The Importance of Augmented Reality on Material Procurement

As innovation keeps on advancing, client encounters are moving ceaselessly from exactly what individuals see to submerging them in the brand experience itself.  One such innovation that is genuinely shaking up the technology scene is the augmented reality (AR) and without any further doubt, AR is obscuring the lines of the real world.

Unlike virtual reality (VR), augmented reality is an overlay of advanced digital content in this present reality condition. Consumers are tending more towards technology and make their purchase decisions on the go.

The impact of augmented reality on material procurement is as follows: 

Improved Customer Experience: AR and VR technology are enhancing and improving the customer/buyer experience. This utilization of augmented reality is a significant leap forward that is focused on the business and commercial industry.

Improved Communication within Departments: With augmented reality, the communication among Procurement, Operations, and Finance to examine the worth and cost drivers of the business could be improved. 

Replace Physical Human Interactions: The augmented reality replaces the need for basic human interactions whether it is a client visit or any business meeting. This helps in saving time of the organization as well as their cost.

Enhance the Procure-to-Pay process: A purchase decision can be made quickly dependent on the survey of the product or finding out about the firm’s services as clients/ buyers can encounter a similar demo. This empowers buyers to check the process worth by means of a digital product catalog.

Digitalizing Supplier Relationship Management: Negotiating with the vendors, bidding in an auction now could be made much more easier after digitalizing.

To make the procurement process proficient and stand ahead of the competitors, these new innovations can possibly reform the manner in which organizations lead certain everyday functions.

Challenges of Traditional Procurement Process

Procurement is tied up with acquiring products and enterprises and the various procurement procedures and tasks connected to this. Despite the many issues and challenges that are mainly associated with traditional procurement, numerous organizations go with the process.

A typical traditional procurement process is carried out with manual work that includes small as well as the repetitive work. These tasks can be anything from getting approvals, discussing bids, making negotiations, etc. Due to all this, it is a very challenging process.

In addition to this, the traditional procurement process is also time-consuming as well as expensive. This is because there are fewer people to manage the given processes. Dealing with the approvals, bills, and other invoices on paper are both inefficient and expensive and obviously inclined to mistakes and loss of administrative work.

Naturally, procurement is a troublesome procedure to control. Therefore, this makes visibility progressively obscured, prompting a greater loss of control and is normally expanded by miscommunication between purchaser organizations and the numerous providers included. 

The key element to beat these difficulties is automating an eProcurement stage. Connecting purchasers and dealers into one single stage. In addition, giving a system to clients to make purchases.  An eProcurement stage improves visibility that it unites all clients, procurement experts, and providers into one stage. 

Having a streamlined procurement process, sourcing and invoicing in a cloud-based stage prompts to controlled visibility over every transaction either locally or globally.

The 5 Important Steps to Effective Procurement

Thinking about the present competition available, it's essential that organizations embrace new ways of thinking, techniques, and procedures while procuring materials and that will make them "best". Here are the 5 most important steps towards an effective procurement in an organization:

Visibility: The first step to effective procurement is to get good spend visibility on what materials the organization is buying and how much is spend across all your purchases. Progress can’t be tapped without spend visibility. 

Control: Users should get to see and control what they see and buy. The way to do this is to set up controls on local buyings with automated technology to ensure the utilization of negotiated rates and invoice bills is efficiently processed. 

Efficiencies: Here the aim is to make the procurement process more efficient by speeding the procuring activity across all aspects of the process. This step ensures the streamlining of the automated procurement process and the supply chain to eliminate errors and waste if any.

Savings: The aim of step 4 is to generate savings for a procurement group.  The traditional supply chain management model relies on manual processing of negotiating with a supplier to provide the lowest pricing. This brings in to implement a good supplier relationship management platform for a smooth flow of supplier management.

Create Value: The last step is about creating value.  For procurement to add value the focus must be on improving financial conditions, improvement of quality, and improving efficiency by utilizing the resources properly and effectively.

The expense of acquiring, and working together, is on a consistent ascent. Organizations have begun to see procurement management as their top need since it takes up an enormous share of their general spend. 

The 8 Technologies that Impact Modern Procurement

Technology and innovation can be utilized in various ways through high spend transparency, well category management, effective as well as efficient supplier management, and propelled utilizing of information and data analytics. 

