What is purchase requisition ticketing & what’s the best approach for your procurement

It’s common for the IT department to have support/help desk processes well in place with IT-specific help desk software like JIRA Service Desk. Meanwhile, purchasing and procurement functions are usually left without any modern tools, even though their role is as business-critical as IT. How come? 

A typical IT help desk ticketing system helps keep track of open cases and reduces the time that employees have to wait to get their issues resolved. Requisition Ticketing, one of the features of ProcurementFlow’s purchase Requisition Management module, does exactly that and much more.

Requisition ticketing brings your requisition process to the 21st century and helps prioritise, measure, and manage requests. This way you can be sure every request gets solved as fast and efficiently as possible.

Requisition Ticketing is an important part of Requisition Management

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Purchase Requisition management process 

If you want to properly manage the incoming flow of purchase requests, you need to have a purchase requisition management process in place.

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1. Issuing the requests 

The process of Requisition Management starts with the requester issuing a purchasing request (PR) for the Goods or Services. Purchase requests are issued by requesters who are usually budget owners; or in the case of indirect procurement (office supplies, travel, telecom, services etc.) it can be anyone in the organisation.  

The easiest way for the requesters is to issue the request is over email or doing it through ProcurementFlow’s Procurement Portal.

2. Centralizing procurement 

The process starts with a purchasing request for items or services. With ProcurementFlow the purchasing requests can be funnelled easily from various channels including:

1. Email as a free text request (with attachments); 
2. Email with items listed on an attached Excel spreadsheet; 
3. ProcurementFlow self-service Requester Portal; 
4. Google Forms; 
5. JIRA Service Desk; 
6. SharePoint Portal; 
7. MRP run; 
8. Custom integration (API).

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3. Registering the requests 

Make sure that every request is registered automatically. Assigning a unique “ticket number” (open case number) to every request, will make managing requests easy. Using numbers is important as requests’ titles can change over the time and could be renamed or specified several times. Without a numbered system it’s challenging to keep track of all the requests. 

New purchase requests will appear under the Purchase Requests tab at ProcurementFlow Kanban view.

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4. Assigning a request

In some companies there is a head of procurement or a lead buyer who assigns new requests to the procurement team, based on the categories and nature of the requests. Buyer gets notified about a new assignment. 

Other option is the so-called pull-method/pull-system where buyers “pull” work from the incoming list of purchase requests based on their availability and specialization. 

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One of the benefits of Kaban-based visual work management tool like ProcurementFlow, is that it gives an easy overview of who is working on what. You can also see if someone is overburdened with tasks and might need some help. This not only boosts procurement teamwork efficiency but also improves the morale of the team.

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5. Specifying requests

When it comes to specifying requests it is important to square away the detail at the beginning of the process. 

With ProcurementFlow you can specify the requests easily and keep all the correspondence with requesters connected to the (purchase request) PR until the end. 

Requesters can just reply to additional questions via email and the responses are automatically added to the PR’s thread. 

In this step the request is related to a Business Unit, Project/Product and Cost-Center so later on it’s easy to track the requests’, if needed.

6. Getting approvals for requests

There is no point in wasting procurement’s time on requests that are not approved by the budget owner. ProcurementFlow lets you send PR's to the approval workflow where the purchase requests can be approved easily. Read more about purchase requisition approvals. 

Getting approvals can take anywhere from a couple of hours to days. Approvers might be too busy or not aware of the approval request due to lack of communication. 

ProcurementFlow provides you with a flexible approval process. It informs both parties involved, requesters as well as approvers, to improve the visibility of the current status of the approval workflow. 

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7. Processing the requests

From a simple Request For Information(RFI) to a complex eSourcing event, ProcurementFlow provides a variety of procurement tools to process the requests. 

Read more about RFx from our blog: Mysterious RFx - what’s the difference between RFI, RFP, and RFQ?

