Preferred Items
in Procurement
Make sure employees know which options are recommend for their purchase request.
How Stampli supports Preferred Items
Preferred items allow procurement teams to highlight commonly used or recommended options for specific request types. This feature emphasizes the items that align with the organization’s purchasing policies, promoting efficiency and compliance from the start.
The old way: Anybody buys anything they want
Procurement teams struggle to ensure purchases align with established vendor contracts and organizational policies. Without proper guidance, requesters often select unapproved options, leading to inconsistent purchases, higher costs, and processing delays. The manual effort required to maintain and track approved items creates inefficiencies, while recurring request patterns frequently go unnoticed without systematic tracking.
Stampli’s approach
Only Stampli automatically identifies and suggests preferred items based on your organization’s purchasing patterns. Our AI-powered system learns from your request history to create a dynamic, self-updating repository of pre-approved options. This eliminates manual catalog maintenance while ensuring requesters always see the most relevant choices. By guiding employees toward compliant purchasing options from the start, Stampli reduces approval cycles, minimizes back-and-forth communications, and helps your organization capitalize on negotiated vendor pricing. The result is a more streamlined, consistent procurement process that saves time for both requesters and approval teams.
Key features
Pre-approved items repository
Requesters can quickly access and select from a curated list of finance-approved items for any request type.
AI automatically identifies preferred items
Billy the Bot automatically generates preferred items by identifying patterns in frequently requested items.
Manual customization
Procurement teams can manually add or adjust preferred items to reflect updates in vendor agreements.
Real-time updates
Item list controls
Procurement can choose whether the AI should make suggestions for preferred items, can edit the name, price, and link associated with a suggestion, or can remove the item altogether.
FAQ
What is Stampli's preferred items feature?
Preferred items is a capability within Stampli’s procurement solution that highlights commonly used or recommended options for specific request types. When employees initiate a purchase request, they’re presented with a list of pre-approved items that align with your organization’s purchasing policies. This guided approach helps ensure compliance from the start while simplifying the selection process for requesters. The feature combines AI-powered suggestions based on your organization’s purchasing patterns with manual controls that allow procurement teams to customize the options presented.
How does preferred items help my procurement process?
Preferred items addresses a common pain point in procurement workflows: ensuring employees select appropriate, approved items when making purchase requests. Without such guidance, requesters often choose unapproved options, leading to delays, additional costs, and compliance issues. By presenting pre-approved choices upfront, Stampli reduces errors and streamlines the entire process. Requesters make better choices from the start, approvers spend less time correcting submissions, and your organization maintains better alignment with vendor agreements and internal policies.
How are preferred items identified and maintained?
Stampli uses two complementary approaches to build and maintain your preferred items list. First, our AI system (Billy the Bot) automatically analyzes your organization’s purchasing patterns to identify frequently requested items and suggest them as preferred options. Second, procurement administrators have complete control to manually add, edit, or remove items from the list. This hybrid approach ensures your preferred items stay current with minimal maintenance effort while still allowing for manual adjustments when vendor agreements or organizational policies change.
Can we customize the preferred items that appear for different request types?
Yes, Stampli’s preferred items feature is designed to be fully customizable. Procurement administrators can edit any aspect of an item including its name, price, and associated links. You can also remove AI-suggested items that aren’t appropriate for your organization or manually add items that should be promoted. The system maintains separate preferred items lists for different request types, ensuring requesters only see relevant options for the specific purchase they’re making.
Will implementing preferred items require significant setup time?
No, one of the key advantages of Stampli’s preferred items is its minimal setup requirements. The AI-powered system begins learning from your existing purchasing patterns immediately, automatically generating suggestions based on your organization’s history. There’s no need to build extensive catalogs from scratch or manually input all possible items. Of course, procurement administrators still have the option to manually configure preferred items if desired, but the system provides value with very little upfront configuration.
How does preferred items compare to maintaining a full catalog system?
Unlike traditional catalog systems that require extensive setup and maintenance of thousands of items, Stampli’s preferred items takes a more focused approach. It highlights just the most relevant options for each request type, automatically adapting as purchasing patterns evolve. This significantly reduces the administrative burden while still providing guidance to requesters. For organizations that don’t need comprehensive catalog management but want to improve procurement compliance and efficiency, preferred items offers an ideal balance of simplicity and effectiveness.