Buy-side Portals - Workflow Overview

Workflow Overview

There are 3 portals that facilitate the requirements of the 'buy-side' of the aggregated procurement ecosystem. Application functionality provided by these portals consist of a combination of workbenches, workbooks, worksheets, dashboards and utilities (please refer to the About the Aggregated Procurement Management Platform section for an explanation of these application constructs).

The three buy-side portals correlate with the standard roles found in industry-leading procurement operations, namely:

1. Buyer Portal

Used by Buyers to Create Purchase Orders by entering required quantities against selected items in the Master Procurement List; after item selection and quantity specification a purchase order is automatically generated, and is added to the 'Purchase Order Awaiting Approval' workflow stream.

2. Procurement Control Portal

Used by the Procurement Controller to control and manage the procurement workflow process, including approving and sending Purchase Orders (to the Procurement Aggregator Agency), processing supplier deliveries (goods received) and processing supplier invoices.

3. Procurement Administration Portal

Used by the Procurement Administrator to create and maintain procurement master data, including the Procurement Master List.

The Aggregated Procurement Management Platform provides 2 alternative ways to process a procurement transaction, namely (i) the Buyer-originating Procurement Transaction approach, and (ii) the Supplier-originating Procurement Transaction approach (for an explanation of the rationale and detailed description of these alternative processing cycles please refer to the How It Works section). Application and utilization of the buy-side portals in terms of these two alternative transaction processing flows are as follows:

i) Buyer-originating Procurement Transaction