Spring is on the way, and that means that it’s spring cleaning or not, and whether you want to admit it or not, your Procurement operation has a few messes that can be cleaned up, or at least minimized. And, as we indicated yesterday there is no better time than the present to clean those messes up … as much as you might want to leave them behind.
If you’ve taken the first step, you’ve identified (the worst of) the messes you have. Now you get to tackle them. How depends on the mess in question, but we’ll help stimulate some ideas by discussing how you might deal with the messes we mentioned in yesterdays post.
People – Maverick Buying
If the maverick buying is due to the fact that buyers just don’t know about the contracts in place, then make sure they have easy access to a centralized e-contract repository with powerful, free-text, search which understands product and services similarity. This way, a single search should identify the majority of products and services they should be buying on contract. They may still miss some contracts for obscure products or services which can only be uncovered with obscure keywords, but the majority of off-contract purchases going forward will be intentional (and then you have a different problem).
People – Master Data Degredation
Hold mandatory training sessions for all employees on procurement and data management processes, insure that the processes are adequate to prevent data degradation, and that only the right people have approval authority. This will keep data clean and useable.
People – Denied Party Dealings
Put processes in place where the only people with contract signing authority have been trained in denied party searches, sign a statement indicating that they will always do a denied party search before signing a contract, and have them immediately report potential denied parties to appropriate legal counsel in the company. Not only will the chances of a denied party transaction be greatly reduced but if, by some chance, a transaction ever occurs with a denied party, the organization will be able to show best efforts to prevent such a situation.
Process – Piles of Paper
This is an easy problem to remedy — install a modern e-Invoice management solution with EDI, XML, PO-flip, intelligent OCR, and m-way matching and the organization will not only approach 99% e-Invoice rates, but 96% straight-through processing (where suppliers deal with routine exceptions and small errors and resolve 90% of those without purchaser interaction).
Process – Slack Sourcing
This is another easy problem to ready — a modern e-Sourcing or e-Source to Pay platform with easy RFX and e-Auction creation, customizeable workflows and lots, as little or as much detail as you want, bulk attachment uploads, templated projects and weightings, and everything else an average buyer needs to get a 3-to-6 bids and a buy event configured and launched on tail spend that would normally just go to the first supplier identified.
Process – Quality Quarrels
Another problem easily remedied by technology — scorecard technology to be exact. Keep good data on all key metrics, monitor them monthly, and automatically alert the buyer and supplier when a threshold is hit or a downward trend (defined as lapses in performance over 3 regular measurement periods) is detected. This allows both parties to collaboratively identify, and correct, a root cause before slips become falls and minor losses become major losses.
Platform – No Platform
Get one — and if you’re starting from scratch, get one that supports a Virtual Procurement Center of Excellence.
Platform – 1st Generation Platform
If the budget is there and the right stakeholders can be convinced, upgrade, if not, bolt on missing functionality from best of breed providers to cover the key components of the end-to-end source to pay cycle as well as deep analytics.
Progression – Change Management
Make sure the organization has a great competency in change management. Hire someone if needed.
There is no silver bullet, or should we say, silver dustpan that can clean up every mess, just like there is no one-size fits all