A famous quote from Lewis Carroll's classic: "Through the Looking-Glass": The Red Queen tells Alice "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place." Tied to the notary gigs, red tape, complex processes, and lack of digitalization the Red Queen effect is one of the biggest Procurement department pitfalls: Resources time and soul are consumed by worthless transactions and operations. At the end of the day and weeks people works as hell only to be in the same place, just delivering transactions.
Action Plan
Need to address processes in order to free resources and be able to achieve the fun stuff: Category Management. To have optimized Procurement Operations need to focus in transactions and processes: The following steps address both of them:
- Data Capture
- Data Analysis
- Procurement Procedures & Authorization Manual
- ERP process flow and usage review
- Transactional-reviewed Procurement Procedures & Authorizations Manual
- Non-Procurable Spend: Redefine categories
- Procurable Spend: Threshold for Procurement involvement for non-core categories
- Procurable Spend: Blanket Orders boost Plan and implementations
- Manual transactions: Increase time coverage
- Other: Corporate and Procurement cards use and catalogs
- ERP leverage: Digitalization and document repositories.
- Manual transactions reduction as a target