Procurement is now a value driver and needs to be profitable, sustainable and agile. Procurement has to ensure strong governance and create a competitive edge for an organization through innovation and speed. The way forward is – “eProcurement”.
Yes, eProcurement will reengineer the “Source to Pay” process by digitizing the entire value chain to build efficiency. It will provide complete data visibility, enhancing effectiveness and system-driven processes will ensure governance and compliance.
Though we know it is eProcurement that will create value, organizations do think twice, maybe thrice, before adopting technology for automating their procurement process. Concerns, as illustrated below, are regularly spoken by chief executives and procurement professionals across the globe:
- Is my investment in technology justified?
- Will technology be able to help me in all my buys and align to my unique processes?
- Will online procurement leak my confidential data?
- Will we be able to adopt eProcurement in our organization?
- Is our IT and procurement team capable of handling the change?
The above issues have troubled many businesses worldwide. Decision-makers are skeptical about taking a digital plunge and fearing scope leakage in dealing with multiple OEMs and service partners. Thankfully, few service providers have addressed all the above needs and concerns to ensure 100% adoption of eProcurement in organizations of any size and nature.
This review is focused on mjPRO – a premier cloud eProcurement and eTendering solution from the house of mjunction, that has been designed for businesses of all sizes and types. mjPRO is the most user friendly and highly adaptable platform that allows you to manage the complete procurement lifecycle for all your buys providing you with faster “Return on Investment”.
Through this review, we will cover the following points:
- Introduction to mjPRO
- Key Features of mjPRO
- Our Final Verdict
So let’s get started, shall we?
Introduction To mjPRO E-Procurement Solution
mjPRO is a SaaS-based digital procurement platform that will connect all your data, processes and stakeholders across the procurement chain, in the most secured environment. mjPRO allows you to manage, monitor, and personalize all aspects of planning, sourcing, contracting, vendor acquisitions, and payments – conveniently and intelligently.
Using the power of AI, robotic process automation (RPA), and machine learning (ML), mjPRO helps you automate and digitize all your procurement-related processes while improving business scalability, profitability, compliance, and flexibility.
mjPRO has been implemented for several large business installations with 60 manufacturing units, 2500 procurement managers with an annual tender count of 20000 and spend value of $2 billion, and also for smaller organizations with only 1 manufacturing unit with <5 procurement managers.
Let us now explore the application in more detail.
One Point Accountability for All Your Needs
mjPRO works as a single point of contact (OEM, service integration, and service partner) for all your installation, integration, upgrades, modifications, and maintenance needs, ensuring that you do not have to communicate with multiple vendors which is time taking and leads to scope leakage.
mjPRO will be your partner across the door for software to activation to adoption. mjPRO is an in-house developed product of ‘mjunction’ (a JV of Tata Steel and SAIL), hosted on cloud and offered as SaaS.
AI-empowered Automatic RFQ for saving time & effort
mjPRO allows you to create and customize RFQs easily. Besides offering you suggestions based on your purchase history, it allows you to automatically generate RFQs. The application enables you to create, customize, aggregate, and split PRs (Purchase Requests) and tenders, and merge them from different indents, digitizing your entire PR-to-Payment process.
Hyper-Personalize to align to any of your buys
With mjPRO, you can create different types of tenders, POs, GRNs, and invoices, thanks to its smart in-built templates. Furthermore, you can hyper-personalize them to map to all types of processes. The application allows you to prepopulate tenders based on the deal type and customize the terms and conditions for each tender, which uncomplicates business transactions greatly.
Simplified Purchase Request Creation
mjPRO allows you to create purchase requisitions (PRs) inside the portal while also helping you to import PRs/data from your existing ERP or legacy solution(s). This saves you a great deal of time every day. Once created, each PR (Purchase Request) can be duplicated, and assigned or reassigned to different individuals through the portal.
Revolutionize Your Supplier Management With A Real-Time Repository and aided intelligence
mjPRO offers a dedicated supplier repository (Supplier Inventa) the system stores all supplier information. This repository allows you to add suppliers instantly and can be used to search and filter them as well. Additionally, it offers an inbuilt rating system where suppliers are classified qualitatively and quantitatively. mjPRO also suggests vendors based on category and historical data.
Stay Ahead with Customized Follow-ups and Approvals
Using mjPRO, you can drastically reduce the time spent on follow-ups and approvals. The platform allows you to modify approval workflows, chat with suppliers directly, and create custom access forms, saving you a great deal of time and effort.
Simplify Bidding & Boost Productivity
mjPRO digitizes the bidding process, enabling your suppliers to bid effortlessly and securely, while also assisting you in evaluating bids and choosing the most profitable ones. Additionally, bids can also be placed by a supplier through their email, RPA (Robotic process automation) enabled, which saves time. mjPRO also improves supplier convenience by supporting multiple currencies and languages.