The technologies that impact modern procurement are as follows:

Chatbots: Chatbots and conversational bots. It is a mix of natural language processing and artificial intelligence. Chatbots help in having automated interactions between the suppliers and the customers (internal as well as external). 

Machine learning and Cognitive Analytics: Cognitive computing and machine learning help in predicting outcomes. These analytics highlights any specific issues or opportunities if any. Machine learning also provides improved intelligence for procurement professionals. 

Procurement process automation: The automation is applicable for all the parts/areas of procurement.  

Virtual Reality (VR): Virtual reality is how an individual can carry out his daily functions, interactions, and functions without leaving his place. It describes how people buy, how the user interface is performing, etc. VR helps to improve the buyer experience by creating meaningful procurement experience.

Data Mining: Here a large procurement data set is accessed and analyzed to determine the patterns, trends, and various associations. 

Cloud and Software as a Service: This technology provides access from anywhere to all areas of procurement and on-demand computational resources.

Digital Signatures: Digital signature helps to keep secure the goods and services invoice, order authorization, invoices and payments, etc. 

Authentication: This technology helps to authenticate the process of payments, supply chain, authorization, and any system access

The present upgraded and computerized business arrangements expect organizations to stay adaptable and open to new innovation that can streamline the manner in which advantages are conveyed to both internal and external partners. 

The 6 Agile Principles Relevant to Procurement

At a certain point of time, procurement as a profession will need to become agile. To resist to adapt new change in procurement is a sure way of slipping into irrelevance and disruption in business activity. So it is, therefore, useful to understand the relevant principles and consider how it can identify with your own particular means of business.

The following are the agile principles that are probably very relevant to procurement:

>> Continuous Delivery of value: The initial step of the typical procurement cycle involves speaking with a business partner to comprehend their needs and plan the sourcing of materials accordingly. When this has been done, normal updates to tell the stakeholder how the procedure is going, regardless of whether there will be any delays and watch that their prerequisites haven't changed should be followed.

>> Adapt Changes: For procurement, this implies figuring out how to work in adaptability at each phase of the sourcing cycle.  Adaptable agreements may give you space to oblige your stakeholder’s very last-minute changes. 

>> Fast Delivery: Speed is one of the benefits of agile principles. Compared to other businesses if the procurement process takes unnecessary time for delivery, then it is a matter of concern. 

>> Communication: For an efficient procurement process, the method of communication is a must. By keeping the communication face to face, the errors and miscommunication of ideas are minimized that frequently occur in mails.

>> Simplifying the procurement process: Complex procurement processes can harm relationships with vendors, stakeholders, as well as, end-users. By following agile principles for procurement will show a clear map of how to simplify and fasten the procurement cycle.

>> Agile Principles advance sustainability: In procurement, this includes creating lean production to minimize the wastage during the process, having a just-in-time supply chain flow, etc. Following any work procedure (counting Agile) is a key method to limit wastage of time, ability, and assets. 

E-Procurement Opportunities in India

Electronic Procurement (also known as e-Procurement) is the way of using the internet to make it easier, faster, and less expensive B2B (business-to-business) purchase and sale of supplies and service over the Internet. 

E-procurement is something beyond a system for making purchases on the web. An appropriately executed framework can interface organizations and their business forms legitimately with suppliers while having interaction between them. This incorporates management correspondence, bids, questions and replies, past prices, and various emails sent to numerous participants. 

An efficient e-procurement system enables an organization to its interactions with its most crucial suppliers. E-Procurement provides built-in monitoring tools that help to control costs and guarantee the most extreme vendor performance. The e-procurement system allows managers to confirm pricing, and leverage previous agreements to assure each new price quoted is more competitive than the last price.

With all the advantages that are accomplished from E-procurement, the organization can fundamentally expand ROE (return on equity) and ROI (return on investment).

Other impacts of e-procurement are increased efficiency due to market competition, procurement monitoring, fewer errors due to automated procedures, etc.

E-procurement, for purchasing immediate products and services, is a successful procurement framework, causing a ripple effect in purchasing circles. The specialist organization assumes a pivotal job in offering to source and procuring that fulfill client needs and give an abundant worth expansion to the services that are provided. 

Before, traditional techniques for procurement offered little transparency and lesser fulfillment of negotiation with providers. E-procurement offers the advantages of more transparency, more extensive geographical reach and lesser time of negotiation, easy purchasing, and better supplier evaluating. 

