Welcome to the first instalment of our procurement marketplace blog series—a series that will teach your procurement team everything you need to know about procure-to-pay marketplaces and how you can empower your employees with access to a marketplace platform.
In this blog, get an overview of what a procurement marketplace is, how it can benefit procurement teams, and how this platform can remove mundane, tedious work from the purchasing process.
An Overview of Procurement Marketplaces
Traditional procurement methods, such as paper-based processes or siloed digital tools, are making way for more configurable, purpose-built procurement solutions—such as procurement marketplace platforms.
A procurement marketplace serves as the front door to procurement by connecting agency staff to your approved contracts and approved suppliers, creating a centralized location for key procurement activities. The purchasing process doesn’t have to be complicated or fall solely on procurement team members. With a procurement marketplace solution, there’s opportunity for procurement teams to equip agency staff to shop approved products and suppliers on one platform while ensuring on-contract spend and complete compliance.
Benefits of Purchasing Through a Procurement Marketplace
A digital marketplace benefits your procurement processes in many ways:
- Enablement for agency staff (shoppers): A marketplace-like solution allows your agency to compile suppliers & contracts into a single online platform for purchasers. This gives your agency a wider range of vetted suppliers for your staff to shop with more goods & services to choose from.
- Prevention of non-compliant purchases: With a proper procure-to-pay environment, the marketplace should only include suppliers and products that are pre-approved by your agency to promote on-contract spend. Agencies should be able to configure rules to factor in things like personal spending limits and track spend against a contract to ensure maximum compliance. As a final layer of protection, shopping carts can and should be reviewed and approved by key personnel.
- Maximized savings and best value purchases: By quickly comparing multiple suppliers at once and identifying the best prices, you’ll capture your savings before you spend the budget dollars, ensuring compliant, on-contract spend.
- Streamlined processes from requisition to payment: By providing your staff with a compliant, centralized marketplace within your procure-to-pay environment, your staff have the tools they need to be self-sufficient in many of their routine purchases. This simplifies everything from the purchase request, to generating a PO, to receiving the goods, reconciling the invoice, and processing the payment. Solutions like Euna Marketplace are powered by things like federated (multi-vendor) search, side-by-side comparisons, multi-vendor checkout, and AI-powered savings advisors that identifies price savings while allowing staff to shop and cut down on wasted time.
- Increased visibility and transparency: Most modern systems provide extensive reporting that can provide key insights into spend. With this information, procurement leaders can make data-informed decisions while monitoring vendor performance at scale. Equipped with these key insights, procurement teams can optimize their contracts and spend for maximum impact.
All these benefits should be on your radar as you’re starting to think about the how’s and why’s of digitizing the procure-to-pay process in your organization.
How Marketplace Solutions Enable Your Team to Be Strategic Drivers
When you implement purpose-built marketplace tech in your agency, you create a bridge between agency staff and your procurement team, streamlining the process of obtaining necessary resources while still committing to compliance and cost management.
Achieve Cost Savings without Sacrificing Time
Cost savings in procurement is notoriously time-consuming. Traditional approaches usually involved exhaustive searches across various supplier websites and manual price comparisons. But, with a procurement marketplace, maximizing savings is easy and allows the procurement team to secure and report on cost savings in a snap—giving all stakeholders the visibility they need into agency spending.
Marketplace technology is a great resource to prevent your procurement team from working unreasonable extra hours and spending time on work that can and should be completed at the click of a button.
Eliminate the Risks of Manual Contract Management
One common way agencies share contract information with staff is through email or shared spreadsheets. However, that can open you up to risks, including unintentional purchases outside of contract terms since staff may use bookmarks of once current but now expired documents. To avoid this, staff would need to manually check spreadsheets every time they buy something to make sure they’re using the right suppliers.
Marketplace solutions become the central repository for all contract details, automatically confirming every purchase sticks to contract terms, including spend against the contract. This minimizes the risk of purchasing errors, giving staff a user-friendly platform to confidently complete their buying activities in full compliance.
What Benefit Does Marketplace Technology Bring to Suppliers?
Leveraging the right technology in your organization isn’t just about internal efficiency; it’s about how you can take those efficiencies and funnel them into positive community impact—expanding that reach outside your organization.
Setting your vendors up for success through a marketplace solution is a key part of that. For example, Euna Procurement offers suppliers a free, integrated storefront to make it easy for them to sell their products or services. Unfortunately, other marketplaces fall short here and instead require suppliers to provide their own storefront—creating a large barrier to entry for Disadvantaged Business Enterprises (DBEs) who may not have the resources to create a storefront.
Take GBEX, a self-identified DBE that integrated Euna Procurement into its operations and saw order volumes triple.
“GBEX went from processing two to three million dollars in order volume with our previous system to over ten million with Euna Procurement’s marketplace solution.”
– Chris Ellington, President/CEO of GBEX
Discover how GBEX leverages Euna Procurement to not only boost its own business but also support government agencies playing a pivotal role in community development.
Streamline Purchasing in Your Agency with Euna Procurement
Euna Procurement offers a connected and efficient way for agencies to manage their procurement needs. From improving cost savings to better shopper experience to reducing non-compliant spend, organizations can optimize their procurement processes and focus on strategic, high-value activities.
Request a demo today to learn how you can implement a seamless, integrated marketplace platform for your agency.