Automated order processing: Boost accuracy and efficiency

An efficient order processing workflow is essential for smooth operations. Teams still using manual order management processes often face more setbacks, errors, and frustration in acquiring goods and services. In addition to these challenges, teams must balance compliance, speed, and accuracy.

Procurement technology like automated order processing can support your team as they strive for operational efficiency throughout the standard parts of the purchase order (PO) lifecycle. Implementing automated order processing helps you reduce overall risk, increase efficiency, and lay the groundwork for organizational scalability.

Key challenges and how automation solves them

The average procurement team oversees numerous moving parts, like ensuring order accuracy, correcting invoice issues, inputting order data, and maintaining internal purchase compliance. While your team focuses on managing these priorities, they also work to ensure stakeholders across your organization can access the goods and services they need to support their job responsibilities.

Coordinating all these factors is challenging, and manual workflows can amplify the difficulty throughout your entire order fulfillment process. But modern procurement teams can leverage automation technology to address these issues and achieve their goals.

Why manual order handling doesn’t scale

Manual processes limit the speed at which your team can create, approve, and process orders. If they have to handle large order volumes, there is an increased risk of errors that can impact operations downstream and ultimately harm your bottom line. 

Teams that use manual workflows have likely encountered one or more of these challenges:

• Accuracy and compliance errors: Manual data entry and order management often leave more room for human error, which can result in internal compliance violations or inaccuracies.
• Order processing delays: Manual operations tend to have slower order processing times because they must be reviewed at every step of the process.
• Limited visibility across orders and spend: Processes that lack automated technology can lead to siloed data, which restricts network-wide visibility.
• Inefficiencies that reduce scalability: Since manual workflows can lead to errors, delays, or inefficiencies, scaling procurement operations isn’t possible for most of these organizations.
   

When teams encounter these hurdles, resolving them takes time and resources away from scaling end-to-end procurement operations. However, order processing automation enables teams to offload these repetitive tasks and allows them to focus on organizational growth.

How automated order processing solves common challenges 

Automation accelerates routine purchase order tasks by performing them instantly and consistently, based on the conditions you set. By automating these steps, your team can experience the following benefits:
 

• Boosted processing speed: By automating regular tasks, your team can minimize delays and process higher volumes of orders. That way, your team is prepared to quickly scale operations as your organization grows.
• Reduced workflow errors: Your team can minimize human error because automated order processing operations will have fewer mistakes. This has the additional benefit of making you a stronger partner for suppliers and providers.
• Lowered operational costs: Automated order processing reduces manual labor requirements, accelerates order completion, and helps your team avoid costly errors or process delays. This contributes to a more cost-effective procurement cycle.
• Increased operational transparency: Because automation uses tracking and integrated reporting, your team gains real-time visibility into activities across your procurement network, enabling stakeholders to monitor spend, order status, and process efficiency.
• Improved regulatory compliance: In an automated procurement workflow, steps of the process operate according to conditions that you establish, so you can rest assured they comply with purchasing regulations.
• Strengthened inventory management: Automated order processing helps you get accurate stock levels, manage inventory updates, and assess inventory needs, which reduces the risk of stockouts or overstocks.
   

To maximize the benefits of automated order processing, however, you’ll need an automation system that suits your organization, team, and goals.

How to choose a procurement automation system

You know your team’s biggest internal purchasing challenges. The following tips can help you prioritize the features and functionality your team needs to help you choose the most suitable procurement automation system for your organization:

Align with business goals and KPIs

Start by mapping your organization’s long-term growth goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) into procurement automation system features and functionality. You should also audit your current purchasing process to pinpoint operational bottlenecks or areas with poor visibility. Once you know your needs, it’s easier to assess automated procurement software and choose the right fit for your team.

Here’s an example: Say your accounts payable team spends countless hours each week manually tracking down vendor invoices, internal POs, and receipts. Procurement automation software can remedy these headaches by streamlining the time-consuming and error-prone process of invoice matching. 

Ensure integration and scalability

You can strengthen your entire procurement purchasing workflow by building a tech stack of integrated systems. Without unified procurement, you may deal with siloed, inaccurate, and unreliable data. Additionally, your operations are more prone to delays and errors, which make scaling operations unlikely. 

Take another look at the invoice matching example. Integrated procurement automation makes it possible to link invoices to their supporting documentation because it connects to your ERP, accounting, AP, and other systems. So, instead of manually toggling between places to find the proper documents for every invoice, the procurement automation system does it for you. This both saves your team time and supports your operational scalability goals. 

Plan your rollout and measure outcomes

Your procurement stakeholders should be top of mind when choosing an automation system. Try putting yourself in their place and ask if the system will be easy to implement, learn, and use. By creating a theoretical procurement automation system implementation strategy, you can proactively identify bottlenecks and find solutions rather than responding to issues after they happen.

After you’ve started working with a new procurement automation, one of the easiest ways to tell if it's a good fit for your team and organization is if its outcomes align with your goals. That means you can see your KPIs trending toward your target results. This—along with ensuring it makes the day-to-day work for your buyers and stakeholders easier—can signal that a particular system is the right choice.

