Intake management
Intake management is the structured front door for procurement: a single channel where employees submit purchase requests, which are then triaged, enriched with required information, and routed to the right process, whether that is a catalog order, a sourcing event, or a contract review. It replaces requests scattered across email, chat, and hallway conversations with one trackable queue.
Examples
Triage in practice: A 900-person hardware company logs 140 intake requests a month. About 60% route automatically to catalogs or existing contracts, 25% need a buyer, and 15% are not purchases at all (invoice questions, supplier complaints) and get redirected. Before intake, all 140 landed in one shared inbox with no queue.
NPI request: An engineer submits 'quotes needed for five machined parts, Q3 prototype build' with STEP files and quantities attached. Intake classifies it as a sourcing request rather than a requisition, and a buyer launches the RFQ the same day instead of reconstructing requirements from a chat thread.
Definition
Ask a procurement team where requests come from and the honest answer is email, chat, meeting follow-ups, and people stopping by a desk. Nothing has a status, requesters ask for updates because there is nothing to check, and a slice of spend never surfaces until the invoice arrives, which is how maverick spend is born. Intake management replaces the scatter with one front door: every request enters the same channel, gets triaged, and gets routed.
Intake sits upstream of the formal documents. A purchase requisition assumes you already know the item, supplier, and price; intake catches the fuzzier reality ('we need EMI testing for the new board by March') and collects what is missing before anything is keyed into a system. Good intake forms branch. A $400 catalog reorder takes four questions and routes straight into the e-procurement flow; a $200,000 tooling buy triggers a sourcing event; a contract renewal routes through legal first. That routing logic is the handoff to procurement orchestration.
The failure mode is an intake form that is just bureaucracy with a login, slower than the email it replaced, so requesters route around it and the front door stands empty. Speed is the adoption strategy. On the direct-materials side, LightSource serves as the intake point where engineering hands RFQ requests to sourcing with part data already attached.
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