Budget and authorisation functions

There is no reason why ordering via TradCom should mean scrapping your current ordering and approval procedures.

If you have agreements within your organisation concerning who is authorised to order which products from which supplier, then TradCom offers the flexibility to rapidly set up this approval flow.

TradCom is a web application and, as such, accessible to all authorised Internet users.

Once the organisation has registered and sub-users have been created, an approval flow can be set up. When your shopping list is sent in for approval, its approver is informed by e-mail. The approver sees all the product details, your net prices and the availability in real time. On the basis of this information, he can give approval 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.

The original requesting party is kept continually informed by e-mail of the action taken, even if this is a refusal of the order.

This prevents the requesting party who is expecting his goods to be delivered finding out weeks later that his order has never been approved. The turnaround time for orders within organisations can quickly mount up with each step in establishing and formulating the requirement, generating the order and final delivery up to and including the administrative settlement of the order. All these actions are part of the “MRO purchasing activity cycle”. The time it takes to go through this cycle represents an enormous, difficult-to-quality, but real cost for the entire organisation.

When signing a series of fax or e-mail orders at the end of the week, it is really worth critically analysing those steps in the approval process. Approval procedures for raw materials and investment goods are often adopted for MRO order procedures.

Deploying technology can increase the efficiency of each of those purchasing steps. In turn, this leads to cost savings.

If such an approval flow has already been set up in your organisation’s ERP system, with electronic approval facilities and automatic message exchange, it is possible to fully integrate TradCom into your in-house ERP system.