Procurement Planning Report: Analyzing Needs, Approaches, and Tools

This report examines the critical importance of procurement planning within organizations, emphasizing its role in defining project requirements, scheduling tasks, and monitoring the procurement process. It identifies the 'Request for Proposal' (RFP) as a suitable approach for addressing business needs, offering solutions, and specifying company goals. The report recommends Coupa as a valuable tool for managing the procurement lifecycle, including approval workflows, budget management, and inventory control. The benefits of Coupa include its focus on delivering business value, ensuring transparency, integrating with modern technologies, and fostering strong supplier relationships. The report concludes with the next steps for businesses using Coupa, such as planning schedules, visualizing expenditures, and streamlining invoicing and payment processes.

Importance of Procurement
Planning
Name of the Student
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Procurement Planning
 This is defined as the process based on making decisions on
purchases.
 This type of planning would be able to help the planners to determine
whether their expectations would be realistic.
 The procurement planning would be able to help stakeholders for
deciding the requirements of a particular procurement (Meyr, Wagner
& Rohde, 2015).
 Procurement Planning would be helpful for estimating the amount of
time needed to complete the process of procurement.

Need of Procurement within Organizations
 Procurement would be able to list the requirements of the project
within a certain period of time.
 The procurement plan would be able to schedule jobs and would also
be able to set different timelines of the project. This would also be able
to fulfil the requirements of the project.
 With the impact of procurement, organizations would be able to
monitor the entire process of procuring. This would also be able to
determine the need for any additional staffing.
 Organizations would be able to include predictability and transparency
within their planning processes.

Identification of Approaches
Based on the needs of the business, the ‘Request for Proposal’ (RFP)
would be helpful. This is due to the following reasons:
 The RFP would prove to be helpful based on providing solutions to the
problems of customers and within the requirements of business.
 The RFP would be able to specify the needs of the company
(Eidenmuller, 2013). It would outline the goals of the business based
on a certain project.
 Different vendors who would provide solutions would propose a valid
solution within the context of the business.

Relevance of RFP to the Business
RFP has a certain form of relevance to the needs of the business. This is
based on certain facts:
 The RFP would be able to gain history about the organization and
would propose a detailed description based on the project.
 The RFP would be able to set deadlines for the completion of the
project including dates and setting of milestones.
 RFP helps in setting questions, which would be answered by
respondents by providing additional details about the concerned
project.

Identification of a Tool for the Business
Based on the requirements of the project and needs of procurement, the
tool that could be recommended for the business is Coupa.
Importance of the tool is:
 This tool would be able to manage the entire procurement lifecycle
that would include approval workflows, management of budget and
inventory management (Busch, 2015).
 Users of this tool would be able to manage approvals based on their
mobile application and email.

COUPA as a Procurement Tool
Fig 1: Homepage of Coupa describing the services they provide

Importance of Coupa as Procurement Tool
This tool would be useful for the business due to different kinds of
reasons. This is because:
 Coupa would focus on the value of the business of the project that
would be offered to clients. This would help in delivering high value
for the company.
 There would be high level of transparency with the trade purposes
(Turban et al., 2018). This tool integrates the latest technologies and
thus strengthens high relationships with suppliers.
 This would be able to deal with smart customers based on offering
prescriptive recommendations.

Next Steps for the Business
With the help of the proper procurement tool (Coupa), the next steps for
the business could be defined as:
 They would help the business to plan their schedule based on the
projects.
 The business would be able to visualize the expenditure and thus
generate new reports based on the decisions.
 The business should make proper invoices by making proper kinds of
approvals and making the processes of payment.

References
Busch, J. (2015). Procurement Systems Integration Within the
Enterprise: Exploring Integration In The Cloud. Spend Matters.
Eidenmuller, H. (2013). A New Framework for Business
Restructuring in Europe: The EU Commission's Proposals for a
Reform of the European Insolvency Regulation and Beyond.
Maastricht J. Eur. & Comp. L., 20, 133.
Meyr, H., Wagner, M., & Rohde, J. (2015). Structure of advanced
planning systems. In Supply chain management and advanced
planning (pp. 99-106). Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg.
Turban, E., Outland, J., King, D., Lee, J. K., Liang, T. P., & Turban, D.
C. (2018). Business-to-Business E-Commerce. In Electronic
Commerce 2018 (pp. 123-166). Springer, Cham.

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