What Procurement Should Be In 2025
Why effective procurement is more than pushing out purchase orders—and how the right tools transform businesses from reactive ordering to strategic supply chain managementIntroduction
Whether you run an e-commerce shop or a physical store, staying stocked without over-ordering is one of the most vital, and time-intensive, parts of your business.
Over- or under-ordering is far more serious than many businesses realize. With customer acquisition costs rising, you don’t get many chances to convert a buyer. Cash is precious, and tying it up in excess inventory is extremely wasteful.
The Problem
This often requires a highly attentive person to spend a large portion of their week managing procurement, much of this work being menial and inefficient.
In 2025, you and your team shouldn’t be bogged down by administrative work. You should be using tools that supercharge your ability to get work done, leaving you focused on decision-making.
Unlike many other areas of business software, procurement tools have seen little meaningful innovation, despite the number of options available.
Current tools, like those built into Shopify and Square, primarily exist to generate purchase orders. They assume no responsibility for the work that happens beforehand (making decisions) or afterward (managing the order through to completion).
As a result, businesses are still stuck finding their own way to make sense of inventory, sales velocity, and margins. Teams are forced to dig through email threads to manually track purchase orders, double-check details, chase down changes, update SKUs and pricing, and set alerts for missed responses. The more purchase orders your company makes, the more painful this becomes.
So What Do I Do?
What’s needed is a tool that syncs with your sales data, learns from your history, and gives you everything you need to make quick, informed decisions, sometimes even recommending actions. Once the order is placed, it should keep you plugged into what requires attention.
In short, it should assist across all three stages of the procurement process.
The right tool should allow even a small team, or a single operator, to work with the efficiency and precision of the most experienced procurement departments.
It should automate everything necessary, but no more, and it should never ask for busywork or administrative labor unrelated to decision-making or relationship-building.
Basically you have the following options:
Manual methods
Examples include:
- Word Documents
- Spreadsheets
- Quickbooks
Pros: Flexible, free, minimal training needed
Cons: Time intensive, manual, prone to errors
Built-in Tools
Examples include:
Pros: In sync with your current products. Don't have to leave the platform to manage suppliers or items.
Cons: Only handles PO creation and not inventory planning or management.
Full ERP
Examples include:
Pros: Feature complete with everything you might need integrated into one service.
Cons: Expensive, time intensive, more suited to large teams.
Enterprise Procurement Platforms
Examples include:
Pros: Comprehensive procurement features. Strong approval workflows. Built for internal enterprise processes. Robust compliance and audit trails.
Cons: Extremely expensive (often $100K+ annually). Built for internal workflows, not external supplier collaboration. Poor supplier experience. Requires dedicated procurement teams. Complex implementation (6-12+ months). Focused on control and compliance over efficiency and supplier relationships.
Procurement Platforms
Examples include:
Pros: Provides powerful inventory planning tools. Uses AI to keep order information up to date. Provides communication threads for personal communication with suppliers. Integrates with Shopify and Square. External supplier collaboration built-in.
Cons: Lack more intensive features such as accounting, BOM management, employee records and project management tools.
Comparison Chart
| Inexpensive | Inventory Planning | Time Efficient | PO Creation and Delivery | PO Tracking | Advanced Accounting | Supplier Collaboration | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Manual methods | ☑ | ☑ | - | - | - | - | - |
| Built-in Tools | ☑ | - | - | ☑ | - | - | - |
| Full ERP | - | ☑ | - | ☑ | - | ☑ | - |
| Enterprise Procurement | - | ☑ | - | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | - |
| Procurement Platforms | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | ☑ | - | ☑ |
Summary
At the end of the day, effective procurement processes are more than just about pushing out purchase orders. It’s all about vigilance, solid calculation, protecting your margins, and ensuring your team can focus on growth instead of busywork. The right system will streamline decision-making, automate where it makes sense, and keep you connected to the full lifecycle of every order.
Small and mid-sized businesses don’t have the luxury of wasted time or cash flow locked up in inefficiencies. That’s why choosing a procurement approach that fits your size, your tools, and your ambitions is critical. Whether you’re running lean on manual methods, relying on built-in features, or stepping up to a modern procurement SRM, the key is to ask: is this helping me operate like a bigger, more capable team - without the overhead?
The businesses that thrive in 2025 will be the ones that take a hard look at their business processes, and adopt the perfect blend of software, AI, business fundamentals, and human involvement. Perhaps procurement is where you should shine the spotlight on next.