CODA Collaborative Procurement - Product overview

The collaborative approach to procurement

As well as world-class accounting and spend management, our CODA financial management suite can now offer you significant additional benefits, by helping everybody in the procure-to-pay process to work with one another and with suppliers more efficiently and effectively.

End-to-end visibility and control

Procurement is much more than placing, tracking and processing purchase orders. Before that can happen, there are various other stages, including: the initial logging of a requirement; deciding if (and how) the organisation will meet those needs; identifying potential suppliers; sending out RFQs (requests for quotations); choosing the most suitable supplier; and final negotiations – all with associated emails and documents. If all this is taking place in separate systems, then often the only visible output is the order itself – at best transferred electronically but often rekeyed manually into the finance system. These islands of information make it impossible to see exactly what is happening at the time or to understand, later, why the organisation came to a particular purchase decision.

CODA Collaborative Procurement* is our ultimate solution for the procure-to-pay process. It covers the extended cycle from the initial demand for goods or services and the approved requisition, right through to payment. Because it ties together all the people and systems involved, you gain a single, clear, consistent view of the entire purchasing process – in real time – and complete, reliable auditability.

Extending collaboration

One of the major advances in CODA Collaborative Procurement has come from joint development work with Microsoft. The result is a truly market-leading solution – for the first time ever, dedicated buying tools are embedded within Microsoft® Outlook.

Traditionally, it has been difficult to put a single procurement system in place across the whole organisation. Non-finance users (especially buyers) are often reluctant to learn a “finance” system that is not tied into their needs or ways of working, just in order to raise and track purchase orders.

Now we have solved this issue, by bringing the procurement system into the environment where buyers operate most of the time – email – and helping them complete their own part of the procurement process more easily too. As a result, users stay in familiar environments such as their email desktop or web browser screens, from where they can raise and assess orders and all without entering a separate application. This enables the widest possible adoption and use of the system across the organisation.

Further information

This website covers UNIT4 in the UK. To discover more about the full range of ways that we can help your organisation, please:

• either continue exploring this section for more about each of our CODA financial management solutions
• or read more on this website about our specialisations, sector focus, services or company
• or contact us to discuss your requirements in more detail.