Content Management - TSM Spend Management Done Right

The difficulties of driving user behaviour

“It is so much more difficult to use our company system to order goods than it is to shop for personal items when online at home.”

When you start to hear these statements from your employees, you know you have a problem with your existing ordering system. True, it may do the job of capturing a commitment, of ensuring a purchase order is properly authorised and getting an order sent out to the supplier, but when the workforce can’t find what they are looking for, it diminishes the potential for realised savings and exposes your organisation to all the risks associated with maverick buying.

We have had countless conversations with employees who should be users of an existing purchasing system, most often within an ERP platform, but who don’t use it because it is seen as being too difficult to find what they want.

This is not the only problem managers of rudimentary PO systems have to come to terms with. They are also faced with the rather daunting challenge of ensuring the records of all suppliers, including latest prices and select items, are all current and up-to-date. When you consider that some suppliers can provide 1,000’s of items, this is no mean task.

Transforming your buying culture

In our experience, if you want the buying culture of your organisation to change, if you want people to change their behaviour, you have to provide them with the environment to change.

By deploying a Content Management solution in support of P2P we treat people to the same buying experience at work as they have become accustomed to when buying online at home. We make the right way to buy, the easiest way to buy.

The complexity of providing this experience to P2P users resides behind the scenes. Therefore, if you want to manage the nuances of differing supplier relationships, the simple ‘one-size-fits-all’ approach of rudimentary P2P systems simply won’t cut it. Fortunately, modern Content Management solutions from Touchstone can help, features include:

Catalogue Management – the provision of a central repository to store all the items of your approved suppliers, aligned with a powerful multi-source search engine pointing users to those approved suppliers at point of purchase ensures those who do not have ecommerce enabled websites are available for selection. The additional benefit of supplier self-service (where you enable suppliers to keep their own catalogues up-to-date) ensures prices are correct and removes the administrative burden from your team.
Punch-Out – Enables users of P2P to ‘punch-out’ to the ecommerce enabled websites of approved suppliers through P2P, select their items, and bring them back into P2P to go through the authorisation channel as usual.