in. Companies need managers to submit requisitions before finishing an order to avoid exorbitant costs, miscommunication, and fraud.

What is a Purchase Requisition?

Employees can submit a purchase request for the needed products and services using a purchase requisition, which is an internal document. It includes information of the product, its amount, price, and department, as well as the requestor's name.

Steps involved in a purchase requisition

Although forms and approval procedures differ amongst companies, the general framework is often the same. The following details are frequently included in the request form:

Purchasing division,
The desired good's quantity and description,
the cost of each line item, and the overall cost.
All participants' signatures and remarks are included.

Typically, the workflow looks like this:

An employee asks for permission to purchase products and services.
A procurement manager may choose to review the request to pick out glaring mistakes.
A request may get feedback, approval, or sendback from one or more decision-makers and stakeholders. The direct line manager must at least provide their consent. The request frequently needs extra approval if the sum exceeds a specific dollar level.
To ensure that they are aware and can guarantee budget availability, the finance staff are informed through dashboard notifications and emails.
Sending the permission to the procurement team, who completes the purchase, completes the procedure.

Challenges with PR Management

1-Long approval process

When the process is manual, sign-offs ranging from purchase requisitions to invoices are inevitably slow. Every process that needs to be approved will take longer, which has the very unfortunate result of slowing down the procure-to-pay process.

2-Lack of transparency and visibility

PR raised manually are simply not scalable. No matter if the purchase request documentation is kept in hard copies, PDFs, or on a drive, you cannot easily access information when you need it. One of the major problem in the manual PR mangement is transparency between the requestor the approver.

3-Errors and duplication

Manual PR management runs the risk of making serious errors unintentionally. When transferring data from purchase orders and PR manually, errors seem to be unavoidable. Inaccuracy can put businesses at risk of noncompliance and even cause financial harm.

4-Higher cost

The cost of a manual purchase requisition process is higher than an automated one because more employees are required to manually oversee each stage of the cycle. Additionally, expenses for paper, ink, printers, and even filing space can add up if you rely on paperwork to keep things organised.

Cimmra for Automation of Purchase Requisitions

For the purchase requisition procedure to be genuinely successful, accuracy is required. With tens of suppliers and hundreds of thousands of requests each year, this might be challenging to do in a large firm. Workflow is too broken when it is dependent on paper work, spreadsheets, and emails. Using Cimmra to automate the purchase request process offers a number of advantages.

Rapid approval

Custom workflows for multiple departments can be set up on the Cimmra purchase requisition (PR) management. The approval process can also be tailored to different purchase amounts. Notifications will be put up on the dashboard and emails so that the individuals who are expected to approve requests are notified as soon as an employee submits one. In addition, instead of sending emails or signing tangible documents, the approval procedure will only take a few clicks. Employees can track the status of their purchase requisitions to improve transparency.

Cost reduction

Using Cimmra PR management may significantly save expenses. Automation can reduce the number of people needed in procurement and finance departments by eliminating paperwork. A good internal control system that stores and reviews every communication avoids needless spending.

Enhanced control and compliance

It is simpler to adhere to internal corporate regulations and any other applicable regulatory obligations with the Cimmra PR management. The software's workflow has been modified to fit the internal controls. Depending on the department, requests are automatically forwarded to the right people. The software's database also makes sure that evaluations may be carried out months down the line .

It avoids placing multiple orders

In large organisations, purchasing is typically handled by a complete team rather than a single individual. With the use of Cimmra PR management, the procurement division can keep track of what has been requested and prevent unintentionally placing several orders for the same item.

Helps prevent fraud

Employees can commit fraud by buying items for their own use or making plans with vendors to steal from the company when there are no clear-cut standards in place. This is stopped through purchase requisitions, which stop fraud in its tracks and make sure that employees don't place informal orders for items from suppliers directly.

Manual procure-to-pay (P2P) processes have no place in a fast-paced world and are not worth the trouble when you can upgrade to sophisticated AI-driven automated solutions.

Cimmra is a new generation of procurement software that leverages latest technology to create purchasing solution with predictive and prescriptive capabilities.