You Can’t Outrun The Cloud

5 minute read

Cloud computing has had a huge impact upon the way that we live and work. While many of us have embraced the cloud at home (Netflix, Spotify, eBay, etc) has it really been so well adopted in business? According to the Deloitte Global CPO survey, on average 25% of CPOs believe that cloud computing will have the biggest impact on digital procurement which suggests that either the need is being already fulfilled, or the value of using cloud-based software has been understated.

While many IT departments are making the move over to the Cloud for their other operating systems, in procurement, there has been a struggle to deploy a fully encompassing solution that meets all needs. There has not always been the option available to procurement, but now this technology is available.

If your business has not yet explored using cloud-based software, here are the first signs that it’s time.

Your business has multiple locations

With globalisation in full swing, businesses are no longer just multi-location, but multinational. Today’s online market means that communications are much quicker and more efficient, especially when using the world’s business language: English. However, to cater for local markets, different locations may need to work with different currencies, languages and with different suppliers.

How can you manage this? Isn’t it expensive and risky to have unwieldy servers and a local team on the ground? Does each team hoard their digital assets, running the risk of using out of date images or an RGB logo for something to be printed? Who would even translate all those catalogues?

There is a solution that is proven and readily available. Marketing teams, internal and external customers all purchasing solely from your preferred suppliers from one place – you will find that in the cloud.

Because many cloud solutions are browser based, it means that all good solutions need to be fully internationalised – presenting the correct language and currency just by the user’s default browser settings.

Read our Blog about Web2Print and Internationalisation.

Globalisation might make global purchasing more complex, but with the right solution in place, it does not need to be an insurmountable task. It’s purchasing without borders.

You need to work more closely with your marketing teams – but don’t know where to start

You are already familiar with working with fixed or static catalogues. This makes the purchasing of very standard and tangible items easy – however, what about those items that could be highly variable?

With that, we’re talking about your marketing team. Marketing and procurement have not always had a reputation for being the easiest of companions, but by introducing the right solution into their department, highly variable and complex items can make their way through your existing purchasing systems, even perhaps automating what seemed to be impossible to do.

It is possibly due to this reason – the complexity and the variety of the items that marketeers need to buy – printed items, updated digital campaign imagery, etc meant that renegade spend was inevitable when the purchasing system was inflexible. Having access to digital assets to compile, approve and order material all in one place integrated with your purchasing system means that you can with all conscience fulfil your terms with your suppliers.

A solution for marketing teams to buy highly variable items originally came from the printing industry – bringing complex items direct from the customer’s online catalogue into their own production workflow, without the work being touched by a human being. This is achieved with a process called PunchOut or Roundtrip, which we will talk about now.

You know that continuing to work in silos is unsustainable

Everybody in business wants to avoid the inefficiency of repetition, it’s a waste of resource and it’s demotivating for staff and not to mention a hotbed for error. It’s not a sustainable way to work, but many business unit managers ponder how they can solve the problem.

The automation of processes is not a distant promise of the future. It’s now. Businesses around the world are doing this today. If there is anything a CPO can take on board as a goal for this year – if they haven’t already is to review automation their processes.

Just picture a smooth process of the user ordering an item to automatically move into the workflow of the supplier and because you already have pricing and terms agreed with them, a PO is generated and paid for with no delays or administration. That’s PunchOut/Roundtrip and this is an integration that works with many different applications. Our solution, Coreprint Pro integrates via this method with many of the major providers of procurement technology, SAP Ariba, Coupa, Oracle just to name a few.

Read how Web2Print can get you paid quicker

This process could not be achieved without cloud-based technology and by adopting solutions that you know can work together, a diverse number of different pain points within the business can be solved – company wide and worldwide.

Our Conclusion

There are many reasons to move to the cloud in our personal and professional lives. Overall, cloud-based software is the most secure way to work and ensures that you will always have the most up to date version. Across a business that could have thousands of staff across many locations, the value is there to be seen immediately. Your key to success in implementing cloud-based procurement software in your business (oddly enough) are the departments you would not expect – Marketing and IT can be your biggest champions.

Want to know more about how a cloud based Web2Print solution works? Book a demonstration with us and we will show you how.