How to Manage Buying Across Multiple Locations With Centralized Procurement

Key takeaways:

• Multi-location businesses are at risk of overspending and reduced efficiency due to fragmented procurement.
• The solution is to adopt a centralized buying process with a single team that can implement your procurement policies.
• This approach facilitates tech adoption, making use cases like automation and data-driven decision-making more accessible.
• Raiven is here to help you centralize your buying with the convenient Raiven Marketplace.

Is your multi-location business losing money because of fragmented procurement?

When each local buying team makes decisions independently, you risk overspending or buying non-compliant supplies.

The solution is to adopt a centralized buying process. This approach reduces costs, improves visibility, and turns buying into a strategic advantage for growth.

Here’s how industry leaders turn fragmented multi-location procurement into a centralized process supporting growth.

Multi-Location Procurement Creates Challenges

Multi-location enterprises in the trades often handle buying locally due to various factors (including quicker decision-making, local expertise, and legacy processes).

However, managing buying across multiple locations creates challenges:

• It’s hard to get good visibility over your spending.
• Rogue spending is more likely.
• Inventory levels might be too high or too low at some locations.
• You don’t know if all locations meet compliance requirements.
• Some local teams might work with vendors you haven’t properly vetted.
• There can be confusion regarding roles, responsibilities, and permissions.
• You might not always get the prices and terms negotiated in your contracts.

The Need for a Standardized Procurement Process

A standardized and centralized buying process addresses these challenges and unlocks improved operational efficiency.

Standardized buying can take different forms:

• You can let local teams make the buying decisions and submit purchase requests to a central team that approves or rejects them.
• You can also centralize the entire process from project planning to buying, freeing up valuable time for your local teams.

With a centralized purchasing model, you have a clear purchasing policy and the means to enforce it across all your projects.

There are several benefits:

• Instead of maintaining multiple buying teams, you have a single team with lower overhead costs.
• You’re paying consistent prices that align with any discounts you negotiated with your vendors.
• Your buying team has complete visibility over spending and inventory levels.
• Every product, supplier, or buying platform meets your compliance requirements.
• Issues like double billing or overpaying are much easier to spot.

Centralized enterprise procurement is more than just purchase orders. You can adopt standardized processes for contract management, communication with sales reps, invoice verification, and billing.

It lets you be more strategic about buying activities and vendor relationship management processes. The risk of human errors decreases, and buying becomes more streamlined, supporting scale and growth for your enterprise in the trades.

The Role of Data and Tech in Centralizing Procurement

Another benefit of centralized purchasing for contractors is that adopting tech tools becomes much easier. Instead of training multiple teams, your central team can easily learn about and implement solutions like procurement and inventory management software.

Plus, a centralized process makes it easier to track and use data. With the right analytics solution in place, you can gain visibility into:

• Project costs.
• Top spending categories.
• Waste and double-spending.
• Pricing fluctuations.

This visibility creates accountability for your buying team and gives you the quality procurement data you need to make better buying decisions. Given supply chain disruptions and high material prices affecting the trades, data-driven procurement is a strong strategy for mitigating risks and pivoting quickly when prices fluctuate.

Once your buying team feels comfortable with procurement and inventory management tools, you can look into procurement trends like automating recurring tasks, which is much easier to implement if you’re not working with multiple buying teams.

Empowering Local Teams While Maintaining Guardrails

Centralized procurement isn’t about reducing the agency of your local teams. Instead, it frees up valuable time for them and allows you to leverage their local expertise while maintaining good visibility.

The key is to define roles, permissions, and approval processes clearly. For instance, you can auto-approve small purchases from your local teams and have your central procurement team manually review the larger orders.

You can also improve inventory management with a process that supports exchanges between your locations. If a product is hard to source or costs more than usual, your central procurement team could check if one of your locations has it in stock and move it to the team that needs it.

Raiven Improves Buying for Multi-Location Businesses

The Raiven Marketplace is a central procurement platform where your buying team can easily find all the necessary parts and supplies.

Buying everything in the same place gives you complete visibility, and you can still give some leeway to your local teams by letting them submit purchase requests or giving them access to the Raiven Marketplace.

Raiven is on a mission to transform buying for the trades. Our innovative platform connects contractors, enterprises, and suppliers into a digital supply chain network.

The goal is to simplify sourcing, reduce costs, and unlock operational efficiency. New business opportunities become available, and you can scale faster.

Stop wasting time and money on inefficient procurement! As a Raiven member, you’ll get access to:

• Our procurement platform. Manage vendors and accounts with one convenient digital tool.
• Price tracking. Always find the best prices on the supplies you need.
• Exclusive cost savings. Raiven pre-negotiates prices, cutting your costs by 10 to 15%.
• A thriving community. Join a fast-growing group of 2,500+ contractors ready to innovate.

Visit Raiven for more information about modernizing and centralizing your buying activities.