Additionally supported reserve funds can be accomplished through mechanized, simple to-utilize purchasing, managing invoices, and supplier enablement abilities. Realizing item numbers, offer costs and contact focuses can assist organizations with finalizing negotiations while different providers are battling to accumulate their important information.

6 Procurement Metrics that will Drive Improvement

Procurement is the same, and most current procurement procedures have a suite of indicators for giving feedback on the performance. Effective and efficient procurement relies upon efficiently examining spend information. The three major classifications of KPIs (key performance indicators) for procurement are quality, conveyance and cost reserve funds.

The 6 procurement metrics that will drive improvement in a business are as follows:

>> Spend Management: This is normally communicated as a percentage of effective and actively managed spending. The more the organization’s spending, the more is the influence on procurement and also on savings.

>> Time of Procurement Cycle: This is a pointer of procurement’s productivity, both inside the team and with the suppliers. Key Performance Indicator’s (KPI) look at the average time of the procurement process from a sourcing demand being submitted to a buy request being set or agreement being agreed upon.

>> Quality: This metric takes a look at the quality and nature of products that are to be procured by tracking metrics like defect rates, dismissals of products, and supply disturbances because of low quality. Accuracy is another important metric both by the procurement team and suppliers. 

>> Delivery: This indicator measures whether the procurement done is right and the procured materials are the items that an organization needs and when they are in need.  Also, the organization can follow how frequently the deliveries are early or late and by how many days they are pending.

>> Agreement Compliance: This metric sees how well the suppliers are meeting contract terms and conditions. It is often expressed as the ratio of contracts that are not meeting the specifications with the complete number of contracts. 

>> ROI from Procurement: ROI metric is a significant level of measurement that helps in estimating the procurement performance by comparing cost reserve funds to the procurement’s team budget.

Challenges Faced by a Business during e-procurement

>> One of the fundamental difficulties for e-Procurement is the foundation of the appropriate and custom strategy. Each undertaking or activity should be established in a cautious, systematic and dynamic procedure. This seems to be an exceptionally troublesome task, requiring an emphasis on numerous viewpoints and procedures, an all-encompassing vision, long haul centre, and targets.

>> The government must also have a proper methodology to beat the boundaries to change. Some portion of the methodology is to participate in a thorough evaluation of the present circumstance, the truth on the ground and the stock of ventures, articulate costs, effects and advantages of a program just as ceaselessly screen and assess the undertaking redesigning. 

>> Getting an exercise from the private sector, e-Procurement must be client-driven and administration situated. This implies a dream of e-Procurement suggests giving more noteworthy access to data just as better, increasingly equivalent administrations and techniques for open and organizations.

>> In a common PSU (Public Sector Undertakings) and Government, the procurement runs into many crores and complexity is innate in e-procurement procedure. What is to be procured is entirely subject to the idea of its business, and in this manner fluctuates as per the businesses.

>> In the present situation, receiving a powerful cost sparing component is vital to any organization's proceeded with presence.  Another significant perspective that the Government and PSU's have to investigate is driving authoritative compliance with negotiated agreements. This would empower Governments to keep and continue their reserve funds.

Top 6 Essential Features for B2B Marketplaces

Being different from the single seller B2B websites, a multi-vendor B2B marketplace highlights one of a kind capacities that empower clients to analyze, communicate, and pick items from the best B2B merchants everywhere throughout the world. 

This idealistic cycle of the developing scale made the B2B marketplace a worthwhile plan of action and gave eCommerce organizations various open doors in each industry. Vendors also get advantage by joining the b2b marketplace as it helps to expand their potential customer base and increase brand exposure.

Unlike B2C marketplaces, the B2B e-commerce portal is a bit complex due to multi-vendor users, making orders in bulk, bidding workflows, etc. 

The top 6 features that are essential for b2b marketplaces are as follows:

>> Multi-vendor portal capabilities: Each vendor utilizing the b2b marketplace shall be permitted to effectively deal with their own organization data, contact details, material pages, material inventory, and also the pricing.

>> Security, Transparency, and Confidentiality: There should be multi-vendor user management available in the b2b platform to easily manage and control their company details and other sensitive details.

>> Responsive to edit PO: B2B buyers will always expect to have a flexible portal where they can edit or revise the purchase order. It can include changing the payment method, shipping address, method of delivery, etc.

