All You Need to Know About Procurement For Your Business

Starting and maintaining a business requires superhuman efforts to consistently render the right services to your target audience as well as an everyday assurance that your customers can rely on you at all times for your goods or services.

Procurement isn’t limited to retail companies alone. Even as a wholesale company, the next time that you are stressing about how to get bulk products, procurement is just your best option. 

Let’s get started.

What is Procurement?

Procurement is the process of sourcing or obtaining services or goods for a business. It includes the end-to-end procedures of ordering, buying, and delivery of products. Procurement could be in 3 forms including 

The procurement process involves the following;

• Need identification
• Communication tools and processes
• Preparation of proposals and quotes requests
• Payment and contract negotiation
• Final purchase
• Delivery

Procurement fraud occurs if appropriate measures are not put in place. Up next, we would be discussing various ways to drastically reduce procurement fraud, especially for new and upcoming businesses.

Ways to Protect Your Business From Procurement Fraud

• Refuse items that weren’t ordered

If you are quite new in procurement, it would be relatively easier to track procurement processes and not fall victim to fake invoices. However, as you grow in the business and engage in more procurement offerings, chances are that you may fall for scam procurers sending items that you didn’t request. To prevent this, track your procurement orders as efficiently as possible and cross-check invoices for verification.

• Allow only designated personnel to place procurement orders

For a continuously growing business like yours, you cannot always stay at the top of affairs on all things. Sadly, recent surveys have it that quite a several procurement frauds are committed by internal staff members. Make sure that you employ not only professional personnel, but trusted individuals who can handle procurement, place orders for goods and services, and follow through as loyally as possible.

• Track all purchases to sieve out low-quality or copycat products or services

This is why it is imperative to employ someone trustworthy to handle your procurement. Such a person should track all purchases coming into your business, no matter how large or little the purchases are per time, and be able to detect defective products. The importance of documentation isn’t just for the now, as documents like this would always come in handy later in the future. 

• Do not accept procurement offers from unknown suppliers

For quality assurance purposes, you should collate a list of your suppliers after performing underground checks to confirm their validity and authenticity. Not all suppliers are real, quite a number of them are out to scam businesses in the most cunning ways possible. To reduce the incidence of fraud or crimes, ascertain that a would-be supplier has a track record of being genuine. This you can confirm by requesting evidence of past and current clients. You may also want to verify from such clients as well, this saves you the stress of learning your lesson the hard way.

All the increasing news on procurement crimes may have affected your procurement activities and it is perfectly fine to be careful. One way to remain careful is to work with a stable and registered procurement company, where you do not only get your goods in one piece but also the right enlightenment to keep your business going. At Lumasen, all your procurement needs as a business owner are in the right hands!