The other verticals within the organization do not appreciate the business value created by the procurement team. Developing the financial culture for the procurement department is an effective collaboration between procurement and finance. For the long-term success of a business, it is essential to have a collaboration between finance and procurement to ensure that it’s achieving maximum ROI.
Recent research shows that procurement and finance departments often don’t have the right tools for seamless collaboration. That’s why it might seem like a no-brainer to have your finance and procurement departments collaborating. However, the relationship between these two departments is essential for process efficiency, strategic leadership, team structure, and knowing which technology to invest in.
The Role of the Procurement Department
The procurement department must ensure the success of the business, as well as a finance department, move from a back-office function to become a strategic partner of the business. The job description of finance and procurement assists with financial strategic management activities, including annual budget cash flow financial planning and financial reporting with these two departments.
Collaborative companies have better success in organizing and maintaining documents of finance and procurement. It also ensures our recording is compliant with corporate, client requirements, and audits.
Between these two departments, the role of finance in procurement has increased, leading to necessary collaboration. Because both departments lead to good savings informed insides better demand planning, decision making, less timely procedures and a good understanding of vendors landscape. The procurement department must work closely with the finance department to ensure that the company’s cash is used wisely. Perception gaps are those that occur between finance and purchasing departments, causing friction, a lack of coordination, and reluctance.
Procurement and Finance
Finance and procurement technologies give a crucial layer of visibility into anything from the specific status of real-time budgets, approval flows, and so on. This enables finance to ensure easily that they have received every possible discount and subsequently secure early discounts or on-time payments.
Why is it Necessary to Understand Procurement and Finance Work Well Together?
1. Finance and Procurement are Two Sides of the Same Coin
The finance supply chain is shown as the heartbeat of any business. Without it, businesses wouldn’t have enough cash flow to keep running. Likewise, businesses will have enough cash to pay for everything from supplies to employee salaries if the financial supply chain works well. The supply chain does not only rely on ideal spending operations. It also relies on proper supplier relationships between valid procurement choices and management.
As the government is a business entity, overall state procurement accounts for between 13 and 20 percent of GDP. Financial supply chain insurance that business thrives on finance and requirements must work hand in hand. Finance and procurement teams work together in a supportive manner to create forecasts and plan budgets.
Also, they work together to conduct financial analysis and reporting. Procurement is responsible for ensuring the items purchased have been paid and received by finance, and procurement sticks to those budgets. At the same time, finance is responsible for creating spend and revenue reports and selling the budgets.
The procurement department must develop financial expertise. Because establishing in-depth financial competence will result in favorable results, the procurement department should build its financial culture:
- More sophisticated economic analysis is carried out by enabling or optimizing the departments’ operations.
- Encouraging understanding and communication with the finance department.
- The procurement department should handle the strategic decision-making of the company.
- The company will be added by financial expertise to offer an innovative solution.
- During the company’s budgeting process, greater financial expertise increases the procurement department’s legitimacy.
- This will ultimately make it easier because the company will take a more tailored approach to management.
- Being able to process and collect a significant amount of data are the benefits of e-procurement.
- The analysis of results is as relevant as possible to make economic expertise essential.
2. Business Performance is Maximized Through Greater Collaboration Between Procurement and Finance
Both the department’s finance and procurement teams generate a wealth of optimized data and help them analyze historical data on the spent supplier patterns identified areas for improvement and innovations.
Tail-end purchase management, which accounts for 20% of a company’s spend but 80% of its suppliers, may benefit greatly from procurement and finance alignment. It improves the quality of service internally. In matters of business importance, the next area for improvement relates to increasing the collaboration between procurement and finance verticals. Through this, the procurement team becomes a strategic partner.
According to a study, the total return to stakeholders for businesses with top-quartile procurement skills was 42 percent greater than those for companies with lower part procurement competencies in the five years after the economic crisis.
A clear understanding of business objectives is imperative to the strategy of success. What the CEO enjoys is close to the power and influence of the CFO at the board level. CPOs create a positive impact across the company by taking necessary steps and leafing out of this.
3. Be Partners, Not Enemies: Finance and Procurement
Pastimes procurement specialists are highly motivated to reduce purchase cost and purchase cost variance no matter what. And consequently, supplies were often forced to maintain profit margins and quality, which is often suspect, and supplier reliability was questionable.
Now, supply chain thinking emphasizes cooperative and collaborative relations with suppliers in the proverbial scenario. Both parties are dedicated to providing better services and goods to the ultimate consumers and building a profitable environment for the long term.
But this idea is not practically simple to accomplish with all the suppliers that a typical manufacturer uses. Therefore, procurement specialists divide suppliers into subjects and set the necessary relations and controls accordingly:
- A relationship may exist for continuous services and goods available from a limited number of sources and more crucial to the production processes. This existence is in the form of blanket orders, buying, agreements, or contracts to ensure the availability of items and to look at the prices that might be quite favorable. It would be one time smaller quantity pricing.
- Supplier strategists get the full partnership treatment with long-term collaborations contracts and data sharing for better performance, product, and many more.
- From several sources, commodities are readily available and not a critical concern for either quality or importance to the company. The most competitive suppliers meet the industry expectations.
- A critical part of the product or high cost, leverage items are important, but they are just available from several suppliers. The competitive market can be exploited by procurement to get high quality and reliability at a competitive price.
According to the optimal framework, procurement should always be profit-oriented, geared to yield, foresee hazards well in advance, and be linked with the business’s strategic goals. In addition, however, procurement must improve its collaboration with other company areas, particularly finance, to achieve this. This one will open the path for the existing procedures to be streamlined and improved.
