Does your construction business have what it takes to compete in a digital world? Do you need it? If you have yet to make digital transformation part of your overall business process management plan, you might find yourself playing catch-up with your competition.

So where should you start to digitise?

For contractors, you might find that digitising the purchasing cycle or the supply chain management will give you the best return on investment. It is the most effective and profitable place to begin your digital transformation journey.

By placing your entire stakeholders on one platform to monitor material purchasing, your construction business’ financial health and competitive agility will benefit almost immediately and greatly. This is assuming, of course, that the digital transformation is done strategically.

What’s The Big Fuss?

Digital procurement is a strategic transformation from manual purchasing workflow. It is the utilisation of technology for each person involved in the purchasing cycle, from site supervisor to account manager, who performs purchasing, monitoring, and accounting tasks on one common digital purchasing platform.

It is an innovative method to do away with manual paperwork. You can think of it as using digital tools to help with the issuance and approval of Material Request Form (MR), quotation, and purchase order (PO). It also impacts how you pay your supplier, where it automates the matching of PO, DO and invoice. As your team uses the digital procurement tool, backend technologies such as artificial intelligence, advanced data analytics, and process automation help to streamline and optimise procurement.

The best feature of digital procurement software is that it manages your entire supply chain, and automatically compiles real-time reports.

These reports come with intelligence analysis of procurement data, helping decision makers to focus on what matters and giving you a holistic view to monitor material spending, supplier risk and budget.

Digital procurement software can connect to your existing enterprise resource planning (ERP) and accounting software, ensuring your procurement data is accurate. This will give you a single source of truth to manage your construction business, instead of trying to piece together a cohesive view from multiple sources.

Complex construction projects need to leverage support from digital procurement software to gain benefits from its data-driven analytics reporting to ensure project profits.

Digital procurement saves you time and money

Running a construction business is complex, given that you would have multiple construction projects running at a time. Ensuring materials purchased can be delivered on time and within budget is critical in ensuring project profit.

You can’t save what you can’t see

Most spreadsheet data (about 88%) contains mistakes, but you lose visibility on the process as you manage your business. On the other hand, e-procurement software lets you gain full visibility on how your team buys material.

With the help of digital analytics procurement software, you can see and catch spending mistakes. When you have doubt, drill down into the source of data with just a few clicks. You can use the data to sharpen your procurement strategy.

You Can Make Better Informed Decisions

Numbers don’t lie. Your data will be available to you at any time, in real-time. This means no more delays on reports. Digital procurement software provides you with actionable insights for you to make better decisions, faster.

Speedbrick COMPOSE—The Digital Procurement Software You Need

One such example is Speedbrick COMPOSE, a software (mobile/desktop) that streamlines your purchasing workflow. Users of Speedbrick COMPOSE have reported positive results such as increased project profits and better materials management (purchasing costs stay within the allotted budget).

Furthermore, Speedbrick COMPOSE provides several features such as historical price trends, automatic monthly material report generation, overbudget alerts, among many others. Users can prevent duplicate efforts and have increased visibility throughout the purchasing cycle, from material request to matching.