How RPA Drives Procurement and Purchase

Procurement departments for businesses across many industries are responsible for various S2P (source-to-pay) processes. Resultantly, the department's efficiency is critical to a business's ability to produce and operate, yet the department is often weighed down by manual labor such as data entry and management, preventing the department from engaging in more value-adding activities such as collaborating and innovating with suppliers.

RPA (robotic process automation), software that can emulate human operations on a PC, can be vastly useful in automating repetitive tasks in the S2P process. However, according to Gartner, only 8% of procurement teams use RPA, showing how procurement teams are only in the early stages of understanding RPA. Therefore, teams that choose to invest in automation will gain a competitive edge in terms of efficiency, accuracy, and cost-effectiveness. Here at Laiye, we offer Laiye UiBot, an RPA+AI product that can drive procurement and purchase at your company.

Have you experienced these problems in your Procurement Department?

The entire S2P process includes discovering, negotiating, and contracting suppliers, purchasing supplies, managing spend and performance, and more. In each of these processes, there is tedious work that needs to be done, such as:

1, Supplier onboarding. Whenever a company works with a new supplier, the procurement team has to collect vendor information, perform background and compliance checks, integrate them into the system platform, and more. These low-value tasks are repetitive and do not warrant the amount of time they require.

2, Managing contracts. Manually reviewing contracts received across different platforms such as emails or paper files, and checking for abnormal terms and conditions, is a hassle that demands meticulous effort and a lot of time.

3, SRM (Supplier Relationship Management). To foster mutually beneficial relationships between the supplier and the company, procurement teams need to segment suppliers, develop a risk management plan, and build scorecards to track performance. However, SRM requires communication monitoring and extensive data collection, analysis, and compilation, which is tedious and error-prone.

4, Managing categories. Manually categorizing transactions is a slow and tedious process, and yet is necessary to keep information organized.

5, Reconciliation and compliance. To make sure terms are met, invoices need to be compared to present conditions in the contract before any payment can be made for purchase. Any missing or incomplete information on the invoice also must be noted. Not only is this an inefficient process: some errors also slip by human detection and result in incurred costs.

6, Managing procurement performance and MDM (master data management). Extracting, processing and reporting data is an important yet extremely inefficient manual process, and so is keeping records of all suppliers' information in a centralized manner. Inaccuracies may easily arise due to human error.

How can Laiye help?

Laiye UiBot is an RPA+AI product that can work 24/7 all year round with near-perfect accuracy rates. Unaffected by fatigue, stress, emotions, or other external factors, Laiye UiBot can work at speeds much higher than a human, resulting in significantly higher efficiency and accuracy at much lower costs.

RPA is equipped to tackle the unique tasks procurement poses. In terms of supplier onboarding, bots can easily extract information about vendors from various structured or unstructured data and fill in forms to expedite the onboarding process. The bots can also perform compliance checks and automatically send messages requesting more information should anything be missing. Finally, they can also input the supplier into the business's system platform, greatly streamlining the process.

In terms of managing contracts and reconciliation/compliance procedures, the bots can scan paper documents using OCR (optical character recognition) and process them digitally. The bots can then extract information from the contracts and determine if there are any nonstandard conditions, which the bot can automatically report for further human review. Similarly, invoices can be compared against contracts for reconciliation and compliance purposes, helping reduce costs due to reconciliation errors.

RPA can be immensely useful in SRM and category management as well. RPA bots can facilitate scorecard generation by extracting and compiling relevant data, sifting through digital correspondence, and so on. Bots can also handle suppliers' segmentation and category management as well as to conduct more frequent contract renewals to aid risk management.

Lastly, RPA is well suited for procurement performance and MDM. Compatible with various computer applications and capable of real-time auditing, Laiye UiBot can help sort, organize, and compile data and generate performance reports. It can make sure the master data is consistent and updated accurately, ensuring that the company is up to date.

Get started on your Laiye UiBot journey today

With the help of our professional team, you can learn how to build your robots in just one or two hours. Let the robots handle the manual tasks and drive procurement and purchase at your business starting today.

About Laiye

Laiye, founded in 2015 by Ivy League Ph.D. graduates, is committed to being a leading Smart Robot platform with global influence in the era of human-robot collaboration.

Our portfolio of high-quality, secure products and services covers RPA+AI Solution, including Laiye UiBot (An RPA product), Wulai (An enterprise chatbot platform), and Xiaolai (A companion robot). Join us on LinkedIn, follow us on Facebook, or visit us at laiye.com/en.