With the economy the way it is, this is a perfect time to clean up forgotten messes, and drive process improvement.
Today we are forced to size our resources to match business needs, but there is nothing in the rule book that says we can’t do some clean up. Move or layoff your underperformers and build the org you want or need for when the economy turns. Now I know we all have personal stories, but you can not look at this as personal and layoffs are very difficult. Another way to help clean up is to upgrade your org. You should always have at least 1 star on your team and if you find yourself lacking one go and get you one or two. Upgrading your org now should be no problem especially with the unemployment so high globally.
When I look at process improvement, I tend to look at automation as much as possible. This will offer you the most efficiency with the most scalability. As purchasing pros, automating POs is always a good idea. But a couple of areas that seem to get lost are forecasting and change management. I worked with a company that automated the acknowledgment of changes to a PO, pushes, pull ins, cancels and shipment info. I would have liked to take it one step further to include forecasting but we did not. This cut back on folks manually having to touch POs multiple times and allowed for a 1/3 less resources to manage the same amount of data. I think we all agree that buying really does not see much of a downturn, you are only ordering 1 vs 100. The sad fact is that the 1 takes the same effort as the 100.
The upside to process improvement is the justification to keep critical resources for a little longer to implement these new tools and hopefully before you’re done the economy will turn.
Posted in Purchasing.com, by Michael Higgs on January 26, 2009
Today we are forced to size our resources to match business needs, but there is nothing in the rule book that says we can’t do some clean up. Move or layoff your underperformers and build the org you want or need for when the economy turns. Now I know we all have personal stories, but you can not look at this as personal and layoffs are very difficult. Another way to help clean up is to upgrade your org. You should always have at least 1 star on your team and if you find yourself lacking one go and get you one or two. Upgrading your org now should be no problem especially with the unemployment so high globally.
When I look at process improvement, I tend to look at automation as much as possible. This will offer you the most efficiency with the most scalability. As purchasing pros, automating POs is always a good idea. But a couple of areas that seem to get lost are forecasting and change management. I worked with a company that automated the acknowledgment of changes to a PO, pushes, pull ins, cancels and shipment info. I would have liked to take it one step further to include forecasting but we did not. This cut back on folks manually having to touch POs multiple times and allowed for a 1/3 less resources to manage the same amount of data. I think we all agree that buying really does not see much of a downturn, you are only ordering 1 vs 100. The sad fact is that the 1 takes the same effort as the 100.
The upside to process improvement is the justification to keep critical resources for a little longer to implement these new tools and hopefully before you’re done the economy will turn.
Posted in Purchasing.com, by Michael Higgs on January 26, 2009
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