Between RPA and Procurement Operations

As companies navigate digital transformation initiatives and an increasingly competitive economic environment, automation is essential. Indeed, the cost saving generated from the sourcing activities is stretching to the bottle neck in the most mature procurement organizations. A lot of procurement leaders are looking for additional saving on the processing cost internally. This leads the great topic on the digital automation that drives the reducing working capitals by the technologies. RPA (Robotic Processing Automation) is one of many options on the table. RPA is one of mature technologies that already widely used in the industries. You will find tons of material online to detail on the benefits and architecture. I am focusing on how the RPA could possibly help with procurement process.

With my experience, I worked with Blue prism and Automation Anywhere on the procurement automation. Nevertheless, there are many great suppliers in the market. (See the figure Source from Gartner 2020) Usually, it is easy for you to the supplier that already has business relationships with your company. The procurement team will only pay for the cost for one time development and bot subscription licenses.

Where are the potential RPA opportunities in the procurement processes?

Strategic sourcing and category management

During the sourcing process, the RPA can be deployed for category spend forecasting and analytics and RFx process on sourcing templates. Compliance reporting and saving tracking are also great candidates for the RPA as well in the category management process. Spend and market analysis, auction services for low value bids and spot buy are also can be leveraged with RPA.

Procure to settle process

This process has great amount of transactional tactic task but requires significant resources to manage in the old fashion. It makes the RPA to be shining to drive the process cost down.

Procure

The potential RPA opportunities are in creating and maintaining catalog items, reviewing and approve lower dollar/risk requisitions, maintaining workflows and vendor master data maintenance. Assisted buy is another area for RPA which helps creating the requisition triggered by other workflow. PO management which including following up and reporting on the POs for the dashboard.

Supplier chain

The RPA can be used for managing GR, ASN and replenishment ordering process.

Settlement operation

The opportunity for settlement operation is mostly for AP area, which are entering invoices from the emails, recording T&E transactions, payment processing, vendor inquiries and monthly reporting.

I am not able to list all possible opportunities with my limited knowledge and diversity of procurement organizations. By saying that, the below checklist is for you to identify the opportunities during the process at this starting point.