Numerous service providers in the hospitality industry are switching from the manual form of supply acquisition and inventory management to the more convenient automated one. From decreasing the amount of paperwork necessary, improving the efficiency of your personnel and limiting delivery time frames to exercising more control over your consumables inventory and coming up on top at fiscal audits, automated procurement system present numerous benefits.
What’s more is that the high end procurement software of today can perform a number of other tasks, including placing bids, creating invoices and tracking your business budget, all of which can be routed by you for approval before commencing. In short, updating your hotel’s inventory and procurement procedures is highly beneficial for your operations. Here’s how!
1. Massive cost savings
Before the automated solutions, the personnel handled procurement and fulfillment, and that required more working hours and sometimes suboptimal purchases. Now, the automated platform can be set to automatically place bids based on pre-established guidelines and thresholds, determine the most cost effective purchase, perform comparisons and consolidate orders. This minimizes the unnecessary expenditures and promotes low cost/high value investments.
2. Enhanced personnel efficiency and less time wasted
Menial administrative tasks, including writing contracts and proposals, placing bids manually, checking receipts, so on and so forth are now performed automatically by the algorithms of the procurement software, in accordance to your specifications. Inventory management is also streamlined by the implementation of a barcode reader that logs all the necessary info based on the barcodes. Consequentially, your procurement personnel is able to focus on the more complex and strategic components of business, and develop new ways to improve the services of your establishment.
3. Superior accuracy for transaction logging
Clerical errors are virtually unavoidable when your employees have to manually enter the details of each transaction and order. The good news is that a quality program is able to eliminate these mistakes, blunders that could pile up to thousands and thousands of dollars per year, especially if you own more than one hotel. In addition, the automated procurement platform is capable of evaluating the current state of your establishment’s resources and order exclusively what is necessary, avoiding waste. Finally, the data logged by the software is used to generate a transaction history, which contains valuable data when you’re evaluating your current management strategies.
4. Leverage in price negotiations
In the negotiations with your suppliers, obtaining the best possible price for your purchases requires an edge. That edge could come in the form of information, as the procurement software is capable of listing the previous transactions, spending patterns and purchase volumes. The aforementioned data can be brought into play to help your procurement personnel discuss price breaks or better deals from a better position.
5. Better compliance and purchase consistency
Finally, you’ll want to make sure that all procurement employees utilize the best sources for the acquisition of products, as previously discussed. To discourage ‘maverick’ maneuvers – employees purchasing from different locations in exchange for personal benefits – the automated procurement platform logs in every detail of the transaction process, from the moment when it leaves the supplier to the time of arrival.