Procurement or purchasing as a function has been the uncool brother of a larger supply chain. It has loads of controls and process checks. And where process checks are there, delays follow - like that dog from that famous mobile network ad.
Speed is sexy ~ John Doe.
In the age of agile purchasing, speed in making procurement decisions matter. The tighter controls have become detractors to faster procurement decisions & fulfilment.
At Bizongo, purchasing is a daily (if not, hourly) activity - there are roughly 1000 purchase orders created per month. It becomes imperative to do this process as quickly as possible, but with a high amount of accuracy.
Just about a couple of years back, the quantum was hardly about 400 Purchase Orders a month. Even at this small scale, we used to take an average of 17-18 days in the processing of these requisitions into purchase orders - with a decent sized team. But this was a problem. At this rate, we could never scale to faster customer fulfilment by scaling manpower. If things were stuck due to internal processes and would depend on people - fulfilment would be slower, and the customer would be impacted.
Our plan was to first assess where things were stuck, and then solve it so it could work for leaner teams. We implemented a new ordering approach in May 2019, which created a pipeline for us to automate with certain rules.
Automation Is Key
Setting up the pipeline alone resulted in us reducing 17 days to just over 2 days. But this caused another problem. Requests were piling up and purchase orders were taking a lot of time to be created, because of our small team.
We noticed patterns where a product was purchased only from a certain set of suppliers. We learned from this backing data, introduced the concept of rate contracts and looked to automate the pipeline.
And automating the pipeline resulted in almost instantaneous, controlled orders - reducing the time from 2 days to just over 4 hours. Process automation has enabled us to act within hours rather than weeks, to honour any order that comes our way.
Here's An Offer You Can't refuse
The best part - we've packaged all these learnings, and the tech behind it - in our Bizongo Procure Live Platform (beta). Now, any organisation having similar problems can use the automation built by Bizongo. All this, while maintaining a leaner team, and guaranteeing 0 stock-outs of products.
If you too have similar problems, or want to see if this works for your organisation - fill our beta invite form to be a part of our limited beta programme.
To know more about how we can supercharge your supply chain, with 100% inventory availability - with controlled spends - read more here - or get in touch.
