Procurement as a service has a huge market value of USD 5.78 billion in 2020 and is expected to grow at an 8.2 percent CAGR from 2021 to 2028. As businesses grapple with the pandemic’s impact, the world is rapidly shifting to alternative services that reduce supply risks, optimize cash flow and working capital, and maintain profitability. In this blog, we discuss how digitizing certain business operations can make an impact.
RPA & AI in Procurement Services
As uncertainty reigns supreme in this era, robotic process automation (RPA) and artificial intelligence (AI) will drive procurement market growth over the forecast period and beyond. Procurement as a function is constrained by time-consuming, error-prone manual operations that would be well-suited for bots powered by RPA. Moreover, the operational step currently has top process high-volume and high-transactional operations, which necessitates an investment of both time and money.
The desire to automate and eliminate all time-consuming procedures has always been prevalent in the procurement world. All forward-thinking procurement leaders are concerned about AI and intelligent automation serving as their ideal roadmap for transitioning from legacy operational methods to fully automated procurement processes.
Procurement Digitization Made Easier
By implementing RPA, procurement behemoths can boost productivity, reduce operational costs, and free up specialists to focus on higher-value tasks such as category administration and analysis. Also, when combined with IA (intelligent automation), procurement professionals can become better business partners by gaining access to more strategic data.
Using robotic process automation and artificial intelligence, both structured and unstructured data can be handled (i.e., gathered, extracted, and analyzed). Processes can speed up because requisitions can be automatically prepared and routed to approvers, purchasers, and suppliers.
The need for RPA grows even more as a result of issues such as information silos, insufficient data storage, or massive volumes of paper, which can make it difficult to follow purchase orders, monitor spend, detect fraudulent behaviour, and limit the ability to forecast future needs.
The answer is that RPA improves process visibility and allows for real-time information sharing.
How is RPA Helpful?
RPA is especially useful in procurement for jobs that are performed on a job-by-job basis. A list of application areas should be provided to back up the claim. In reality, any procurement procedure that is carried out recursively, using the same repeating procedures, can be automated.
Purchase Requests vs. Purchase Orders: Processing procurement requests and creating purchase orders by hand frequently results in delays and a low accuracy rating. Software robots streamline the process, allowing it to be completed in less time.
Supplier Relationship Management (SRM): The foundation of SRM is real-time communication and issue resolution. Furthermore, RPA enables effective email scanning, highlighting all escalations and interactions that require immediate attention.
Contract Management: RPA assists in the implementation of complex performance tracking mechanisms for contract usage in order to identify and collect all possible rebates, discounts, tiered pricing, penalties, and remuneration changes to SLA issues. Businesses can better manage supplier queries and disputes by using real-time tracking, or they can issue notifications for faster resolution.
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