Set up a strategic sourcing process to ensure that all vendor evaluations follow a standard procedure.
Educate stakeholders on how the sourcing team evaluates vendors and the roles and responsibilities of the business vs. the sourcing team in a vendor evaluation process.
Run the RFX’s ( Request for Information(RFI) or Request for Proposal (RFP)) process with the vendors. RFIs are generally run to gather information for creating an RFP and asking vendors to submit their proposals.
Support the business with analysis of the RFP responses and help drive a decision that meets organizational goals.
Work with contract management to review vendor contracts and mitigate risk.
Own a savings target and be responsible for tracking procurement cost savings.

Provide standard contract templates for different products and services that your organization purchases. It includes defining standards for commercial and legal terms. Standards for commercial terms are set up in consultation with the finance and treasury departments.
Define standard fallback clauses and work with sourcing teams to enable sourcing self-service.
Review vendor contracts to ensure that they meet the defined corporate terms.
Work with a vendor legal to negotiate a contract
Set up a central repository for storing all contracts so that it is easy to find contracts and track critical dates like expiration and renewal dates.

The basic assumption here is that you can divide your spending into big chunks of categories. Too few categories lead to unequal distribution of work. Too many defeats the purpose of organizing your Spend by categories because it is unmanageable

Pros:
It is a great approach where you need domain knowledge to source the category, such as telecom services, clinical research services, or other specialized projects.
It affords the sourcing/category manager to grasp the domain knowledge and manage the category through a category management plan.
Cons:
It is not a good approach for stakeholders if the stakeholders are purchasing multiple categories. For example, you have an IT hardware and software owner, and you have an owner for professional services. So your stakeholders always have to remember to reach out to two different sourcing team members based on what they are procuring.
It is not a good model for resource utilization unless you have a steady stream of sourcing activities. If an individual doesn’t have enough categories, then that could lead to inefficient resource use.

Collaboration
Effective Procurement needs strong collaboration with various departments. Strong collaboration skills are required in all aspects of Procurement. Some examples where a strong partnership is required.
Working with department owners to align procurement strategy with their departmental goals
Working with suppliers to run an effective RFP
Coordinating the evaluation process with internal stakeholders during an RFP process

You are trying to understand the Spend better so that you can identify saving opportunities.
The focus, in the beginning, should be to automate the purchasing process so that the transactions are taken care of and you can get the product when you need it and where you need it.
The two main benefits an eSourcing tool provides is that
It helps to gather data in one single place so that you can easily compare the results from suppliers instead of manually collating all the responses in one single place.
It makes it easy to get feedback from the stakeholders and rate the vendor scores to get a total score for each supplier.

You are trying to understand the Spend better so that you can identify saving opportunities.
The focus, in the beginning, should be to automate the purchasing process so that the transactions are taken care of and you can get the product when you need it and where you need it.
The two main benefits an eSourcing tool provides is that
It helps to gather data in one single place so that you can easily compare the results from suppliers instead of manually collating all the responses in one single place.
It makes it easy to get feedback from the stakeholders and rate the vendor scores to get a total score for each supplier.

The ability for end-users to create requisitions. This also includes creating requisitions from catalogs so that Employees can direct spending to the preferred vendor.
The ability for the spending to be authorized at the correct organization level. This not only allows for cost control but allows the purchasing team to review the Spend before it happens.The last step in this process is to send the purchase order to the supplier. Based on the supplier’s capabilities and the capability of your system, you can send the orders via EDI, email, or through a supplier portal.

Purchase And Invoice Use Case
This case covers the automation of the purchase order and invoice process. The idea is to have the end-to-end process in one system to be efficient for the Procurement and Accounts Payables team. The entire process is streamlined, and that ensures faster processing of the documents. This use case needs close collaboration with your Account payables team.
This use case covers the steps mentioned in the purchasing use case and the following steps.

The ability for employees to create receipts for the ordered items. The receipts can be created by the users who ordered the product (Desktop receiving) or by a central logistics team (central receiving). If your users don’t create receipts, we recommend starting with central receiving and moving to desktop receiving after your users have adapted to the new process.
It also includes the ability for supplier invoices to be created in the system. Whether the invoice needs to be entered manually in the system or the process is completed automated – depends upon the capability of the vendors and the system’s capability.

The standard mechanism includes EDI (Electronic Data Interchange), email, and cXML. Don’t worry about the jargon; your procurement system vendor should be able to take care of this for you.

The third step in this process is to match all the documents and enable touchless invoicing. That means a two-way (match PO and Invoice) and a 3-way match (match PO, Invoice, and Receipts) to ensure that the data is consistent across all three documents.
The fourth step is payments to the vendors. This may or may not happen in the purchasing system as most companies prefer to use their accounting system for payments.