Improving a company’s procurement has never been easier or more effective. Whether it’s a question of standardizing purchase requests, reducing costs, improving quality or securing supplies, good procurement management contributes directly to the organization’s performance. And yet, procurement processes are often fraught with pitfalls: multiple tedious entries, lack of visibility, multiple contacts, overly long approval circuits, poor internal collaboration or even power struggles with suppliers… In this article, we’ll be sharing Procurement Best Practices. We’ll also look at how digitalization and automation can simply transform your business.
What is Procurement ?
Before delving into Procurement Best Practices, it’s important to clarify what we’re talking about. Procurement, or purchasing, refers to all activities aimed at acquiring the goods and services required by a company (raw materials, services, equipment, etc.). This process includes the following main stages:
- Formalization of needs and hierarchical approval: identify internal needs, whether operational, technical or project-related. Write them down and send them for validation to a circuit of players, subject to certain criteria (amount, service, urgency, etc.).
- Supplier selection: Whether directly or through a call for tenders, this procurement process enables us to identify, qualify and evaluate partners, and conduct calls for tenders or negotiations to obtain the best terms and conditions.
- Contractualization and follow-up: draw up the purchase order, negotiate conditions, formalize terms, ensure that delivery is compliant and that invoicing is correct.
Of course, this definition varies according to the size, culture and specific requirements of the company. In an SME, the person in charge of procurement may wear several hats, while in a large group, there will be a procurement department structured into several divisions (indirect, direct, marketing, etc.).
Example of a Procurement process
A typical procurement process typically includes :
- The purchase requisition: an employee or department expresses a need, justifies it, and enters a request. Depending on the company, the requisition may be manual (paper, e-mail, Excel) or computerized (online form or via procurement software such as Lapala).
- Internal approval: the manager and/or management (depending on financial thresholds) approve the request.
- Supplier selection or negotiation: Directly or via a call for tenders, we analyze the offers available on the market, discussing prices, lead times, etc.
- Purchase order: formal document sent to the supplier, contractually committing the company to the service, price and deadline.
- Delivery: reception and verification of quality and conformity.
- Invoicing and payment: invoice/order/delivery reconciliation, then payment according to agreed terms.
- Monitoring and evaluation: feedback, performance indicators (on-time delivery, quality, price, etc.).
This process is sometimes referred to by the acronym P2P for Procure to Pay, i.e. from identification of the requirement through to supplier payment. Companies using Procurement software digitize all these stages, enabling them to centralize requests, reduce lead times, ensure data reliability and cut processing costs.
Why focus on optimizing Procurement?
- Make teams’ work easier: By implementing procurement software, teams are freed from tedious, non-value-added tasks.
- Reduce errors and duplicate orders: manual data entry and the impossibility of finding information quickly are sources of error.
- Reduce costs: even 1% reductions on a large purchase volume can generate huge savings.
- Reinforce resilience: a solid, agile procurement process enables us to cope with unforeseen events (shortages, inflation, exchange rate fluctuations).
- Improving collaboration: procurement management is a multi-departmental process, and without effective collaboration, there can be many roadblocks.
- Control compliance and limit risks: compliance with internal policies and regulations is easier when you have standardized procedures and monitoring tools.
- Connect and integrate existing company software: by connecting ERP or accounting software, organizations can automate a number of non-value-added tasks.
It’s a strategic investment which, in addition to the financial aspect, contributes to the company’s overall competitiveness and the quality of its offering.
Procurement Best Practices and the purchasing process
3 key areas for optimizing procurement
- Optimizing the procurement process
- Eliminate unnecessary or redundant steps.
- Define conditional approval circuits (amount, urgency, nature of purchase)
- Set up automated systems
- Greater control and visibility
- Centralize purchase requisitions
- Better real-time tracking of purchase requisitions and orders
- Consolidation of budgets spent by department
- Analysis of historical spend to identify pricing trends, strategic suppliers, etc.
- Detect early warning signals (budget overruns, supplier risks).
- Setting up dashboards
- Vendor relations
- Identify key partners and establish long-term relationships (framework contracts, multi-year agreements).
- Define quality, innovation and deadline targets together.
- Set up performance indicators to measure mutual satisfaction.
#1 – Assessing and understanding business needs
Why?
The first step is to clarify the nature and volume of purchases. Indeed, the best way to avoid duplication, overstocking or unnecessary orders is to understand precisely why and how each department (production, marketing, R&D, etc.) requires a good or service.
What to do?
- Centralize and collect purchasing information: Set up a purchase request form where each employee details his or her need, justification, deadline, etc.
- Analyze recurrence: Check recurring requests (e.g. office supplies, spare parts, recurring subcontracting) that could be better pooled.
