A significant part of the cost for any purchasing workflow is the paperwork involved in creating a purchase order, receiving the invoice, verifying receipt of the goods ordered, and finally paying the invoice. This process is known as “Procure-to-Pay” and there are many solutions for large enterprises that are designed to fully integrate and automate all parts of this process. 

However, many of these systems are far too complex and expensive for small and mid-sized labs to implement. How can they realize the same cost-saving benefits of automation without the huge cost of implementing a system like Jaggear or Ariba?

Lab Procurement Services can help you improve your procurement process and provide significant ROI for even the smallest labs. Using digital document automation software, provided by our partners at Simple Software, we can significantly reduce the time it takes to manage purchasing paperwork and enter the relevant data in your accounting systems. These systems have a very low cost and don’t require dedicated IT specialists to manage them, making them perfect for startups and small labs.

We can also provide Robotic Process Automation or “RPA” solutions that allow you to automate any process that requires repetitive manual steps. With RPA you can make any two applications work together seamlessly regardless of whether the vendors provide any interface for it (API).

Vendors that send a significant number of invoices will often provide the option of receiving them in XML format. Our developers can help you set up XML invoice processing between you and any vendor that supports it, regardless of whether you use our managed procurement services.

Invoices can be received via email or downloaded from a website or service, and automatically fed to your accounting systems built-in data import, or entered via API or RPA bot automation.

We can also turn the XML invoices into human-readable PDFs that can be archived with scanned paper and emailed invoices to create a complete, searchable archive. 

We’ll help you find the most cost-effective integration and work with your vendors, IT department, procurement, and accounts payable teams to ensure a successful implementation.

Vendors with high transaction volumes can implement Electronic Data Interchange or “EDI” to fully automate the exchange of purchase order and invoice data. This is the classic approach to automation, but due to the large number of legacy systems that use EDI it is still a commonly used way to automate the procure-to-pay process.

The best way to leverage LPS automation and managed procurement solutions is to work with our managed procurement services team to consolidate your vendors and streamline your purchasing pipeline. Instead of implementing data exchanges with dozens of different vendors, many of whom lack the purchasing volume to justify the cost, you simply integrate with Lab Procurement Services and let us handle the rest.

We integrate your systems with ours using the simplest and most cost effective 3-letter acronym available, be it PDF, XML, EDI, API, CRM, RPA, CRM with integrated RPA  or etc. Now, any vendor you purchase from using the LPS managed services becomes fully automated, and you get to leverage LPS wholesale buyer’s club discounts and other benefits.

Our consultants can help assist your company in the selection and implementation of any turnkey procurement solution. There are many fully integrated purchasing and ERP solutions available, many of which are scalable to smaller labs. However there are many things to consider when selecting such a system, and many implementation, integration, and data migration challenges presented in the process.