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New Features Tackle Top Procurement Priorities
Call them procurement's big three concerns: process inefficiencies that drain procurement professional's time, complex goods and services headaches, and maintaining strong supplier relationships. Improve these areas and you'll not only cut costs, you'll free staff to devote their expertise to more strategic tasks.
These areas are the cornerstone of the new capabilities in the recently shipped Oracle Advanced Procurement Release 12, an integrated suite of applications designed for the changing needs of today's procurement professionals.
Here's what some of these new features can mean to your bottom line.
A "Big Picture" View Creates New Efficiencies
The Professional Buyer's Work Center (PBWC), a new feature in Oracle Advanced Procurement 12, is a central management console that gives buyers a "big picture" view of key procurement functions. A few clicks around the slick web-based UI shows users all the information they need to prioritize the day's activities through consolidated alerts and to-do lists.
Procurement professionals can also use the PBWC to see the status of important orders, process requisitions, create and manage orders and agreements, and confirm service deliveries.
In addition, a new two-way Microsoft Word synchronization feature in Oracle Procurement Contracts means contracting professionals can now import as well as export contract changes as Word documents. "Offline changes are easily rejected or accepted for faster contract binding and improved long-term contract enforcement," says David Hope-Ross, senior director of procurement for Oracle. "Any modifications are easily identified as ‘nonstandard' and rules enforce policies for mandatory and protected clauses."
The latest release's auto-approval capability automatically approves minor purchase order revisions without requiring buyers to review them. If changes exceed a requester's, supplier's, or buyer's authority, embedded workflow rules send the purchase order through the designated approval process.
"By reducing the ‘noise' of trivial tasks, buyers will be able to focus on major exceptions and turn their attention to more strategic tasks," Hope-Ross explains.
Tame Complex Goods and Services
Many features in the latest release of Oracle Advanced Procurement help procurement professionals tame the challenges of complex categories. New features span the entire procurement process, from capturing the right specifications during requisitioning, to navigating complex approval paths, to contracting, financing, and payment.
New capabilities are especially helpful for procurement organizations that need to actively manage contract financing
Enhanced capabilities include tight integration between Oracle Advanced Procurement 12 and the Oracle Approvals Management engine, which enables organizations to simultaneously route requisitions to multiple approvers to speed the sign-off process.
When complex goods and services require elaborate contracts and extensive payment options, Oracle Advanced Procurement 12 offers new options for defining, tracking, and completing payments. For example, if suppliers require payment advances before delivering products or services, procurement professionals can use Oracle Advanced Procurement to define terms and verify payment requests against the preset limits in the contract. These advance payments are automatically liquidated or recouped from payment requests after the goods are delivered or services have been completed.
In addition, this release gives procurement staff detailed progress payment schedules as part of the contract. "The payment schedule can consist of multiple pay items that specify the work components, monetary amounts, and due dates for completion. This provides for maximum flexibility in defining complex payments based on progress or milestones," says Tom Anthony, senior director of product strategy for Oracle.
Drive Mutual Cost Reductions
Almost by definition, trying to cut costs by reducing the profit margins of suppliers is not a sustainable approach to achieving year-over-year savings. It also can be counterproductive. Instead of creating adversarial supplier relationships, savvy organizations today cultivate success by driving mutual cost reductions, expanding supply base management, and improving supplier performance for results that benefit everybody.
Release 12 of Oracle Advanced Procurement's Oracle iSupplier Portal helps achieve mutual cost reductions by streamlining the collaboration required for negotiating and executing complex services contracts with suppliers. Oracle iSupplier Portal's redesigned receipt pages provide detailed purchase order, shipment, and invoice status. The Receipt Details page includes on-time performance information so buyers can quickly identify which shipments are early, on time, or late. The Receipt Details page also tracks deliveries received against orders, as well as what's been returned and rejected.
Similarly, the redesigned Prospective Supplier Registration capabilities now let procurement professionals gather the information they need to prequalify suppliers. "Once supplier submissions are completed, Oracle iSupplier Portal can leverage the Oracle Approvals Management engine to drive approval workflows necessary to process registration requests," Hope-Ross says.
On the flip side, suppliers can now better understand their performance track record with integration between Oracle Advanced Procurement, Oracle Daily Business Intelligence, and Oracle iSupplier Portal. Buying organizations can "publish" a quantitative analysis of each supplier's performance and update it daily. Using the intuitive Web layout, suppliers can easily slice and dice the information to create a baseline for measuring future activities.
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