In the recent times, supply chain managers have developed strategic sourcing agreements that allow moving production closer to the market. Purchasing in the recent times has shifted from simply placing purchase orders, to providing strategic management of organization’s assets and profitability. In the last decade, implementing effective procurement strategies has helped organizations account for approximately 10% improvement in the material costs and 40% improvement in the labor costs.
Tools to streamline procurement lifecycle
Integrated costing, purchase order and invoicing processes reduce the risk of supply chain disruption, and enables both buyers and suppliers to optimize their working capital through streamlining their business operations.
Learn how the GRID helps manage different components of procurement:
Order Management
Brands have the opportunity to escape away from manual data entry in ERPs or accounting systems for the financial reconciliation process. The productized integrations with ERP and EDI systems helps in centralize purchase order information. The purchase orders be shared seamlessly with suppliers and logistics partners facilitating the PO acknowledgement process. Purchase order lifecycle can be tracked and managed through inception to completion.
Costing
Implementing the costing module of the GRID within the supply chain operations, centralizes information, and allows organizations to manage vendor costs across styles within supply chain. The system helps in gathering and managing cost information across multiple product categories, providing organizations the ability to analyze historical costs across the supplier network. This centralization allows a more organized process to forecast and manage costs.
• Configurable Cost forms
Brands can create configurable costing templates for retrieving costs across styles from one or many vendors. Digitizing the end-to-end costing capability helps brands to reduce overheads and attain consistency across planning and budgeting phase of the production lifecycle.
• Calculate Margins and Sales Price
Brands have the ability to set thresholds for vendor costs based on identified sales price, margins and invoice deductions, providing higher efficiency rates across the costing and bidding process.
• Costing and PO Validation
Embedded costing and PO management in the singular platform helps brands to automate purchase order transmissions based on identified costs across styles. The PO exception rate is exponentially reduced, and vendor relationships are strengthened.
• Financial management
Integrating finance management into one platform on the GRID, leads to real time reporting visibility, simplifies the auditing process and reduces overhead costs for PNL processes.
Invoicing
Digitizing the invoicing process helps in effective resource scheduling, and reducing the associated costs of payment processing. Organizations can create invoice templates within the GRID to generate invoices and notify customers and vendors about the new invoice. Invoicing details can further be pushed to the accounting software facilitating reconciliation and payments. The painstaking process of audit season is simplified with the digital repository, reducing error and disputes.
GRID differentiators:
Exception Management
GRID team understands the challenges brands face when it comes to managing exceptions around POs, cost forms and invoicing. The GRID allows brands to track and manage any proposed changes at both the item level and global levels across POs, costing and invoicing, eliminating exceptions with accounts payable. Efficient exception management works in tandem with integrated accounts payable systems, providing brands an opportunity to save money, time, and increase the strength of partnership across their supplier network.
Communication and Collaboration
About 49% of brands claim that exception across procurement processes is a result of lost communication across email threads. The line level and global communication capabilities across purchase orders, costing and invoicing allows Production Managers to drive alignment across both suppliers and customers. The rate of exceptions decreases exponentially with centralized communication, allowing brands to mitigate risks of delayed delivery and further minimize operating costs.
File Management
The file management capabilities across purchase orders, costing and invoicing provides brands an opportunity to share packaging grids, labels, and ASNs with suppliers within the platform. Supplier relationships are integral, and digital asset management helps in eliminating the cost of inappropriate documentation. The file management capability further reduces workflows redundancies, helping brands to maintain consistency and compliance across the production lifecycle.
Vendor Rating and Compliance
The GRID maintains supplier score cards, facilitating the tracking of key performance parameters that help brands in strengthening their supplier network. Supplier score cards are updated in real time following the purchase order processing, providing the opportunity to track performance across quality, costs, timeliness, and compliance. Improved supplier performance exponentially increases reliability across the supply chain. GRID customers report cost and time savings, better management of unexpected expenses, a better understanding of vendor expectations, improved inventory management, and enhanced legal protection due to increased data and documentation.
Integrations
The GRID supports an open API structure to build custom connectors where data can be pushed to and pulled from third party systems. The productized connectors with applications like QuickBooks, NetSuite, DI Central, Amazon vendor and seller central, help in streamlining the procurement lifecycle.
Ketan is Director of Product with years of experience working with dynamic SaaS environments. He enjoys being at the intersection of business operations and technology – developing and deploying solutions that inspire smart growth strategies.
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