Understand procurement governance
Understand — Procurement & Approvals.
How procurement governance works in B2B commerce, and how the procurement and cost-centers apps map onto it.
Procurement governance is three subjects that get discussed as one: what a purchasing department protects, how a signature is routed, and which document exists while it waits. Keeping them apart is most of the work. Read the three articles in order. The first gives you the vocabulary a customer's Einkaufsleiterin uses, the second lets you recognise her policy as one of a few known shapes and shows which of them the approval rules can express, and the third explains why the order is created last and what follows from that for budget, prices and your ERP.
If you read only one article before a customer meeting, read the first.
- How procurement governance works — What a purchasing department is protecting, and the four controls it uses.
- Approval models — Single approver, chains per cost centre, parallel cost centres.
- Purchase requests vs. orders — A request is not yet an order, and the difference matters for stock and invoicing.