Businesses use procurement technology solutions to manage procurement of supplies, parts, inventory, and equipment. Although businesses of every size should strive to run a lean operation, large organizations face unique challenges and opportunities in their procurement processes. Procurement management includes making purchase decisions on price but also on other components of value, such as quality or even contributing to an environmental or socioeconomic initiative.
As Doug McMillon, CEO of Walmart, pointed out in 3 Predictions for the Future of Retail, how companies source their supplies and other materials matters to customers. Because of this, a modern solution to manage procurement needs to provide more than e-catalog access.
eLink™ Gateway: Procurement Management Software
eLink™ Gateway is one form of software designed to manage spend, specifically to manage spend on indirect supplies for enterprise-level organizations. Procurement management software is designed to standardize large business’s purchasing decisions. At the core of all procurement software packages is a simple software query.
Your business (the purchaser) requests catalogs from other companies (the suppliers) and are able to access all of them from one centralized location. eLink™ Gateway provides additional controls that our competitors are unable to provide at the moment.
- Catalog Management – eLink™ Gateway provides industry-leading catalog management. From the data-driven controls to the personalized attention VIT gives each customer, eLink™ Gateway truly gives large organizations better control of their purchasing decisions.
- Purchase Controls – eLink™ gateway provides controls that are customized by Value Innovation Tech to each customer’s specific needs. Thus, each procurement process is fully customized and fully controlled to prevent misorders, standardize supplies, and control costs.
- Streamline Workflow – Indirect spend purchasing should be an easy item to manage. Your team members need to be presented with a straight-forward system to predictably purchase the right supplies so that business carries on as normal. A good procurement management system like eLink™ reduces the time your team spends on purchasing items.
- Manage Supplier Relationships – 3-way PO matching ensures that orders are fulfilled, that financial discrepancies in purchase prices are prevented, and that you have a high level of knowledge and control in purchasing decisions.
Procurement management software is essential for any business that desires to turn their procurement process into a business advantage.
What Sets eLink™ Apart
eLink™ is truly software as a service (SaaS). Many software platforms are sold on a monthly subscription and then called a service. On the other hand, eLink™ comes as a truly customizable part of VIT‘s business process automation services. Some other systems may be able to simply allow you to access multiple vendors in one place. eLink™ goes two steps further than “all the others.”
One – Product Substitution
Discussed earlier, product substitution gives your management team the ability to choose either the product or the standards that determine how purchasing decisions are made across an organization. For example, if an office manager needs to buy AA batteries, she will be automatically shown the cheapest options. Even if she selected a more expensive one from the list of approved vendors, if the software has been told to substitute for price, it will.
This can be done as a mandatory substitution. So that if she selects Energizer batteries from a vendor and your business has decided to standardize on Duracell, then the software will automatically replace the batteries with the desired ones. Or, if she selects Duracell from Company X and AA Duracell batteries are cheaper from Company Y then the software will let her know there is a cheaper option for purchase.
Two – Product Customization
Every organization is unique. Some organizations have a centralized process even for indirect materials. Other organizations give incredible flexibility to local purchasers. Large manufacturing businesses will have many parts involved in manufacturing that are contractually arranged between salespeople. A manufacturing business with a few large plants will have different needs than a company with many small offices.
Because of these unique needs, VIT installs eLink™ as a customizable software. Rather than creating a software system that “works for everyone,” VIT focused on creating a SaaS model that gives us the freedom to build relationships with every one of our customers and provide unique custom software that actually saves them money.
VIT: The Backbone of eLink™
Value Innovation Technologies (VIT) is the company behind eLink™. VIT was birthed out of American Product Distributors. APD was founded in 1992, by C. Ray Kennedy, Founder and CEO. APD needed to replace an outdated e-commerce platform that could not scale to meet future growth. They developed this technology from listening to their customers talk about the need to drive down.
VIT decided to focus on the expense side of things and see if we could decrease expenses. eLink™ decrease expenses by allowing buyers to control costs from their vendors. It also provides sellers e-catalogs to sell to their current customer base. The technology gives buyers more data/information on what they buy, which allows them to make better choices on what they want their employees to buy.
With 25 years of experience in the B2B sales space, we understand the needs of a business’s procurement team, and eLink™ Gateway was born out of those needs.
