IT teams and procurement departments have long sat apart in their approach to buying technology. While IT is focused on keeping organisations well equipped at all times, procurement is more concerned with ensuring the business buys from cost effective, authorised channels.
While both are looking to achieve the same thing, their contrasting motivations – speed and efficiency vs frugality and compliance – have been known to create friction.
Old world versus new world
IT teams are tasked with knowing exactly what their organisation needs, and they provide invaluable expertise when it comes to product specification. The job of checking whether a product supplier ticks all the boxes when it comes to price margins or reliability, however, falls to procurement. They assume responsibility for ensuring due diligence is carried out.
When those checks result in product acquisitions being delayed, it slows IT down and can cause resentment. But we shouldn’t see procurement as the source of frustration. The real problem is inefficiency in the purchasing process. Still today, I continue to see IT teams picking up the phone or sending emails to ascertain price and availability when buying tech. When that information has been acquired, purchase requests are then sent to procurement for approval.
This is a slow process, and it’s not uncommon for prices to have changed, or for products to no longer be in stock, once it’s complete. The IT market undergoes approximately 60,000 product price changes every single day, so even a short delay can create headaches. As a result of this inefficiency, it’s not unusual for tech buyers to “go rogue” and risk sidestepping their approval channels, just to get a product bought and in use – especially when it comes to smaller purchases of a lesser value.
Digital platforms are helping to remove those inefficiencies, however. They are helping both IT and procurement to achieve their goals, without them coming into conflict. Here are four ways it’s happening:
Greater efficiency
Digital platforms help to reduce the time it takes to make a purchase. Buyers can access live data about product, stock and price information. This not only increases transparency but, when suppliers are pre-approved, it allows IT buyers to instantly acquire the best equipment at the lowest prices more quickly.
Authorised suppliers
It is also possible to customise the products that IT buyers see on a digital platform. This can be achieved through catalogue management which refines what products users can browse and buy. This provides a safety net, giving procurement the confidence that all tech purchases are meeting their compliance criteria. This also relieves time pressures on procurement and finance teams, by allowing more of the wider workforce to browse products under set controls.
Buyer autonomy
In addition to customising what products IT teams can see, organisations can also give individual buyers different levels of authorisation. This means businesses can grant an IT buyer autonomy to self-serve and make purchases, up to a certain amount. At the same time, however, they can ensure the appropriate checks on those bigger, more complex purchases are still happening.
Spend analysis
When relying on traditional purchasing systems, which use spreadsheets to record spend, it’s not uncommon to miss crucial information. For example, people will enter a dash or dot instead of a serial number when they don’t have information to hand. When they buy through a digital procurement platform, however, the necessary data sets are always available.
This means it’s easier for procurement to track prices and compare costs year on year. Similarly, it’s easier for IT to analyse its own past spend. This provides them with vital intelligence when predicting future costs and pitching for additional budget.
IT and Procurement: Working together to benefit the business
For too long, IT and procurement teams have come into conflict simply as a result of doing their jobs. While their priorities may be different, their goal is the same. They want to do what is the best for their organisations.
In reality, it’s the cumbersome, old-style way of doing things that’s the problem. By embracing digital platforms, these inefficiencies can be removed, along with the associated frustrations. More than this, with increased transparency and protections in place, they both can spend less time on the basic task of acquiring equipment and more time on projects they believe can offer the most benefit to the business as a whole.
