The current climate of economic uncertainty and resulting budgetary constraints has highlighted the need for businesses to plan their procurement activity effectively. You need to produce sound business cases, prioritise projects based on value, complexity or criticality and ensure you have enough resource to deliver them. Taking control of your procurement planning is easy when you use procurement pipeline management.

Pipeline management involves conducting pre-procurement planning. It includes:

·       identifying which contracts need sourcing

·       prioritising projects based on company goals and objectives

·       approval process for business cases and projects

·       savings and benefits planning

·       defining outcomes of projects and their associated value expectations

·       resource scheduling for procurement and business departments

·       project planning and milestone identification

The benefits of pre-procurement pipeline management

Introduces process control mechanisms

Pipeline management introduces control mechanisms to ensure you have completed the resource forecasting needed for procurements. It also makes sure those who want to procure goods or services submit a business case which sets out the reasons for the request. You can then use the business case for procurement prioritisation and resource allocation purposes.

Aligns procurement with business goals and objectives

Your strategic objectives should drive your purchasing decisions. For example, if you’re providing low-cost services, you won’t want to purchase high-end products. The pipeline process will ensure only projects that meet your company’s goals and objectives receive approval and move forward.

Provides transparency of the pipeline

Pipeline management provides visibility for business departments on where their projects are in the procurement queue. They will be advised of the business priorities and where their procurement fits in with them. If a project is authorised, designated project approvers will receive alerts as the project moves through each stage of approval.

Defines project outcomes and value expected

Project outcomes will be defined using your strategic priorities, ensuring projects will deliver results that support your business objectives. Value expected can be harder to define, as it is not always a measurable financial gain, and can be environmental or social value. Your pipeline management system will ask a series of questions to help you identify the non-financial value expected. The answers will then generate measurements, for example, KPIs and service specifications, to be included in the related tender or contract.

Why use the Atamis procurement pipeline management solution?

Atamis’s procurement pipeline management is a simple to use, cloud-based solution. It ensures your procurement department runs efficiently and your approved procurement requests meet your strategic objectives.

Approvals: we build your corporate approval processes into the system, preventing any unauthorised procurement or projects.

Defines associated values: the system defines project outcomes and associated values - social and environmental as well as financial.

Forecast vs capacity: Atamis pipeline management generates automated resource forecasts which identify any resource issues. The forecast can drill down into different job types and departments.

Automatic alerts: the system highlights when resource capacity is exceeded.

Comprehensive support and training: support desk available to answer system queries and training options available to suit your business needs.