How Vendr’s Procurement Dashboard Elevates Your Procurement Process

Procurement is no longer the simple process of buying goods and services for your business.  It's become an entire skill and discipline in itself, with companies hiring Chief Procurement Officers to oversee the ever-more-complex supply chain and cycle of purchasing and managing company spend most effectively.

Even today’s bootstrapped startup founders know that maintaining a balance between innovation and value during the procurement cycle is an ongoing job. However, too many leaders hire an entire procurement department before they’re financially or operationally stable enough.

That’s where a tool like Vendr’s procurement dashboard comes in. It simplifies the entire procurement process and lets users submit purchase requests, approve purchases, stay ahead of renewal deadlines, and manage supplier relationships — all in one place.

But how do you know a tool like that delivers the ROI you want? That’s what we explore in this quick guide, breaking down how Vendr’s procurement dashboard helps you battle daily procurement challenges.

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What is a procurement dashboard?

A procurement dashboard is a tool that displays various types of procurement spend and purchasing-related data in one place. Vendr’s procurement management dashboard lets users initiate purchase requests, approve those requests, track and manage spend, and stay updated with their current contracts.

Importance of procurement dashboards

Without a procurement dashboard, the manual purchasing and buying experience is disconnected, lengthy, and hard to oversee and regulate internally. 

This overly complicated manual procurement process makes it harder for finance or operations leaders to develop procurement strategies focused on saving money rather than process improvement. 

Manual processes also tend to lead to untracked costs in shadow spend. This is a growing problem where department heads and employees make credit card purchases on software, consultants, or events without following set processes and approval or tracking total spend. So, they’re more likely to overspend on tools they shouldn’t.   

How Vendr’s dashboard features transform your procurement process

• A centralized source for all contracts and spend — Your procurement dashboard should act as a single “front door” for all intakes and approvals, where all employees make purchase requests. The software will then notify the right stakeholders and team members approval tasks, and it will let users track managed spend and relevant procurement data across all purchases.

• Customizable approval workflow templates — Add specific steps, conditions, or integrations so that the right people get notified about what actions to take for approval. 

• Renewal and supplier management tools — Stay proactive when you track spending on individual suppliers, monitor supplier performance, and receive real-time spend analysis and data updates and alerts when contracts are about to expire. With the Intelligence add-on, you can also get actionable insights directly tailored to you from our on-demand SaaS consultants.

• User-friendly interface — Intuitive navigation makes for faster adoption among all employees, encouraging every team member to be part of a more sustainable procurement process.

• Customizable views — Configure administrative permissions, including how supplier data displays in your procurement dashboard so you can make more data-informed decisions about future purchases. 

How to implement Vendr’s procurement dashboard

Getting started with Vendr’s procurement dashboard is easy. Let’s explore the basic steps involved in making this tool work for your business.

Setting up the dashboard

When setting up your dashboard, you’ll start by designing your intake and approval workflows. To do so, you’ll customize your intake forms with the specific questions you need to collect the relevant data on every purchase order before approval. Then you’ll set up conditions for every approval. 

For example, you can set the rule that the finance team should approve any purchase over $10,000. Your finance head will then receive a notification to address within the procurement dashboard. 

Once you’ve created and published your workflows, you can then use the dashboard to start the purchase process.

Customizing the dashboard

With your workflows published and dashboard set up, you can start making and accepting intake requests. Under the request tab, you can view every workflow currently in motion. Click through each workflow to a dedicated workflow page, where you’ll see the overall progress and comments between your team during the purchase order cycle.

In the “Renewals” tab under “Procurement,” you’ll have two different views — a calendar format or table list — to track which suppliers are coming up for renewal. The “Approvals” tab will show you every open workflow task that is assigned to you, giving you the ability to give purchase requests the go-ahead. 

Finally, in the “Supplier” tab you’ll see an organized list of all of your contracts by supplier, and you’ll be able to track historical trends and useful metrics for the products and prices you’ve been paying each year. 

Training and support

Vendr’s Customer Support page makes it easy to troubleshoot or answer simple product queries, but we also have experts on demand as part of our Premium Intelligence add-on. 

With an Intelligence subscription, you can access our in-depth Buyer Guides and our SaaS Advisory feature, which connects you with a live agent who can answer your questions or with a SaaS consultant, who’ll give you strategic advice, forecasting info, and the industry benchmarks you need to get the best deals.

Case studies: Success stories with Vendr’s procurement dashboard

Currently, Vendr has helped businesses save over $430 million dollars on software spend by helping them create more sustainable, time-saving procurement processes with built-in support from our negotiations experts. Let’s look at a few specific case studies.

Industry-leading conversation platform Orum ditched manual procurement for a streamlined process

Before using Vendr, Orum Controller Carla Ferris was concerned about the disorganized manual process for purchasing and managing software contracts. Vendr helped them create a customized process with intake requests through the procurement dashboard, followed by finance department approvals and a brief security review.

The Vendr negotiations team also offers tactics and advice to the Orum team so they can get the best price on purchases. As a result, Ferris and her colleagues save time and maintain peace of mind during procurement, and now feel much more confident in negotiating future contracts. “Having Vendr's negotiation tactics in our back pocket has empowered a lot of departments across the business to better negotiate contracts in all areas, not just software,” says Ferris.

Vendr helped password management platform Dashlane expose contracts that were sitting on credit cards

“It’s helping us clean out the underbrush,” says Dashlane General Counsel Davison Paull of Vendr. Tasked with overseeing the company’s global scattered procurement activities, Paull was looking for a solution that could help them centralize the purchase request and supplier management process. 

Paull used Vendr’s native integration with NetSuite to see every SaaS-related expense as it happened. With more visibility, he was able to implement more security and legal checks for every request. It also helped them reduce the occurrence of “quiet auto renewal,” in which overlooked software expenditures on corporate cards leads to more unwanted spending.

Mattermost saved over $281,000 over two years and achieved 2.7x ROI with Vendr

As an open source platform for secure software development collaboration helping clients like Bosch, AIG, and NASA manage their own workflows, Mattermost needed its own efficient, centralized procurement process. This is what IT manager Daniel Sischy noticed upon joining the company, and he set out to solve this issue right away. Thankfully, Mattermost’s VP of Legal recommended Vendr to Sischy, and they worked to integrate existing deals and contracts into the platform.

“Vendr makes it easier to find usage, deal sizes or anything else across our entire SaaS stack,” Sischy shared. “The ability to see everything we need within a platform rather than having to run around and dig for it has been a time saver.” Besides the time and cost reduction, Sischy also acknowledges how integral Vendr’s support team has been to their success. “My Vendr support team is always quick and willing to work with me on any issues or questions. That’s the experience I have had with everybody that I've spoken to at Vendr.”

Design a time- and cost-saving procurement process with Vendr

Vendr helps turn business leaders into confident negotiators with market insights and buyer levers to help them get better deals with new and current suppliers. 

Even more than that, Vendr helps you overhaul your entire purchasing process. Rather than sinking costs into shadow spend or hiring an entire procurement team, use a tool like Vendr’s procurement dashboard to act as your single source of truth for all business purchases.

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