- Prioritize: Identify critical purchases (direct impact on production or sales) vs. secondary purchases.
- Setting up framework contracts
- And regularly monitor consumption trends
Based on these results, you’ll be able to set up appropriate approval channels and supplier relationships.
#2 – Implement a clear procurement strategy
Why?
Having a global procurement policy avoids improvisation and guarantees consistency. Managers (directors, department heads) need to define the main objective: cost reduction, securing supplies, moving upmarket, etc.
What to do?
- Formulate objectives: For example, reduce the average unit cost of products by 10%, or reduce the internal approval time to less than 48 hours, or gain visibility on purchases and orders.
- Establish rules: validation thresholds (e.g. > 5,000 → management validation), number of suppliers to consult, or quality standards.
- Setting out the strategy in a framework document
- Communicate and train: Organize mini-sessions for all departments concerned, reminding them why and how to comply with these rules.
#3 – Standardize, digitalize and automate the process
Why?
We emphasize the importance of moving from manual management (scattered Excel files, multiple emails) to more automated management, to gain in productivity and reduce errors. Workplace comfort is enhanced by guided experiences, intuitive interfaces and automation (ERP updates, accounting software, e-mail dispatch, task assignment, personalized online forms, etc.).
What to do?
- Identify key stages: requisition, approval, order, receipt, invoicing, etc.
- Digitize: Create an online requisition form for each stage, or use procurement software such as Lapala.
- Set up automated processes: automatic reminders, notifications, reconciliation of invoices and purchase orders.
#4 – Managing supplier relations
Why?
A supplier is more than just a service provider: it’s a partner with whom you can innovate, solve problems faster and secure your supply chain.
What to do?
- Creation of a centralized repository: Information (contracts, assessments, certifications) is recorded in procurement software.
- Organize regular reviews and assessments: review quality, deadlines, costs, and possible areas for optimization.
- Classify suppliers (by strategic issue): For critical suppliers (key raw materials, etc.), give priority to collaboration. For less strategic suppliers, you can be more transactional.
- Set up performance indicators: quality, service rate, on-time delivery, responsiveness.
- Encourage co-innovation: Involve suppliers in improving products or finding greener solutions.
#5 – Use technology to increase control and visibility
Why?
Having a real-time overview enables you to react quickly. We insist on the importance of analytics and reporting to identify budget overruns, late payments or bottlenecks.
What to do?
- Create simple, guided experiences via dynamic forms: teams enter important data more easily, while other data is entered automatically by the procurement software.
- Dynamic dashboards: Indicators on the number of pending purchase requisitions, average lead times, error rates, etc.
- ERP / CRM / Accounting integration: For example, automatically update invoices.
- Real-time control tools: Launch automatic alerts when the allocated budget is 80% consumed.
#6 – Monitoring Compliance and Risks
Why?
No matter how hard you try to avoid them, the risks of fraud and non-compliance are always present. Without control mechanisms (double approval, traceability), anomalies can be discovered too late (fictitious invoices, unauthorized budget overruns, etc.).
What to do?
- Role separation: Separate the person requesting the purchase from the person approving it.
- Make it compulsory to enter certain information
- Internal audit: Regularly check consistency between purchase orders, deliveries and invoices (see “Purchase requisition”, where traceability of requirements is key).
- Automate approvals: Set up a circuit requiring managerial and executive approval above a certain amount.
#7 – Improve Contract Management
Why?
Trying to pay less is not always the grail. Sometimes it’s better to invest a little more to gain in durability, reliability or service. What’s more, it’s not uncommon to lose control of the content of certain contracts, or to lose them altogether.
What to do?
- Create a contract repository: using procurement software
- Analyze and formalize contract conditions: Include maintenance costs, warranty, impact on the quality of your own products, etc.
- Keep a long-term view: a more expensive supplier may offer better parts availability or better after-sales service, avoiding costly breakdowns.
- Evaluate the overall impact: Sometimes, switching from a plastic to a recyclable material may seem more expensive at the front end, but it improves brand image and reduces potential taxes.
#8 – Collaborate across all company departments
Why?
Procurement must break down silos. Purchasing-Finance-Operational collaboration is important to avoid budgetary or technical misunderstandings.
What to do?
- Create cross-functional committees: Involve representatives from production, finance, logistics, etc. in defining requirements.
- Aligning KPIs: so that Finance’s “payment lead time” KPI does not penalize supply chain execution, for example.
- Use a common tool: A shared platform, where everyone can see the progress of a purchase request in real time, avoids endless email exchanges.
#9 – Staying in touch with market trends
Why?
Buyers need to keep abreast of price fluctuations (energy, raw materials), new regulations (customs, VAT), technological developments and so on. This enables them to anticipate rather than suffer.
