3 Ways Arkestro Removes Strategic Sourcing and Procurement Stress
It doesn’t matter what kind of business or organization you work for; if you’re part of the sourcing process, you’re working under pressure. Strategic sourcing stress is caused by day-to-day occurrences and manual process.
Let’s leave strategic pressure aside for the moment, where we’re dealing with big picture stuff, and instead focus on day-to-day stresses. It’s easy to get hung up with strategic issues because they can seem just so—big, however, let’s focus on an area that’s easier to fix without making massive changes outside of the procurement team. You may be surprised to discover what a big difference relieving the stress from those day-to-day items will make. The issues may seem small, but knock them off one at a time, and you’ll find your role is far less stressful.
How does a strategic sourcing professional reach sourcing Zen and remove strategic sourcing stress? There are different ways to go about it, but why bother trying to reinvent the wheel? Arkestro is a highly advanced (yet delightful to use) AI-powered Predictive Procurement Orchestration platform made by procurement professionals for procurement professionals. Our team has lived the life, experienced the countless annoyances and stresses, and concluded that a better way to do things exists. Here are three ways that Arkestro removes the stress from supply’s day-to-day.
Strategic Sourcing Software Integration
How many times have you had to reach for the Advil because you’re facing a deadline, you need to access critical data, and your sourcing software won’t import it? After pulling out user manuals, calling IT support, fending off the e-mails from the business unit demanding answers, and nursing that ongoing throbbing headache, you print out the information from one system and manually enter it into your sourcing software.
That is strategic sourcing stress that no-one needs.
How about the time(s) you had to log into your ERP software to look for data, but due to your position’s lack of necessity to access the system regularly, you couldn’t find your password? And when you finally tracked it down (another fun call to IT support), it took you most of the afternoon to figure out how to use the software? More pressure.
You aren’t alone. These sorts of scenarios happen far too often in procurement offices.
Arkestro eliminates these common sources of day-to-day aggravation. It’s all about simplicity and seamless integration.
Arkestro was built with ease of use in mind. It is strategic software that anyone can log into for the first time and get up, running, and comfortable in as little as 15 minutes. Second, the experienced procurement professionals who created Arkestro know that companies rely on multiple systems. They designed the software with seamless integration as a key requirement. With Arkestro, you can import and work with data from any system, including ERP and P2P software.
Supplier Management
Supplier management can be a nightmare for a procurement office. The strategic level is a whole other ballgame, but the everyday stuff—communication with suppliers and having an up-to-date list of suppliers—can be extremely frustrating.
Arkestro removes this common source of tension by managing and tracking everything to do with your suppliers, all in one place. There’s a centralized, up-to-date supplier database.
The Conversations feature enables quick and easy dialogue directly with suppliers within the platform instead of tracking down endless email chains, phone calls, or texts. Arkestro also manages reminders, assigns tasks, and allows you to share files with suppliers.
Automation of Mundane, Repetitive Sourcing Tasks
The typical procurement office is the setting for many repetitive (but high impact) tasks. These aren’t always challenging, but they are always time-consuming—and no-one gets much satisfaction out of doing them—but someone must do them. Over and over, day after day. Sound familiar?
The combination of repetitive AND boring (and old software) causes two problems. The first is that it’s hard to find someone who wants to take them on: people like to be challenged. Rubber-stamping gets old, fast. The second problem can be much more serious. When someone is doing the same thing over and over again, they tend to zone out. It’s less likely they’ll catch exceptions. Mistakes are all too easy to make. By the time they’re caught, those mistakes become very expensive.
These tasks are also a time sponge. You would be shocked to discover just how much time people spend on this sort of activity!
Arkestro leverages state-of-the-art AI. The platform is capable of learning and automating many repetitive tasks that procurement staff would just as soon avoid. It may sound like a small thing, but this alone can take a considerable amount of the daily pressure off your procurement team. Arkestro eliminates careless errors, frees staff up for more challenging tasks, and slashes the required amount of time.
What Are the Next Steps Towards Smarter Procurement?
The next step should be clear at this point: give Arkestro a try! Request a demo and see how you can get started with no upfront costs. It’s one thing to talk about how this sourcing software will make your life as a procurement professional less stressful. It’s another to see it in action and be able to see that, yes, the team that designed Arkestro wasn’t just looking for a niche market; they really have worked hands-on in supply chain.
The other thing that will quickly become evident when you see Arkestro in action is that this software does so much more than relieve the pressure on the day-to-day stuff. That’s a great start. But with incredibly powerful AI on tap and all your critical data centrally managed, you’ll quickly realize this is the ultimate tool to enable and support strategic sourcing and predictive procurement. It’s there for when you decide to make the move, but in the meantime, everyone in your procurement office will enjoy the stress-free daily operations and sourcing and procurement Zen.