Advanced Order & Contract Management Saves Time
mjPRO makes managing orders and contracts a breeze and allows you to make quick modifications to them to match your business needs. Rather than creating orders and contracts from scratch, you can use and modify existing ones to save time and effort.
Power Your Business Decisions Through Better Visibility
mjPRO helps improve your decision-making using the power of your data. Besides in-depth, intuitive, and customizable reports, the application also provides a dashboard that offers a holistic overview of key business operations.
Reports can be generated in a single click and can also be configured as per your requirements, ensuring that you have complete visibility over your procurement operations. Additionally, all reports from the dashboard can be expanded to full-screen for better visibility, enabling you to keep track of every minute detail.
In addition to the above, mjPRO can populate tax records swiftly and provide detailed breakdowns of all pricing components in invoices, thus improving business transparency.
Impressed already? We haven’t discussed the best features yet!
Key Features of mjPRO
Here are a few features of the mjPRO solution that put it in a league of its own:
1. Hyper-Personalization
mjPRO allows you to personalize almost all aspects of your operations, including process differences, stages, workflows, approvals, compliance guidelines, and departmental hierarchies. It enables you to create and customize templates/formats for Tenders, purchase orders, goods received notes (GRNs), and invoices.
You can create and customize templates, add fields and manage multiple tender types with different template groups. You can also add and modify auction rules, schedules, and stages from the portal itself. Additionally, if you require further modifications in the application, the mjPRO team would be more than happy to create them for you.
Summary/In short: Loads of personalization options (for auctioning rules, templates, approvals, etc.) – create, customize and curate effortlessly. Thus, all your business needs can be accommodated and all details can be stored in one place. Adjustments are easier to make, which improves business flexibility.
Feature(s) We Loved: Template Groups to manage different tender types
2. All-round/Complete Support (OEM+Service Integration+AMC)
With most other digital procurement solutions, you would have to chase behind multiple service providers for the services you need. Thus, even if your service provider is top-notch, you might have to deal with sub-par assistance from other service vendors.
In such a scenario, you might also need to explain your needs again to these providers and they might need to explore the entire solution to understand your requirements. However, mjPRO acts as a single point of assistance, saving you time and effort while offering credibility and world-class service.
Unlike the majority of e-procurement solutions that require separate service providers for maintenance, integration, and product, mjPRO offers you the convenience of a single point of contact for all your Sales and after-sales support needs. Thus, along with being the original equipment manufacturer (OEM) for any personalization needed, it also handles your service integration, installation, and annual maintenance contract (AMC).
Summary/In Short: Get maintenance, integrations, installation, and customizations done from a single provider, i.e. mjPRO. This not only saves you time but also gets you assured assistance from a brand that already has an understanding of your business.
3. Integrated Auction Engine
Auctions are an important component of procurement, and well-conducted auctions can pave the way for business success. mjPRO comes with an Integrated Auction Engine that allows you to auction via the portal itself and improves business profitability. This feature enables you to get quotes from different suppliers and select the best bids easily.
In addition, the application provides you with supplier ratings and all details related to bids to facilitate better decision-making.
Unlike traditional platforms that have limited provisions for quotation/bid management, mjPRO portal allows you to initiate auctions directly from the engine itself while also giving you the flexibility to follow the regular tendering process and get quotes from suppliers.
This allows negotiations to be completed within an hour instead of taking days. Furthermore, along with auto-extension of bid times (to promote fairness and equal opportunity to all bidders), you can also view bids in real-time and proceed with bid winners from live auctions.
Summary/In Short: mjPRO allows you to automate and digitize the bidding experience, get quotes from internal and external suppliers and choose the best bids. Greater flexibility and inclusiveness in auctions improve profitability and encourage healthy competition.
Feature(s) We Loved: The ability to view supplier ratings and bid details and choose between regular and digital bidding.
4. Intelligent Automation (AI, ML & RPA-enabled)
mjPRO lets you automate and simplify a significant amount of tasks through artificial intelligence, machine learning, and robotic process automation. For instance, the ‘AutoRFQ’ feature automatically creates RFQs based on your purchasing history, which traditional platforms largely lack.
Using its machine learning capabilities, mjPRO also provides suggestions on suppliers that you may have missed out on (based on your past orders), which reduces manual errors.
The RPA-based ‘Excel Bidding’ feature is another useful feature in mjPRO that allows suppliers to bid directly via email without having to log into the portal. Even without access to the portal, a supplier can download the bid template, fill up the excel file and re-upload it in the system. This allows even non-tech-savvy users to place their bids, which are repopulated in the system via RPA.
Summary: mjPRO learns your behavior and helps you automate daily tasks, saving you much time. Intelligent suggestions reduce manual errors and reduce workload. Having a system that watches your back reduces business risks and improves accuracy. Additionally, the more you empower your suppliers and vendors, the better your business becomes.
Feature(s) We Loved: Suppliers can bid directly from anywhere via email without any sign-ins, and the bids sent get automatically recorded in the system.