What to do?
- Sector watch: Monitor the trade press, attend webinars.
- Subscribe to alerts: For example, alerts on oil prices, metals, or commodity indexes.
- Exchange on forums: In some cases, join forces with other companies to share intelligence (professional groups, unions, etc.).
#10 – Promote Continuous Improvement
Why?
Procurement processes are never static. Internal needs, economic conditions and technology evolve. Strategy and methods must therefore be adjusted regularly.
What to do?
- Gathering ideas: Employees in the field are often aware of bottlenecks.
- Update procurement software: When a new best practice is identified, integrate it into the software using its no-code features.
- Test in “pilot” mode: For any new feature (e.g., a new module for automatically sending purchase orders), start with a restricted perimeter before rolling out to the whole company.
#11 – Digitizing and automating procurement
Why?
Digitization and automation enable us to create guided and intuitive experiences for our teams, while eliminating repetitive tasks (copy-paste, manual validation, etc.). This is a real lever for saving time and reducing errors.
What to do?
- Identify recurring manual tasks: e.g. invoice / purchase order reconciliation, sending reminder emails.
- Equip yourself with a suitable platform, such as Lapala
- Measure ROI: Compare before and after average lead times, number of errors, etc.
Find the complete comparison of Procurement software by reading this article: the 9 best Procurement solutions for 2025
Why is good procurement important?
Adopting best procurement practices brings rapid benefits to the company:
- Greater visibility and control over purchasing: a clear, standardized process provides a real-time view of expenditure and commitments.
- Improved profitability: streamlined workflows speed up order creation and reduce the risk of errors.
- Fewer disputes: as roles and responsibilities are more clearly defined, each player knows what he or she is supposed to do, thus avoiding conflicts.
- Enhanced reliability: more structured collaboration with suppliers means more on-time, higher-quality deliveries.
- Improved cash flow: certain levers, such as optimizing payment times or reducing inventories, have a positive impact on cash flow.
- Greater flexibility and agility: a well-oiled organization can respond more quickly to changes in the market or internal demand.
How to implement procurement best practices?
Managing your procurement means first and foremost equipping yourself with supply management software
It all starts with the implementation of procurement software. There are many of these available, and in recent years they have become accessible to SMEs thanks to intuitive interfaces for teams, rapid, no-code implementation and adapted pricing. Procurement software like Lapala makes it easy to set up the first Procurement Best Practices, with limited effort. In just a few weeks, you’ll be able to centralize your purchase requisitions, manage your approval circuits, plan your calls for tender, and manage orders and their payment. These digital tools are both the allies of managers, thanks to dashboards, and the allies of teams, who are freed from non-value-added tasks thanks to automation.
5 steps to implementing procurement best practices
- Standardize forms: avoid each department creating its own template, which would make the system inconsistent.
- Raise team awareness: explain how the purchase requisition protects both budget and service quality.
- Set up indicators: average approval time, refusal rate, average amount per request, etc.
- Automate as much as possible: interconnection with ERP and accounting software, automatic notifications…
- Regularly review the process: gather feedback from employees to simplify or adjust rules and circuits.
By including finance, logistics, production and even the legal department from the outset, you get a more robust process that is better accepted by all.
Conclusion on procurement best practices
Procurement is far from being a simple “cost center”. It is increasingly becoming a vector for value creation and innovation. Good purchasing management practices go beyond the single objective of price reduction; they encompass quality control, the building of lasting relationships with suppliers, regulatory compliance, continuous optimization and, above all, increased employee comfort at work.
Moving your organization towards more structured, centralized, transparent and efficient procurement may seem ambitious. Yet the returns on investment are manifold: saving administrative time, reducing the risk of error or fraud, improving internal collaboration, enhancing the company’s image with suppliers, etc. The challenges (lengthy processes, lack of visibility, unsuitable tools) remain numerous, but solutions do exist.
Beyond theory: the importance of digitalization with procurement software
Experience shows that companies that equip themselves with modern solutions such as automation platforms (e.g. Lapala), possibly combined with ERP or CRM, make rapid progress. They move on from a logic of underdeveloped procurement (too reactive, dispersed) to real-time management thanks to :
- Customized workflows: creation of a simple requisition form, conditional approval circuit (amount, urgency), automatic reminders and notifications.
- Performance dashboards: budget consumed, average approval time, rejection rate, etc.
- Seamless integration with ERP or accounting systems: automatic data transfer to invoicing, invoice/purchase order reconciliation, real-time financial monitoring.
This eliminates the need for multiple data re-entries, scattered Excel spreadsheets and over-solicitation by email. Teams can concentrate on analysis and negotiation rather than administrative execution.
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