>> Filtering and Navigation: Enabling advanced filtering and search will allow b2b buyers to quickly find the required products and also have a smooth buying experience.

>> Manage Pricing: B2B vendors require full command over their eCommerce portal set up just like they would do on their own portal. This includes customizing and managing pricing for their buyers, constant evaluation with their backend systems, etc. 

>> Order Negotiations: B2B sellers-buyers often involve multiple cycles of order negotiations before purchasing the product. So, there must be practices concerning a consistent change from RFQ to formal quote to arrange in B2B eCommerce.

Introduction to Cable Gland and Functions of Cable Gland

A cable gland is a device intended to join and tie down the finish of an electrical cable to the electrical equipment. A cable gland is defined as a “mechanical cable entry device” which is used to link the wiring for electrical, instrumentation and control, automation structure including lightning, power, and telecoms.

A cable gland is utilized as a sealing and termination device to guarantee the characteristics of the enclosure in which the cable enters can be maintained properly. Cable glands are made up of different plastics, aluminum, brass, or steel.

Cable glands are generally known as “connectors”, which distinguishes them from quick-disconnect, conducting electrical connectors.

Functions of a Cable Gland: 

The very main function of a cable gland is to act as sealing and terminating to ensure protection to the electrical equipment and keep the electrical cable intact. Apart from this, other functions are as follows:
  

>> Environmental Protection: Cable glands give protection against water and dust through its seal on the outer covering of the cable, eliminates/block the moisture on the electrical equipment or enclosure.

>> Holding Capacity: Cable glands provide support to the electrical cable from getting pulled out.

>> Extra Sealing: It provides additional seal protection at the cable enclosure when a high level of protection is required. 

>> Good Earth Continuity: Earth continuity can be provided for armoured cables in case the cable gland has a metallic construction characteristic.

Cable glands must adjust as per the environment the cable is in. If the cable is in a hazardous environment, the cable gland must be powerful and rigid. In a nutshell, the more important an electrical cable is, the more protection a cable gland should provide.

How e-Commerce is changing material procurement for SME’s

Whether a business is large or small, all of them have their own set of challenges. But small medium-size enterprises (SME’s) have their own distinctive barriers that must be overcome. So as to remain aggressive, organizations persistently investigate more channels that will help to overcome the challenges and build a strategic advantage.  

The challenges faced by SME’s in the procurement process:

1. Access to limited vendors: SME’s generally have access to the limited vendors only. Here, SME’s have very limited access to innovative products as well as raw materials.
2. Quality issues: One of the key explanations behind the low quality of the finished products is the low quality of raw material. This is the reason why SME’s find it difficult to compete in international markets.
3. Challenge in economies of scale: Indian SME’s feel difficulty to achieve economies of scale as work with smaller vendors who can’t consistently supply a large amount of material.
4. Challenges in the payment system: SME’s often have working capital related difficulties. SMEs will confront difficulties working with local as well as unorganized vendors who are not prepared to move into the new digital transaction system.

The difference observed with eCommerce:

B2B eCommerce will help to overcome the challenges of SMES’s procurement process in the following ways:

>> With b2b e-commerce platforms, SME’s will have multiple options to procure materials from different vendors. This will open a wide range of possibilities for the SME organization.

>> By implementing just in time procurement strategies will help the SMEs to make most of their working capital. Ecommerce also helps in cutting down on raw materials hence reducing the warehouse costs.

>> By sourcing from the b2b platform, SME’s can procure better quality materials and that too with discounted rates.

>> B2B platforms like helioscart will help SME’s to float quotations to “n” number of vendors across any geography.

Building an Efficient Procurement Process for Real Estate

Real estate procurement is one of the key factors in delivering decent, tough, steady, sellable, and profitable real estate projects. The real estate industry’s procurement has come with unlimited alternatives, various customizations, and the changing trade & business laws have placed the experts in the field under huge worry to settle on the correct choices, brisk choices consistently.

