4 steps to streamline your intake process.

Employees at your company gain access to your procurement team through a process called intake. Any purchase or onboarding requests should (ideally) be vetted and approved by procurement.

However, if a team’s intake process is long and inefficient, employees may find ways to work around procurement– increasing maverick spend and thereby hindering your team’s potential impact.

Streamlining your intake process can help to solve this problem. Keep reading to learn four steps your team can take to improve their intake process today.

1. Automate your purchase request flow.

Purchase requests can come from anyone at the company and comprise anything from laptops to photo editing software. Large-spend purchases will typically require direct involvement from the procurement team for risk assessment and spend approval.

However, not all purchases require such close and careful management. In fact, most small purchases could be completed quickly and easily with just a little bit of guidance.

The first step to improving your intake process is to automate your purchase requests. With a customizable intake system such as Graphite, you can easily design the process by which purchase requests are made. You can allow for small purchases to be made through approved vendors without any involvement from a procurement team member and large purchases to flag the need for a team member’s aid.

With that capability, your team will no longer waste time churning through small requests. Instead, their time will be freed to work closely on larger spend requests.

2. Centralize where your team can be contacted.

Without a clear place to make purchase requests, employees may not know where to go to get procurement help. This issue can also decrease your team’s impact, as confused employees take matters into their own hands.

By standardizing the process of working with your team, you make it easy for employees at your company to involve procurement earlier in the buying process, making your team a place where they go for help rather than another stop on the way.

By creating a single location for kicking off procurement requests, any prior confusion will be replaced with efficiency. A simple, easy-to-use intake flow for all employees ensures purchase requests become an easy task rather than a headache and time commitment– both for your team and other employees.

3. Move intake requests along more quickly.

One benefit to a smooth intake flow is that your team will be able to move requests along much more quickly. Automation leads to efficiency, and your team will soon find themselves with much more time to devote to bigger spend requests.

The procurement bottleneck is infamous. But, it doesn’t have to be that way. With a smooth and efficient intake process, soon enough employees won’t remember how they managed without you. 

Moving through a greater number of requests will allow you to better align your team with your company’s goals, save the business time and money, and become essential to your fellow employees.

4. Promoting preferred vendors.

Another way a guided intake process benefits both you and your fellow employees, is that it allows you to promote preferred vendors– saving you both time. 

Employees coming to you with a spend request don’t have the experience your procurement team has of knowing which vendors provide the best services for the best price, which vendors you have contracts with already, or vendors who will negotiate their prices down for you. So, they need your guidance to make the best purchase decision.

This can become very time consuming for you and your team, not to mention repetitive. If several different employees come to you with a purchase request for a new computer and you have to work with them each individually, that takes a lot more time than if you have a list of promoted vendors they can choose from and take care of the request without much guidance from you.