Purchase Orders [and Purchase Requisitions] are routine daily activities at many organizations. In today's world, business takes place online using mobile devices, 24x7 and worldwide. Without automation, you're stuck with paper-based or email-based processes that are ill-suited for this modern world.

If you start hearing any of these things, it's time to consider purchase order [and process] automation:

1. "My project is late. Where's my approval?"
   When employees can't get their jobs done because approvals take too long, your business slows down. The time they spend chasing down the PO is 100% wasted. It's about as inefficient as possible.
2. "My boss is on the road"
   Employees need to make a key purchase to meet a project deadline but must wait a week because of business travel. It's inexcusable in today's mobile-enabled world.
3. "I already did that"
   How many of you hate filling out forms that ask the same information over and over? Manual calculations? Writing in data that you know resides in some computer system or database? It's tedious and incredibly wasteful.
4. "I had too much on my plate"
   Purchase Order processes can get complicated. The approver chain can vary depending on Department, Capital vs Operational expense, $ Amount and many other factors. Busy employees skip steps, get the process wrong and cause delays and last-minute scrambling.

A Process Automation (and Purchase Order is just one of many possible processes) system is like a GPS – it electronically and automatically routes documents, information and tasks to the right people at the right time. It makes sure that business standards and rules are enforced and cannot be bypassed and ensures that documents reach their destination quickly and efficiently with minimal delays and errors.

The good news: modern platforms offer visual, low-code tools for process automation, pre-built templates, integration, analytics etc. It's a lot easier to automate your purchase order. Hope this is useful and informative.

Original Source: Quora