Knowledge of the dynamic market: The real estate market is highly evolving. Everything from regularity to full-scale macro-economic conditions, all influence the real estate procurement decisions. Therefore, this requires a procurement proficient who knows about the entire real estate market and accordingly equipped with the forecasts and trends.
Business Networking: A decent list of business contacts is the way to fruitful business management. The database is not only of peer business contacts but also relates to the professional of the real estate industry i.e. architects, engineers, designers, etc. It's great to relook into your business network on occasion and have a go at being in contact with all who are essential to you all the time.
Effective Communication: Successful and effective communication results from knowing the individuals you meet or manage them well ahead of time. A decent comprehension of what they do, the materials they give or the tasks that they take a shot at, their estimating structure, level of customization and adaptability, their experience and aptitude and a lot of such data gathered in front of your communication with them helps you settle on informed decisions.
Innovation: Innovation provides a strong competitive advantage for real estate procurement as it is reinforced by the selectiveness of the items utilized for the delivery of procured materials. Innovation creates value for the project.
Exposure via business events: Business events will give the right exposure to working. These events are a great platform to showcase your best self and best about your organization to gather the interest of associates you are keen on.

5 Advantages of Digital Procurement Technology

Procurement is simply the management of purchasing the materials involved with the outside merchants. It searches for approaches to verify items at the least cost. It ensures procured items make it securely to the premises. It tallies the money.  

It is not so surprising that something has digital, whether it is for a B2C market or a B2B market. And digital procurement is no different as the advanced analytics and data-driven optimization is leading to better insights, allowing for increased value-chain between all the stakeholders. 

Without a committed department for procuring the materials, activities would slow down. The question here is: what makes digital procurement so different?  The e-procurement benefits are getting progressively obvious as the more extensive comprehension of its numerous utilizations becomes evident.

• Cost Reduction: Expenses can be decreased by utilizing volume, having organized provider connections and by utilizing framework upgrades to diminish outside spend while improving quality and supplier performance. E-procurement takes out desk work, revise and blunders.
• Productivity: The internal employees can get the materials they need through an online purchase requisition and order arrangement. Even the procurement staff can be discharged from preparing requests and dealing with low worth exchanges to focus on key sourcing and improving provider connections.
• Visibility on Spends: Streamlined tracking of transactions ensures the full track of purchase requisitions reports, purchase orders, and the payments that are made.
• Better decision making: The visibility highlights give real-time actionable insight into the procurement process. This helps in taking better decisions and design potential ways to take the possible gains.
• Removing Tedious tasks: Procurement frameworks can mechanize a significant number of the tiresome procedures workers need to trudge through consistently.

E-procurement preferences must be completely acknowledged when the frameworks and procedures to oversee it are well set up. Software tools are needed to create procurement documentation of electronic requests for information (e-RFI), requests for proposal (e-RFP) and requests for quotation (e-RFQ).  

5 Components of Procurement-as-a-Service

Procurement has become a large part of all the total revenues. But, the selection of technological drivers in the procurement procedures has not driven the expected efficiencies which it has in other areas. The procurement technology and any corresponding procurement procedure have become very complex due to the imbalance of innovations in technology and speed. 

The simplest and most straightforward strategy is to adapt to the scenario of “..as a service”. This helps to embrace and treat the procurement function as a platform that integrates the procurement process through a mix of cloud-based technologies, procedures, and services. 

The procurement-as-a-service approach could tackle the procurement procedure problem by decreasing complexities and receiving basic and reliable processes.

Components of Procurement-as-a-Service:

>> Vendor Management & E-sourcing: Vendor Management in procurement-as-a-service helps to understand the current supplier base. Managing the vendor information and keeping the record up-to-date prompts smart sourcing, helps to decrease purchase-to-pay transactions inaccuracy. It also brings growth in productivity using e-sourcing tools.

>> Contract Lifecycle Management: With a state-of-the-art contract lifecycle management application, you can utilize digital practice for different types of contracts to make standards, while additionally streamlining the negotiation procedure.

>> Spend Analytics: Spend analytics is achieved by gathering information from various sources, and after performing a thorough data quality checks, these data pieces helps to drive decision making.

>> Cost and Performance Review: Data science technology helps to perform a cost, risk, and performance review on your spend. Vendor risks are categorized on the basis of the nature of risk, vendors in unstable geographical areas, etc. Authorizing the data of vendors selectively while creating a purchase order helps in handling data for decision-making.
 

>> Reporting dashboards: The cloud-based PaaS approach gives the staff an opportunity to identify any further procurement innovation via reporting dashboards and visualization tools.

PaaS approach tackles the inefficiencies by merging with the cloud-based technology to manage the vendors, costs, risks, performance, enable e-sourcing, deal with the contract lifecycle management, and review with spend analytics