The process of buying goods and services for use by a company or organization, such as a government department, ministries or NGO is known as procurement, starting with the issuance of a purchase order request and ending with invoice payment.
Procurement also involves planning, strategy, and practices that enable the management and improvement of purchasing behavior.
Procurement vs Purchasing
Procurement is long-term in nature, a more comprehensive approach to obtaining products and services for the company. It involves tasks such as sourcing vendors, maintaining records, and negotiating contracts.
Purchasing involves tasks such as ordering, receiving, raising purchasing orders, and arranging payment. It is often short-term and is transactional. Purchasers looking for items to buy look for favorable cost, and not the overall value.
What Business Procurement Involves
Procurement is important because it helps businesses get the best possible prices for products and services, and it can help them build long-term relationships with reliable suppliers.
Purchasing decisions are also often based on specific factors like where the product was manufactured, who designed it, what its environmental impact is, and whether or not there are laws that prohibit importing certain items.
In most cases, businesses are primarily concerned with obtaining the highest-quality products and services they can at the most reasonable cost, and in the shortest amount of time.
Businesses are also interested in ensuring that their procurement rules reflect the ideals that prospective customers would find appealing, as people tend to gravitate toward companies that they feel share their values. For example, companies have a stake in procurement regulations that are seen as fair, encouraging competition, and performed with business integrity.
Types Of Business Procurement
There are various kinds of procurements. Depending on how the organization intends to use the things being purchased, it can be categorized in different ways.
1. Internal Procurement
This means that employees buy materials or services from other parts of their organization such as human resources departments, buying office supplies from another department within their company.
2. External Procurement
It includes sourcing material from outside of your organization. External procurement has many advantages over internal procurement such as a lower cost and more product variety.
3. Direct Procurement
The development of your product lineup necessitates the purchase of some items and services. For example, a laptop manufacturer needs to order specific computer parts like memory, batteries, and displays.
In the manufacturing sector, this kind of direct purchasing is prevalent. Since few businesses frequently switch their raw material suppliers, the supplier connection is important in the long run because this area directly affects your revenue and growth.
4. Indirect Procurement
Other purchase activities, such as those for office supplies, travel costs, and utilities, are essentially designed to support the internal, daily operations of the organization. In service-based enterprises, purchasing commodities keeps the business moving.
5. Service Procurement
You need to find ways to link employees and processes together because businesses never operate as a completely unified entity. To do this, you can choose to use contingent laborers, professional consulting services, or program subscriptions.
Contract-based partnerships with suppliers are frequently the consequence of services procurement, which fills in the gaps to produce an efficient workflow.
Avoiding Fraud In Business Procurement
Bribery, tender, and outsider procurement schemes are all prominent examples of procurement fraud in the purchase of goods and services.
One of the most frequent forms of fraud is when a company receives a fake invoice for goods that were never delivered. Businesses can guard against procurement fraud by:
- Limiting the ability to order goods and services to only certain, reliable individuals
- Refusing proposals from unidentified vendors
- Keeping an eye out for frequent or recurring purchases of faulty or inadequate goods or services
- Check references, read reviews, and research before committing to a purchase
- Be wary of bulk offers
Always be skeptical when someone wants to give you an amazing deal on something. Stay diligent throughout the entire purchasing process and make sure you don’t miss any steps like making sure your credit card information is safe if purchasing online.
You can also contact the supplier directly if you have any concerns about their pricing or shipping fees. With these precautions, you’ll be able to identify fraudulent suppliers quickly and get back to doing what really matters: running your business.
Endnote
Each company establishes its own procurement rules that guide the selection of its products, suppliers, methods and procedures for interacting with them. Multiple companies engage in direct and indirect buying of products.All businesses should implement procedures to detect and stop any procurement fraud.
