How are Mobile Apps Reshaping Modern Procurement?
Mobile apps have become a crucial asset for today’s fast-paced procurement landscape. They empower the modern procurement professional to optimise their processes, enhance collaboration and improve the efficiency of operations. These specialised software solutions are designed to facilitate and streamline the procurement process using mobile devices.
Through these tools, businesses can manage their purchasing activities, track orders and communicate with suppliers from just about anywhere in the world.
Features include mobile purchase order creation, real-time notifications and analytics, allowing professionals to make informed decisions on the go.
This flexibility ensures that procurement processes are not hindered by physical location, enabling quicker decision-making and responsiveness to business needs.
These apps can also reduce the time spent on manual processes such as order approvals and invoice management, creating faster turnaround times and helping organisations maintain a competitive edge in the market.
They also provide immediate access to critical information, such as inventory levels and supplier pricing. This allows businesses to make more informed purchasing decisions and react swiftly to changes in demand or supply.
With all these benefits comes better negotiation capabilities and more strategic purchasing decisions, ultimately reducing costs.
Two of the leading apps are those belonging to SAP and Coupa. Doug Benson, Sr Director of Product Management at Coupa, and Baber Farooq, SVP for Market Strategy Procurement Solutions at SAP, discussed the transformative impact of mobile procurement apps. Both, however, raised the challenges of implementation and security that these apps can produce.
SAP Ariba
SAP’s Google Play Store page says: “With the SAP Ariba Procurement mobile app, you can:
Track, act and get notified on sourcing and contract tasks
Order items from your organisation’s internal catalogue or request non-catalogue items
Order items on behalf of another user
Get notified of purchase requisitions assigned to you and approve them
View purchase orders and confirm goods receipts for quantity-based orders
Sign in to the app using single sign-on (SSO) with corporate authentication”
Coupa Mobile
Key features include:
Home Page Dashboard: Users can see an overview of their activity
Approval System: The app sends push notifications for requests needing attention
Expense Management: Users can create and submit expense reports on the go
Shopping and Catalogues: The app offers personalised catalogue and Open Buy recommendations
Receiving: Users can mark PO lines as received and use the camera to attach pictures as proof of receipt
Virtual Cards: The app allows viewing of active virtual cards for purchase orders or pre-approved expenses
Offline Access: Coupa's mobile app allows users to continue working offline
Travel Booking: The app includes features for searching, booking and managing reservations for air, hotel and rental cars
Mobile procurement apps - transforming procurement management
Doug says maintaining compliance with organisational policies can be challenging for a distributed workforce. He says that Coupa’s mobile app simplifies this.
He says: “The app offers flexible and secure authentication controls, ensuring data access policies are upheld. It synchronises all mobile actions with Coupa’s servers, reflecting changes on both mobile and web platforms.
“Users can manage procurement, approvals, receiving, expenses and virtual cards effortlessly, regardless of their device or location, streamlining their workflow and ensuring consistent policy compliance.”
Baber says he is seeing growth in procurement professionals demanding greater flexibility in their purchasing activities. He highlights a recent TechReport article, which shows that people spend almost 3.8 trillion hours on their mobile apps and the number of mobile app downloads has increased by 86% since 2016.
“With greater exposure to screen time and particularly among the younger cohorts who are the most active in this space, delivering procurement functionalities through portable, digital channels such as a smartphone makes sense,” he adds.
Beneficial for modern working conditions
One of the most critical elements of a mobile procurement app is user experience and usability.
Doug says that Coupa Mobile has a robust search function so employees can easily find items across hosted and web catalogues with a single search.
“To make the experience even easier we show organisation and personalised item recommendations just like on the web. We’ve built features that make ordering easier, such as barcode scanning, visual camera search and using GPS to find the closest ship-to locations.”
Baber adds: “Visibility across spend is also a key consideration, but data presentations should be kept simple and relevant as mobile apps are not well designed for large, cumbersome data analysis on a small screen.”
Enhanced communication and collaboration
With the Coupa App, team members can see, reply to and add new comments when ordering or approving, ensuring seamless communication and rapid turnaround.
Another feature in Coupa Mobile is Group Buying. Employees can invite their team members to collaborate and add items before placing an order, enabling teams that are distributed across locations or work shifts to work better together.
Baber says, as procurement professionals are working with different suppliers across many time zones, it becomes a necessity to have a platform where communication channels are always open and accessible.
“These team members work with overseas suppliers and urgent purchasing decisions may have to be made with the approver in a different location,” he adds. “A procurement mobile app breaks down these virtual, collaborative barriers across both time and space.”
Challenges implementing mobile procurement solutions
Despite all these benefits, there are challenges.
Every organisation has its own requirements for allowing or controlling user-provided or organisation-provided mobile devices – such as authentication. There are also expectations from customers to have mobile use cases at feature parity with web applications.
At Coupa, there is the use of standard authentication controls to support the widest variety of these requirements without needing to rely on third parties.
“This allows multiple scenarios common to large enterprises, including optional control over who is allowed to use the mobile app and on which devices,” Doug says.
Baber discussed the expectation from its customers, saying: “It becomes a balancing act to provide a delightful user experience and have deeper functionalities on a mobile device, for example editing a contract at the same time.
“We have made an attempt to solve this problem by splitting the mobile apps into professional buying experience (SAP Ariba Procurement app) and casual buying experience (SAP Ariba Shopping app).
“To further refine this balance, we are spearheading the transition towards moving our solutions onto BTP and leveraging the power of machine learning and generative AI. SAP Joule – SAP’s gen AI assistant – can do all the heavy lifting around making suggestions, revising the text and still provide a delightful mobile user experience.”
Integrating with existing systems
One of the most critical elements of a mobile app is ensuring seamless usage between the mobile and web version of your procurement system. Any setup changes made on the web at the organisation or user level are automatically mirrored on the Coupa mobile app, allowing workflows to always remain in sync between web and mobile, so users can freely switch between devices to get work done.
SAP’s app integrates into a wide range of settings. These include central receiving, where back-office orders can be sent to a warehouse, allowing sourcing events to be approved by executives and strategic buyers and supporting contract task approvals through the app.
Ensuring compliance and maintaining data security for a remote workforce
Mobile procurement apps address compliance and data security challenges for remote workforces through several key features. At Coupa, the app provides a secure and convenient way to allow users access to Coupa procurement, approvals, receiving, expenses, travel and virtual cards while on the go.
“All transactions occur on the server, so no transactional data is stored on the phone, enhancing corporate security,” Doug says.
“Employees can be deactivated on the server and various policies for authentication timeouts or additional PIN codes can be enforced. Additionally, a wide variety of flexible user authentication, server access and other security rules can be configured to meet specific organisation requirements.”
Baber says that, with login methods such as biometric fingerprinting, MFA OTP, single sign-on and emerging digital identity methods, SAP has seen advances in the market that make secure logins possible.
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