Fostering spend stewardship empowers organisations to drive better spend management

Basware, the global leader in providing networked purchase-to-pay solutions, e-invoicing and innovative financing services, has adopted the WeProcurement™ methodology to e-procurement, which fundamentally transforms company spending culture for its customers by changing employee behavior.

To reinforce desired spending behavior, WeProcurement creates a collaborative process that delivers relevance, intelligence and awareness within the e-procurement system. This systematic approach enables everyone to work together towards company goals and saving money, ultimately making employees better stewards over company funds.

IlariNurmi, SVP, Purchase to Pay, Basware, explained: “Today’s employees expect the systems they interact with on a daily basis to be intuitive and relevant to their daily lives, and to deliver critical intelligence at the point needed to greatly increase efficiency. With WeProcurement we are taking things one step further. Our methodology also incentivises employees to stick and comply with a company’s procurement processes by making it the easiest thing to do within the natural course of their work and by making them aware of how they add value to a business as a whole. This gives organisations tangible results and ensures employee contributions amount to more than just the sum of their individual parts.”

At its core, WeProcurement is fueled by the “Power of We” philosophy, a crowd-sourced style process that builds its success from the collaboration of all users. Applied to a business setting, this user-driven process results in significantly higher cost savings compared to traditional e-procurement solutions and the agility organisations need to fund their missions.

“By consolidating our purchasing activities across 200 locations into a collaborative process, we were able to reduce our supplier base by 96%,” said Angela Watts, Purchasing Manager at Goodyear Tire &Service Centers. “Our users are now saving significant time in their days and getting the items they need in a cost-effective manner – ultimately saving the company millions.”

WeProcurement eliminates the number one reason users drop out of a process, which is that they feel their actions are not making a difference or do not matter. By increasing employee engagement and emphasising that everyone who buys goods and services has an important role to play, the system becomes self-managing – relieving the procurement team from having to police the organisation so they can focus on more strategic initiatives.

Greg Summers, Finance Director at DCOR, added: “While we anticipated having to force employees’ hands to use the system, we found it very easy to garner adoption. Once the employees saw the benefits and user-friendly nature, they were eager to get on board.”

IlariNurmi, concluded: “Our WeProcurement approach for procurement systems overcomes traditional procurement management challenges by making the processes as relevant as possible to each person’s role, department, category of spend, and industry. Instead of trying to force people into a mold with a system that caters to procurement or finance, WeProcurement seeks to understand the needs of each requestor and deliver a system that is designed for them – the users.”