Purchasing: the Whole Truth & Nothing But the Truth - Zupa

Keeping on top of purchasing and stock control can be a minefield. Particularly because multiple people within multiple departments can be responsible for ordering goods at any given point. Stock control itself has many layers of complexity and unless you have live visibility of exactly what items are available, as well as where and when, purchasing can soon spiral out of control. Whether the upshot of this leads to lack of stock, overspend or subsequent wastage, it’s not a pretty picture.

Managing purchasing within your business can also be time consuming from an admin perspective too. Ultimately this has a knock-on impact in terms of team productivity and if you’re using a manual system or process, you have the added likelihood of human error. Ideally, a good procurement system should keep you up to date with every order, but in real time as it happens. There is little point in discovering errors or issues when it is too late to do anything about it. By having up to date live information and clear visibility of stock, you can make more informed purchasing decisions to ensure you don’t get caught short.

Importantly, using an automated eProcurement will ensure that there is a single source of truth for every purchase made. This gives you clarity on your business assets and means you can stay up to date with every single order in real time. This in turn, will reduce the burden on admin and free up your staff’s time to focus on their core roles.

Building relationships with suppliers is also another important factor in the purchasing process. There is considerable strain and pressure within the supply chain at the moment and businesses are feeling the effects of this. As we head into another year of uncertainty, maintaining strong relationships has perhaps never been more important, and if those relationships are automated between your business, supplier and the trading location, even better.

Procurement is at the heart of Zupa, and our system is designed to have minimal interaction with managing purchasing details. Implementing a process that isn’t standard in your business can cause delays and headaches and ultimately, distorted data. Accurate, quality data is fundamental to achieving complete stock control, and this must be linked up to all purchasing and sales channels in order to achieve this. With many businesses struggling to stay on top of spend, this provides absolute control in terms of how and where you spend money while giving you immediate and actionable insights.

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