Visibility and cost are the two biggest challenges facing procurement and finance departments both in terms of process and price paid.

As a significant strategic overhead, procurement impacts on cash flow, operational efficiency and time. It has now come under greater scrutiny and decision makers are calling for more savings and greater value from reduced budgets than ever.

Standard Supply Chain diagram

This throws up the considerable challenges of:

• Optimising procurement or buying teams to buy better, quicker
• Accountability
• Centralising often disparate manual processes and source, supplier and financial data dispersed across multiple systems, departments, locations

At the core of these issues is an often, unstructured procurement processes that dictates:

• Buyers struggle to secure best value on purchases or engage better suppliers simply
• Enterprises lack visibility of the procurement process and spend analysis
• Accounting functions waste time managing supplier and buyer queries, so cost per transaction is high and actual productivity is low
• Purchasing occurs without control or budget approval and often with unapproved suppliers
• Invoices arrive without approval or spend visibility, taking procurement into overspend
• Duplicated buying wastes time and money
• Cost centers do not exist, so there is low accountability
• Buying-to-requisition takes a long time through manual paper based processes
• Mavericks thrive with their own processes
• Critical purchases are missed or delayed
• Little planning goes into buying and out-of-stock scenarios impact upon business operations

The CIPS accredited technology behind the Mercato Procurement proposition, drives a competitive marketplace through a fully automated process of Data Management to deliver a 'many-to-many' trading environment within world-beating online procurement and P2P tools.

Fundamentally, the solution devolves procurement to the desktop through a browser-based mechanic whilst retaining full management control of spend.

Mercato procurement and supply chain rationalisation

Uniquely, Mercato has automated the process of sourcing and cleansing raw 'dirty' supplier data, product/service details, price and stock using a powerful process of:

• Fetching and receiving supplier data feeds
• Filtering them through a data conversion module that converts myriad formats into a 'clean' standard
• Checking product data, assigning product codes and filtering new products for preparation
• Comparing product data, price and stock before prioritising lowest price and stock availability
• Catalogue structuring and population having verified descriptions and formatted to a uniform style

This proprietary hosted Catalogue approach gives supplier data integrity and saves customer expense and maintenance often associated with traditional error-prone 'punch-out' catalogues. This also makes Mercato procurement scaleable and inclusive of engagement with large and small suppliers alike and facilitates greater accuracy of catalogues as they are all managed in one location.

This automated process achieves 100% daily populated accuracy processing over 500,000 line items to publish over 150,000 products from more than 2,500 suppliers in arguably the most volatile world market of IT.

Public Sector Procurement Login
Warburtons Procurement Portal

A web-based Private Procurement Hub then empowers buyers to search by any dimension, using parametric facilities – by brand, manufacturer, supplier, product code, category and so on. Ultimately, individual product searches reward buyers with the lowest priced in-stock product supplier highlighted at the top with optional margin.

The transparency of the process drives collaboration with suppliers to be as competitive on a day-to-day basis as possible in order to win the business.

The Hub also indicates any special discounts, bundles or deals allied to searches and specific to niche end user audiences – it automatically acknowledges buyer profiles at point of log-in.

This role enhancing automated comparison alone has been proven to save a working week in procurement time otherwise spent manually calling and comparing suppliers and products. And in excess of 25% on budgets dependent on marketplace and existing processes.

The highly granular levels of product detail – photo, dimensions, capability, function - that this automated workflow offers also drives more informed buying decisions as requirements can be more accurately matched to products on offer.

Other features built into the Mercato Procurement tool:

• Intuitive browser based user interface
• Order authorization mechanism
• Personalisation at company, branch, department and individual level
• Buyer order pads, where the first page after log-in lists the users regular purchase items already populated with data
• Multiple shipping addresses enabling centralized procurement without the need for centralized distribution
• Budgetary reporting tools allowing central authority to pass ordering to other areas of the business and still maintain control
• Role based log-in matched to functionality to unlock centralized reporting, tracking, forecasting
• Seamless integration with ERP systems and other tools within the Mercato Application Suite
• Quick ROI delivered from SaaS model

To close the P2P loop, Mercato provides:

• Rapid Purchase Requisition – Created by a simple point and click operation, pre-approved users can quickly create internal purchase requisitions for selected products. The tool controls this centrally according to the level of purchasing authority attributed to the user – division, department, ceiling value, type of product. If 'eye approval' is required deadlines can be set and request is past to authoriser. Stakeholders have total visibility of the requesition's progress
• Efficient Purchase Processing – On requisition approval, a Purchase Order is automatically generated and delivered to the supplier, internal stakeholders and central procurement via secure internet.
• Desk level order-tracking – At point of order, delivery instructions can be entered down to desk level to ensure products don't go astray within a transparent process.
• Smooth handling of Goods Received – Once delivered the tool automatically updates the order and completes an invoice match to ensures only goods ordered and received are paid for.
• Dynamic eSupport – A facility that enables users to communicate dynamically with suppliers via integrated email functionality. It also provides exchange of product delivery, specification, support and any negotiation within a fully controlled and audited manner.
• Role-appointed management reporting - For improved compliance, accountability and better procurement outcomes, users can drill down to granular levels of process, budget, spend and forecast trends.

Mercato Procurement empowers procurement and finance professionals to lead business transformation by:

• Optimising buying capability to secure validated best value on every purchase fast
• Streamlining day-to-day purchasing processes and empowering end users to buy quicker within a controlled environment, so reducing procurement overhead and cost of doing business
• Driving enterprise wide compliance with tools that make the task of buying easy
• Condensing time spent on order processing and admin so reducing cost of transaction
• Increasing visibility and improving budget control with automated approvals, ironing out maverick spend and cementing spend management
• Automating supplier 'on-boarding' to maximise spend under management

As a market-leading subscription based SaaS solution that integrates and extends common ERP systems, the Mercato Application suite is modular and tools can be bolted on to meet specific demands.

This overall end-to-end solution is hosted by Mercato and can integrate into existing FMS and back office systems if required.

The solution can be 'live' rapidly without hardware or software installation costs and there are no maintenance costs.

The solution is highly intuitive but if needed, Mercato can offer implementation assistance and training to ensure swift deployment, company-wide adoption, and quick ROI.