Having understood the basics of e procurement solutions and few reasons why banks would need them in part1, below is the landscape of the procurement market and what could be the recommended solution for your bank!
Procurement Market Landscape
In India, e-Procurement solutions are being adopted by all the Public Sector Units, Government Organizations and other agencies undertaking procurement of goods, works and services subject to tendering process and are accountable to public scrutiny of processes and optimum utilization of public/government funds. The major private sector players in this sector are: SAP, Ariba, PWC, Oracle and Hewlett Packard.
Otherwise, it has been observed that:
- The e-procurement market is a geographically fragmented market populated with many general solutions, some industry-specific solutions and some specialist vendors, with over 100 active suppliers.
- Market requirements for e-procurement have evolved over the past 2-3 years as the solution has progressed into a mainstream application. Notable changes include higher expectations for usability, enhancements in PDA support, cloud based delivery capabilities, workflow configurability and invoice matching functionality.
- Demand for procurement suites over point solutions is motivating vendors to fill out their product lines by buying, building and partnering for missing pieces, such as strategic sourcing, budget encumbrance and contract life cycle management (CLM).
- One can clearly see significant consolidation through mergers and acquisitions over the next three to five years, with the number of major players dropping by 50%. This activity will be triggered by vendors seeing economies of scale and growth, but finding many markets already crowded with local competition.
- A final observation about the e-procurement market is the increasing desire of prospective buyers to favor vendors that offer related, natively integrated solutions in a broader suite.
Recommendations
- Banks should shortlist those vendors that have suitable geographic coverage, industry orientation, customer size preference and your preferred delivery mode. For "deals," shortlist the vendors that are trying to expand their business into your country or region.
- Banks should select a vendor whose solution simplifies procurement, guarantees savings, offer a fabulous ROI and integrates with other systems easily.
- Today, businesses are 24/7, interconnected, and dynamic. To keep pace with a fast-changing work scenario and provide real-time insights, an application needs to be mobile. The solution should give you all the mobility and dynamism that you need to survive a changing market place.
- With the whole IT industry moving towards the Cloud, banks should ensure that the solution is available both on cloud and on-premise, without much investment. This gives the banks an option to select the strategy best suited for them.
- Banks should watch out for those solutions that manage only the procurement or payment or sourcing function. Banks should look to pick those solutions which integrates and automates the entire procurement life cycle.
In any organization, eProcurement will be able to deliver benefits when senior management understand the big picture and appreciate the benefits of having an end to end eProcurement solution.
Procurement Solution
Ramco’s Procurement Solution caters to all the processes of the procurement cycle. Using Ramco Planning and Budgeting Solution, financial institutions can plan ahead, optimize utilization of resources and control the budgets allocated through variance analysis. This ensures that the purchase is within the budget.
Ramco Fixed Assets Management enables financial institutions to manage and monitor physical assets throughout their life span. Ramco Project Management deals with application of knowledge, skills, tools and techniques to project activities that meet or exceed the stakeholder’s needs and expectations.
With the Ramco Procurement Solution, you can empower your team, impose processes through configurable workflow, reduce cost, gain better control, automate and integrate the entire life cycle from planning and budgeting, to tracking and maintaining projects and managing assets.
- Configurable workflow for better process control
- Mobility across iPad, iPhone and Android devices
- Alerts for appropriate notifications to different recipients
- Standard set of reports for better decision-making capabilities
- Synergy of the forces of cloud, mobile, social and information
Globally now eProcurement / Procurement Solution are the most preferred way to procure Goods, Services & Contracts. So what are you waiting for, just go for it!
