IT Procurement Best Practices: How to Approach the Entire Process

Regardless of your business size or industry, efficiently procuring and distributing IT assets to your workforce is vital. Whether it’s hardware like laptops and tablets, software, apps, or digital services, you need a streamlined, reliable end-to-end process. 

Following IT procurement best practices is your ticket to reducing friction and accommodating the needs of your growing business every step of the way. 

Here, you’ll find 11 procurement process best practices to help you at all stages. 

What is IT Procurement?

Although there are several steps involved with IT procurement, it boils down to four main elements.

• Determining what IT assets you need for hardware procurement, software procurement, and digital procurement
• Strategically sourcing assets for your supply chain by choosing professional, reliable suppliers
• Negotiating contracts and handling supplier management
• Implementing IT assets and distributing them to your team members

The end goal of your procurement practice is to get the right IT assets into the hands of your employees quickly, efficiently, and with maximum ROI. 

Effective IT Procurement Best Practices

1. Define Clear Requirements

Arguably, the most important of the best practices is having concrete goals in mind as to what you’re looking to achieve with modern procurement. In other words, what are your objectives?

Obviously, providing your staff with modern tech should be a goal of your procurement plan. 

But some others may include: 

• Getting the most value from IT assets for the least amount of money
• Making your organization more efficient with best practices
• Making a digital transformation to utilize cutting-edge tech
• Developing strategic sourcing methods and building lasting supplier relationships
• Practicing effective supplier relationship management and promoting supplier diversity

It’s important to ensure everyone is on the same page from the start, which is why it’s helpful to get stakeholder involvement (more on this later) and assign a chief procurement officer/procurement manager, procurement leaders, or procurement department to oversee everything. 

2. Strategically Select Vendors 

There is a wide range of potential vendors available for procurement activity. And you need to look beyond just pricing when making your decision. 

Some critical factors to consider include:

• Industry experience
• Reliability
• Time in business
• Professionalism
• Ratings
• Reviews
• Customer service
• Scalability

Also, consider the renewal date for subscriptions like SaaS and CRM platforms. We recommend connecting with a sales rep for a one-on-one conversation and, if possible, trying the IT asset firsthand before officially establishing vendor relationships. 

3. Make Informed Contract Negotiations

Every procurement software contract will come with specific terms and conditions, with the potential for hidden clauses. 

Before officially greenlighting any supplier relationships, an important procurement best practice is to have a full overview of exactly what you’re agreeing to before signing a contract with a potential supplier. 

If a particular aspect of the contract isn’t to your liking (e.g., a service level agreement or renewal date), try to negotiate it to find a condition that better suits your needs. 

In many cases, a supplier will be willing to make the adjustments. But if they don’t, you may need to seek a different vendor for your supply chain. 

4. Optimize the Procurement Process

The exact IT assets you’ll use in business operations will inevitably change over time. That’s why you want to develop a fully optimized asset procurement process so you can streamline the sequence of steps to get the assets you need without any hiccups along the way. 

You could, for example, develop a workflow and standard procedure for procuring a device, whether it’s hardware, software, apps, or digital services. 

Or, you could establish an approval process where a new asset can get approved while only involving key stakeholders to save time.

5. Analyze Spending to Enhance Transparency and Efficiency

As we’ve said before, ROI is the name of the game with IT procurement operations. Regardless of the specific tech you’re implementing in your supply chain, you always want to keep your spending as low as possible. 

A critical precursor is to analyze the spending of your procurement strategy. Some specific areas to look at include pricing structures, overall spending per supplier, and pricing increases per vendor.

You may also want to compare how much you’re spending with a current supplier against key competitors to see if there could be potential savings if you switched. 

6. Gauge Supplier Performance

After you’ve been using an IT asset for some time, you’ll want to assess supplier performance to see if you’ve been getting the value you were hoping for. 

For instance, have there been any major glitches or system disruptions since you’ve been using their asset?  How responsive and helpful has their customer support team been? How satisfied have your employees been using the asset?

These are just a few questions to help you analyze supplier performance and optimize vendor management. 

7. Integrate Procurement Processes

Effective procurement management starts with having a dedicated procurement specialist and/or team in place. But making it work doesn’t end there. 

At the end of the day, your procurement process should be cross-departmental, where other teams within your organization are in on the action. For example, this could include collaboration with IT, HR, finance, and legal. 

By keeping everyone in the loop in your procurement procedure, contract management, current best practices, and so on, you’ll be better positioned to create and maintain a successful procurement cycle and prevent small issues from escalating. 

8. Get Stakeholder Involvement

This piggybacks on our previous best procurement function practices #1 and #7. Again, we can’t stress enough how important collaboration is for developing an effective procurement strategy.

You never want the process to be siloed, where only one or a handful of team members are part of it. Rather, every key stakeholder should be involved.

Just be sure that you’re realistic about how much involvement is required from each party to keep the process simple and streamlined.

9. Leverage Modern Technology to Optimize Your Inventory

Besides using technology to optimize your business and make it more efficient, you can use additional technology to make your IT even more efficient. 

For instance, an inventory management system can give you a bird’s-eye view of all the IT assets in your inventory for maximum visibility. 

Lifecycle management tools allow you to track hardware assets throughout their lifecycle so you’ll know when maintenance is required and when upgrades or disposals are needed. 

And AI tools can be used to analyze asset usage to identify patterns and trends to supply your team with the right mix of hardware, software, apps, and digital services. 

10. Train Your Procurement Team

Once you’ve fully fleshed out your IT procurement best practices, be sure to train your procurement team on them. 

Some specific areas of emphasis include:

• Criteria for selecting a supplier
• How to negotiate supplier procurement contracts
• How to maintain healthy supplier relationships
• Data points to analyze asset and vendor performance

11. Make Continuous Improvement

IT is incredibly dynamic and ever-changing. 

Therefore, you should always be looking to evolve with your best practice. More specifically, you want to continually iterate your procurement process to account for emerging technologies, new supplier offerings, changes in organizational goals, and so on. 

Therefore, you’ll likely need to make changes to your procurement policy, strategic sourcing game plan, and best practices from time to time. 

Work with allwhere Procurement Professionals

Because of the complexities involved with the procurement process and best practices, many companies prefer to use IT procurement services to simplify things and eliminate much of the hassle.  

For example, allwhere is a global IT procurement professional that manages the process end-to-end, offering strategic sourcing of top-of-the-line assets from today’s most reputable vendors. 

We can help you find computers, devices, accessories, and more while handling all of the logistics, supplier communication, and shipping in our procurement service.  

That way, you can use indirect procurement to conveniently equip your workforce with the IT they need with no heavy lifting on your end. You can also easily manage all of your IT assets from a single dashboard for full transparency every step of the way. 

Learn more about allwhere procurement here. 

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