Intake management market overview (Part 1): What is intake?

As procurement and other functions have sought to create more value by aligning better with internal stakeholders and users, the role of ‘intake’ has become increasingly popular. The overall concept has existed for years within procurement, but it has been aspirational only and weakly implemented within the source-to-pay (S2P) software market. This has led to a clutter of functionalities for requisition management, stakeholder/demand management, procurement service/‘help desk’ requests and more that are disconnected from other needed partner functions, e.g., IT, HR and Finance.

Procurement is not alone here. Other functions also struggle in bringing a consumerized multi-channel user experience to internal users. While IT and shared services groups have been more advanced with service management systems, these don’t tend to support robust S2P processes that drive high economic value and extend unified process interactions out to the supplier/third-party base.