How to scale procurement automation

While implementing an automation tool can help teams streamline procurement workflows on day one, long-term operational scalability also requires a data-driven strategy. Your team can follow these best practices when building out your plan:

Best practice #1: Automate purchase requests and approvals

When you first implement an automated procurement system, you might start by digitizing purchase requests and approval workflows. Automating routine purchasing workflows, like getting stakeholders approvals or logging request details for future audits, can be a good place to start. But once you’ve automated your workflows, consider expanding into recurring purchases, budget tracking, and supplier compliance workflow automation. 

However, to use an automation tool in this way, it must integrate seamlessly with your ERP, accounting, or other existing procurement systems. That way, you can maintain accurate spend data and extend automation benefits across departments.

Best practice #2: Align automation with purchasing policies and compliance goals

Procurement automation helps you control internal policy compliance by allowing you to embed compliance controls directly into routine workflows. This grants you more visibility into organization-wide compliance with purchasing policies. Additionally, you can use automated approval workflows and Guided Buying (with enhanced features available through Business Prime) to encourage employees to purchase from preferred suppliers and approved categories. By covering these bases, automation improves compliance visibility, ensures purchases align with organizational goals, and mitigates compliance risks.

Best practice #3: Scale in phases, not all at once

Scaling procurement automation should also be sustainable, which means avoiding the growth of too many parts of your operations at once. Instead, opt for a slow and steady approach. 

As you roll out automation, start with the high-impact areas. Depending on your organization, these areas may include approval routing, purchasing thresholds, or supplier policy integration. Once you’ve automated the most impactful parts of your operations, your team can focus on the areas that have less impact but are still crucial to procurement efficiency and compliance.

Best practice #4: Measure ROI beyond cost savings

Increasing cost savings is an essential goal, but it’s important to track ROI beyond your finances. Metrics like approval cycle time reduction, percentage of spend under management, and policy adherence rate can give insight into the impact of your automation efforts. These metrics are crucial for efficient and transparent procurement operations, which in turn support scalable purchasing decisions.

Best practice #5: Elevate the end-user experience

If you don’t implement new procurement automation solutions intentionally, they can complicate workflows and create unnecessary hurdles for your teams. As a result, your team might struggle to scale operations or avoid using the software altogether. For an automation system to support your current and future operations, it must encourage your team to embrace new buying processes. 

You can make sure that a new system helps your teams by thinking through implementation, onboarding, and day-to-day workflows before adoption. Make sure you understand the challenges your new solution should solve. 

Ultimately, a solution should enable faster approvals, guided supplier selection, and spend visibility, all of which streamline your procurement stakeholders’ daily responsibilities.

Smarter procurement automation with Amazon Business

Amazon Business can be your partner for smarter business buying and procurement automation. Through robust integrations and data-driven insights, Amazon Business supports operations like yours. Here’s how Amazon Business can simplify, automate, and scale purchasing compliance and spend visibility:

Automate recurring purchases with business lists and recurring delivery

For greater efficiency, it’s best to set up recurring deliveries for frequently purchased goods or curated lists for approved suppliers. This reduces the need for time-consuming manual purchasing work and promotes compliance by guiding buyers toward pre-approved items and vendors.

Within Business Lists, you can create product lists for your contracted suppliers based on purchasing data. These lists allow you to automate recurring purchases, which reduces your team’s manual workload and makes it easier for buyers to get the goods and services they need.

Streamline approvals with built-in procurement workflows

We help enhance approval workflows by striking a balance between flexible and intuitive functionality. Our configurable buying policies help you control spend and ensure compliance.

When these steps occur automatically, your workflows move forward smoothly and minimize the risk of delays. Additionally, if your approval workflow changes, it’s easy to create new buying policies within the intuitive Buying Policies and Approvals section. 

Gain visibility with analytics and spend reporting

Visibility refers to the depth of understanding you have about your procurement operations, including approval workflows. It also provides crucial insight into which parts of the process would benefit from automation. 

Amazon Business can help you achieve this with its real-time dashboard, which provides robust Business Analytics (a Business Prime feature) for orders, categories, and spend patterns. Additionally, spend reporting enables you to measure the outcomes of your automation efforts and identify opportunities to optimize your network further.

Integrate seamlessly with your procurement system

Integrations help you build a unified procurement network that leverages the right technology for enhanced operational insight and control. To support this, Amazon Business integrates with over 300 procurement systems and supports seamless order automation that functions within your existing ERP systems or procure-to-pay workflows.

These in-depth integrations support uniformity throughout your procurement tech stack. That way, all your systems work in tandem, which helps you maximize the impact of automation and growth strategies and ensures data accuracy.

Get started with automated order processing

Automated order processing has the potential to streamline several parts of your procurement operations. That said, the most sustainable approach is to start small and scale with a trusted partner.

Amazon Business is a strategic procurement partner that grows with your organization, allowing you to automate and simplify your purchasing processes. Our account executives are eager to work with you to enhance your entire procurement operation helping you gain the control and visibility you need to foster long-term growth.

Ready to get started? Contact us today to learn more.