Organizations rely on a combination of direct and indirect procurement activities to keep their operations running, productive, and efficient. Direct procurement is often easier to manage and track thanks to its direct link to a core product or service. Manufacturers need raw materials to make their end products, for example, and hospitals rely on supplies and equipment to support their patients.
Indirect procurement isn’t as clear-cut or easy to track. It’s about buying goods and services necessary for a business's operations and focuses only on items not directly related to the company’s core product or service. This includes everything from office supplies and travel expenses to software subscriptions and maintenance services. Indirect purchases are usually made by individuals across various departments, which effectively lowers visibility, inhibits good spending controls, and can make the procurement process more expensive and time-consuming.
Here are some other common indirect procurement challenges that companies can’t effectively manage using disparate systems, spreadsheets and paper:
- Its decentralized nature can lead to maverick spending, with employees bypassing established procurement processes.
- Paper-based purchase requests and approvals can create delays, errors, and a lack of real-time data.
- The broad array of indirect purchases makes it difficult to standardize processes and negotiate favorable contracts with suppliers.
And with no centralized control, enforcing procurement guidelines and ensuring that purchases adhere to ethical standards and legal obligations is nearly impossible.
NetSuite understands the complexities that companies face on the indirect procurement front and has developed a new application offered as part of the Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) platform’s new 2025.1 release. SuiteProcurement meets all of the above challenges and more by centralizing and automating the indirect procurement process.
By enabling direct shopping on supplier e-commerce sites from within NetSuite, SuiteProcurement streamlines the purchase request and approval workflow, ensuring compliance with established policies. This integration with the Oracle Business Network (OBN) expands supplier access, fostering competitive pricing and efficient sourcing. It also automates purchase order (PO) generation and transmission, effectively eliminating manual errors and offering real-time visibility into indirect spending.
Getting All Things Procurement in One Place
Powered by OBN, NetSuite SuiteProcurement brings business supplies and service vendors onto a single platform to help improve the buyer experience and accelerate and control purchasing. The tool transforms indirect procurement from a fragmented and inefficient process into a streamlined, strategic one.
SuiteProcurement lets users shop directly from a supplier's online store. For example, users are eligible for a free 12-month Amazon Business Prime Medium membership that provides business-only pricing and savings, and a 50% discount on membership renewals in subsequent years. In addition, Staples Business Advantage is offering SuiteProcurement customers dynamic pricing to help them receive an average of 10% savings on all business essentials.
“For growing businesses, indirect procurement can be a time-consuming and costly process that negatively impacts the bottom line,” Evan Goldberg, Oracle NetSuite’s founder and EVP told the audience at SuiteWorld in September. “By giving customers access to great offers they can purchase from Amazon Business and Staples Business Advantage directly in NetSuite, SuiteProcurement will help them optimize spending and efficiently buy the goods and services needed to support growth.”
Key Features that Streamline Indirect Procurement
According to NetSuite, SuiteProcurement integrates financial and procurement workflows to provide:
- Seamless vendor integrations: Reduce costs and enhance financial controls by establishing trading partner relationships and providing access to preferred pricing on goods and services through OBN.
- Automated approval processes: Support compliance with organizational policies and protect the bottom line by automatically routing purchase order requests for approvals and enabling tailored approval workflows based on employee location, department, and spending amount.
- Automated purchase order creation and invoicing: Confirm orders are fulfilled and paid on time by transmitting purchase orders directly to vendors and automating order confirmation, shipping, and vendor bills.
- Complete visibility of spend: Reduce costs and improve relationships with suppliers by providing complete and real-time insights on spending across locations, departments, vendors, projects, and accounting codes.
- Improved data accuracy: Ensure procurement data accuracy by centralizing all purchase order details including description of items purchased, manufacturer name, and manufacturer item number.
- Streamlined accounting processes: Reduce manual work and track spending against budgets by leveraging pre-defined category mapping to automatically post to the appropriate general ledger accounts.
In a recent webinar introducing the NetSuite 2025.1 release and all of the new features and functionalities that it offers, the NetSuite team discussed how this new SuiteApp brings indirect procurement right into the ERP. This helps create an efficient, cost effective and transparent process for buying indirect goods and services, and further integrates the broader procurement function into a company’s core business system.
Here's how it works:
- Once buyers check out in NetSuite, SuiteProcurement will automatically create a purchase request and initiate routing through the approvals process.
- Once the request is approved, the order is then transmitted to the supplying vendor.
- The tool also provides automated electronic vendor bill receipt and posting for maximum efficiency and accuracy.
“With SuiteProcurement, your business has better access to volume discounts on goods and services by centralizing purchasing power with a select set of vendors so you can increase your savings and reduce overhead costs,” the company says. “This also helps you maintain strong controls over spending and purchases.”
Turning Indirect Procurement into a Strategic Advantage
With indirect procurement embedded within NetSuite, buyers can shop on a supplier’s e-commerce site, giving them access to volume discounts on goods and services by centralizing purchasing power with a select set of vendors, Rebeca Bichachi writes in NetSuite 2025.1 Features New Procurement Solution, Enhanced Bill Capture, and More.
“At checkout, SuiteProcurement creates a purchase request, initiates the approval process, and automatically transmits the purchase order once approved to the vendor,” says Bichachi, who adds that Amazon Business and Staples Business Advantage are the first suppliers to support this solution and are offering significant benefits to SuiteProcurement customers.
SuiteProcurement is available as an add-on module and also included within NetSuite Advanced Procurement. Organizations that want to optimize their operational spending and drive sustainable growth should contact award-winning NetSuite Alliance Partner, Vursor to optimize SuiteProcurement and transform indirect procurement.