3 Tips to grow your spend under management with Graphite

Increasing your spend under management is essential for any procurement team. When you have a higher percentage of transactions coming through your department, you can align closely with company goals– saving your business time and money. 

So how can you increase your spend under management? Efficiency is key. The rest of your business’s employees will either see your team as a help or a hindrance. With streamlined processes, your fellow employees will come to see your team as a facilitator rather than a bottleneck.

First, a few definitions:

Intake

Intake is the process of collecting and executing on new spend requests. This may be as complicated as requesting new vendors that will require a full-scale procurement process, or as straightforward as buying a laptop from a preferred vendor that you’ve worked with in the past.

Spend Under Management

Spend Under Management is a metric that represents the percentage of annual supplier spend that is managed by the procurement team. This metric is a common KPI for procurement teams that aim to grow their impact across the organization.

Keep reading to learn three ways that you can use Graphite to increase your spend under management and improve your team’s internal reputation.

1. Standardize your intake process

Intake is the process through which an employee at your business makes a purchase request– whether it be a physical product, software, or anything else deemed desirable or necessary for business. As your organization grows, intake is likely to become exponentially more complicated. With a standardized process, other teams at your organization will know what to expect and can act accordingly.

At too many companies, the intake process is slow and inefficient, causing purchase requests to take far longer than seems appropriate. When this kind of bottleneck occurs, a procurement team’s reputation suffers, and more employees will take purchasing power into their own hands without going through the procurement team first. 

But, while common, it doesn’t have to be that way. With Graphite, your procurement team is empowered to design your own guided intake process that fits your business and specific purchasing needs.

Graphite allows you to decide how your buying process will flow depending on variables such as spend tiers, purchase category, geography, and more. Employees throughout your business will then be empowered to make purchase requests (and even purchases from an approved vendor) for easier, everyday items without bogging down the valuable time of your procurement team.

2. Increase team efficiency

With employees empowered to quickly request lower tier purchases, your procurement team will have time to spare. 

You’ll be able to move much more quickly through the pile of more complicated requests that require more time and energy. No longer will these requests push over the smaller requests and create a bottleneck for your business. Instead, your team will be able to focus on what they do best– saving the business money on bigger deals.

With greater efficiency, you’ll be able to increase your team’s spend under management–  proving real value to the business.

3. Improve procurement’s internal reputation

If your procurement team is struggling to turn purchase requests around quickly, your internal reputation can suffer. Many people have come to see procurement as an annoyance, or another unnecessary step hindering their ability to do their jobs. 

But not your team. With the increased efficiency from Graphite’s Guided Intake software, your team will be perceived as less of a roadblock and more as a helpful tool. Employees will find the purchase request process not only seamless and swift, but also advantageous.

Individual employees will have to do much less research on their own before making a request, as Graphite allows them to see the options your team has already authorized. They’ll be able to rely on your research rather than performing their own, shortening their own purchase process significantly.

Soon, your team will be seen not as an annoying next step, but as a helpful facilitator in their pursuit to do their own jobs more efficiently.

So, what next?

Ready to take your procurement team to the next level and move from obstacle to facilitator? Request a Graphite demo by clicking the link below and learn how your business could increase your spend under management, improve your guided intake process, save your team time, and show your value to the business.