ProcurementFlow eSourcing lets you compare multiple vendors at the same time. All you have to do is choose which vendor offers the best price or the best service. One of the benefits of eSourcing is increased efficiency: eSourcing helps you find, contact, and evaluate a large number of suppliers. You can also keep the competition going throughout the process without additional manual labor. All in all, it can result in serious cost savings.

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8. Updating requester about the status of the request

You’ve probably heard the saying: procurement is like a black hole. The main reason behind it is the fact that after submitting a request, there used to be no way for the requesters to know the status of their requests. But now, times have changed. With the help of ProcurementFlow, requesters are up to date about the status of their request every step of the way. 

The 7 key benefits of a purchase requisition management system

Requisition software brings value to everyone involved.

1. All requests are registered
Do you know that feeling, when an important budget owner enters your office and asks: “Where are the bearings I ordered last month?!” and you have no clue when this purchase request (PR) came in and which purchaser/buyer is (or should be) working on it? 

Never feel that way again. 

Purchase requisitions management system makes sure no request goes unattended.
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2. Sending requests is easy for requesters 

Requesters are procurement’s internal clients. Sending purchase requests (PR) should be easy for them. Choose the easiest to use channel depending on the most common PR types in your organisation (see the table below). By far the simplest way for requesters is to send PR-s over email as free text requests. If PRs consist of several items with additional info (meta info like material type, finishing, attachments with specifications, drawings, etc.) then the Requester Portal is the most convenient option for the requesters.      

3. Specifying requests is faster

Specifying the requests usually takes up a lot of purchasers/buyers’ valuable time. This can mean exchanging several emails before the PR gets finalised. Depending on the organisation policies, buyers often start working with requests only after it has been approved by budget owners. In an alternative scenario, procurement goes through the entire sourcing cycle, only to discover that there is no internal budget for the request. Purchase Requisition Approvals workflow makes it faster and easier for everyone - the requester, approvers, and purchasers/buyers. 

4. Getting a quick overview  

Which purchaser/buyer is working on what? What was ordered and when? Is this approved? What are the latest updates? With purchase requisition management you have all this information in one place and can get an effortless overview at any time. 

5. Keeping an eye on the assignments 

Everyone knows what they need to be working on and it’s easy to assign it to colleagues if needed - without losing any important information. 

6. Requester Self-Service 

In the requester self-service portal, the requester can easily create purchase requests (PR) even for multiple line items and add attachments. They can also see the status of PR without contacting anyone from the procurement. 

7. More time and less stress  

All in all, a streamlined process gives more time and reduces stress for everyone involved. 

4 steps for setting up requisition ticketing in a day

Centralising your purchasing can sound more complicated than it actually is. With ProcurementFlow, you can do it in less than a day. You don’t need to get any development done or install any new software as software nowadays is mainly cloud-based. 

Also, requesters don’t have to learn anything new. 

Get started in these 4 simple steps. 

1. Try sending a PR as a requester.
   Send a trial PR to ProcurementFlow and see how simple it really is. 

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2. See how the process feels like for a purchaser/buyer
   ‍The purchase request will appear in ProcurementFlow where it’s automatically registered. The purchaser/buyer can easily specify the request by asking additional questions from the requester. All the communication with the requester is kept with the PR.

3. Enable forwarding of procurement email
   Ask IT to set up a common email (e.g. procurement@your-company.com) for receiving purchase requests. Direct emails from that address to ProcurementFlow. Here are the instructions for your IT-department for enabling forwarding.   Notify your organisation about the change and the new common email they have to send their requests to.

4. Ready! Purchase Requests Ticketing is now active!
   ‍From now on all requests are funnelled to ProcurementFlow where they are automatically registered. Your purchasing/procurement can manage the entire process in one place and you can be sure that none of the purchase requests are neglected.

Start organising your requests now and take ProcurementFlow for a test drive. We give you a 14-day free trial with no credit card information needed.