5. 70,000+ Supplier Base
Having a small group of suppliers can often be restricting for an organization in terms of profitability. The high dependency on such suppliers often leads to higher buying prices as compared to the industry and at times cartelization, which can stunt your company’s growth.
The solution is to add more suppliers into the system that similar companies/competitors use. This is why mjPRO’s ‘Supplier Inventa’ module has an in-built (qualitative & quantitative) rating system for all suppliers.
mjPRO constantly collects data from the post-P.O. modules to evaluate suppliers and rates them based on compliance adherence, number of rejections, TAT, etc. This allows you to make smarter choices, reduce business risks and reduce dependency on a select group of suppliers only.
Summary/In Short: Detailed supplier information (with transaction history) is stored in a separate database. Prevent cartelization by adding suppliers from similar companies and easily recognize the best ones based on ratings.
Feature We Loved: Suppliers can be rated both qualitatively(based on TAT, compliance measures, average rejection rates, etc. ) and quantitatively (based on total business done with them).
6. Reports & Analytics
The importance of business intelligence in procurement is undervalued by most providers. Smart and informed procurement decisions facilitate organizational success and help prevent strategic mistakes, fostering sustainable growth. This is why mjPRO’s Analytics Engine allows you to create dashboards from any given data point.
These dashboards allow you to visualize data through different types of graphs/charts and can be configured for specific users/user groups. However, the best part about them is that they are completely configurable and can be drilled down for deeper insights.
Here are a few key reports in mjPRO that most organizations find useful
- PR-PO MIS
- Savings MIS
- Pending PR Report (can be segregated month-wise & user wise)
- Cycle Time Report (can be segregated month-wise & user wise)
- Vendor performance dashboards
- Spend Analysis Report (can be based at material category level or item level)
Apart from the above, mjPRO sees to it that multiple varieties and combinations of reports can be generated as per your needs.
Summary/In Short: Fully configurable reports and dashboards for complete business visibility and easy analysis. Visualize each aspect of your operations minutely and understand how you are spending, opportunities for improvement, etc.
Feature(s) We Loved: Reports can be drilled down and segregated user-wise or month-wise. You can analyze how much you spent on each item/category for a particular duration.
7. Top-Notch Security
mjPRO is hosted on Amazon Web Services(AWS), making it reliable, fast, and secure. It also houses a report repository with timeline and activity breakups, allowing you to gain 360-degree oversight into your procurement pipeline. Furthermore, it offers two types of Captcha verifications (numeric and image-based) on login for added data safety.
Summary/In Short: With mjPRO, you enjoy 99.9% uptime and advanced data protection. Tasks and efficiencies are easier to map with timelines.
Feature(s) We Loved: Both image-based and numeric captcha options for secure login.
Our Final Verdict
mjPRO offers several advanced features that make procurement a breeze while improving performance and ensuring compliance. It completely digitizes the ‘Procure-to-pay’ process while improving visibility over your expenditures.
The mjPRO team is full of e-procurement experts who help you accommodate diverse procurement needs, and allow you to bring 100% of your spending online. Apart from being a single point of ownership, it facilitates 100% user adoption with a faster rate, resulting in faster ROI.
The application allows you to automate multiple tasks, conduct auctions in real-time, and manage tenders effectively through the use of technology. The only challenge that we feel with this application is that so many options and parameters can initially be overwhelming, especially for your suppliers. However, suppliers would soon notice how it benefits them.
Let us now rate mjPRO on various criteria that are critical to any business software:
- Convenience: 5 Stars/Full marks in this department….mjPRO is easy to navigate, learn & personalize.
- Data Visibility: Again….5 Stars due to its stellar dashboard & customizable reports
- Scalability: Full marks….Since they help you modify the application based on your needs and offer hyper-personalization of templates.
- User-friendliness: 5 Starts again… Almost no training required, automation has your back, and features like Excel-bidding allow even laypeople to bid on tenders.
- Value for money: Miles ahead of the majority of e-procurement solutions in terms of innovation, features, and customizability, yet easy on your pocket…. 5 stars yet again!
- Data Protection & Uptime – Reliable hosting and advanced security measures that protect oraganizational and client data during transactions….Full marks here too.
Being a cloud-based (SaaS) application, mjPRO can be set up instantly and allows you to access it safely from anywhere. Additionally, features like RPA-based excel bidding, Auto-RFQ, and integrated auction engine further simplify operations and boost system performance.
Not only does the application offer advanced negotiation techniques, but its multi-layered templates allow you to accommodate the most complicated project buys.
mjPRO automates menial tasks, minimizes business risks, and maximizes sustainability to help your firm grow continuously while remaining profitable. Considering the above features, we are inclined to give mjPRO e-procurement solution a ‘Perfect Ten’ in our review, hoping that it will transform the realm of digital procurement in the years to come.
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