Sourcing-First Procurement in India
Gaurav Baheti, CEO of Procol, on bringing procurement online in India
The core advantage is speed to savings. In India, many large companies still run procurement through email, Excel, phone calls, or older SAP and Oracle setups, so a full procure to pay rollout means wiring a new system into purchase requisitions, purchase orders, invoices, approvals, supplier records, and finance workflows before value shows up. Procol avoids that long dependency chain by starting with sourcing, where buyers can digitize vendor discovery, bidding, and negotiation first, and reach value in under 45 days instead of the nine to 12 months typical of legacy suites.
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The practical bottleneck is integration depth. A sourcing tool can run earlier in the workflow, before invoices and payments touch the ERP, while procure to pay has to connect tightly to finance systems and supplier master data. That is why Procol says 90% of its target customers were still offline, and why older enterprise products were concentrated in the 10% already using SAP or Oracle.
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Time to value is also driven by supplier adoption. Procol built a supplier mobile app and says suppliers can be onboarded in five to 10 minutes, versus four to eight weeks on legacy platforms. That matters in India because many suppliers operate from regional markets and do not sit at desktops waiting to log into a procurement portal.
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This matches a broader market pattern. Modern procurement companies like Zip and BRM have won by landing as lighter workflow layers around intake, vendor management, or buying operations, instead of forcing an enterprise to replace the whole stack at once. The wedge is faster deployment, easier adoption, then expansion into deeper workflows later.
The next phase is clear, modern procurement platforms will keep moving downstream from sourcing into procure to pay, but only after they prove fast ROI in one narrow workflow. In India, the winners are likely to be the vendors that layer onto messy legacy systems first, then expand system by system as customers standardize their processes and digitize finance operations.