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Supply Chain Management Includes People Quality, timeliness, value for money, and reliability are what your customers demand of you. You need the same from your suppliers, internal and external. Suppliers should be paid promptly to ensure continued supply, after they have delivered. Feedback, both, positive and negative is important. The management of both your internal and external supply chains including consulting services, staff and materials, is critical to your success. Part of the management process is to ensure providers being hired have the necessary skill sets to complete the work being assigned. The cost of any purchase is more than the amount invoiced by suppliers. Time is money. Delays and costs related to the purchase of both goods and services are material. Often, the people involved in requisitions, approvals, budgeting, vendor selection, ordering, receiving, accounting and payment are in different locations and may not all work for the same organization or company. Some people are involved sporadically in the purchase process and their input needs to be triggered. Other people are routinely involved in the purchasing process and a barrage of such reminders would be a nuisance. All of these people are paid for their time and expertise and the demands on their time and energy need to be managed. Occasionally, circumstances arise which require more urgent attention and purchases need to be expedited. Most people enjoy meeting such challenges if they do not become standard operating procedure. Repeated urgent purchases increase costs, jeopardize the processes that rely on them, and undermine the confidence of everyone. Particularly, in such cases, people need to independently monitor the status individual consulting projects, requisitions and purchase orders and occasionally instigate corrective action to meet commitments to both suppliers and customers. Quantity discounts are often available to large volume purchasers and it costs less to process deliveries from and payments to, fewer vendors rather than more. Most organizations have preferred vendors and nurture those relationships to ensure the benefits of inter-dependency continue. Virtually all assets are purchased and stewardship of assets is dependent upon adequate documentation for legal, insurance and human resource management. The best time to collect and confirm information is when it first becomes known to an organization, i.e. during the purchasing or initial engagement cycles. Many purchases require the assistance of experts inside and outside the company. An example of this is, end users know they need a computer, but often are not sufficiently knowledgeable to neither adequately define their needs nor understand hardware and software incompatibility and security issues. Accordingly, all software and/or hardware requests commonly require prior approval by people acting in a service role rather than a line function. Experts are often in scarce supply and it is beneficial to have them prepare templates outlining the information, which needs to be collected before they can provide real assistance. The bane of many experts is the time it takes to collect missing information of a routine nature and known only to the person seeking assistance. The costs of carefully controlling all the factors outlined above, for every purchase, would be onerous and far outweigh risks and rewards of doing so. Accordingly, processes need to accommodate different types and magnitudes of purchases. Organizations periodically change processes to accommodate different times of year and/or changes in circumstances. Often the time taken to implement decisions is lengthened by the time needed to inform explain and document the changes in processes, suppliers, personnel and so on. Tenrox Purchasing by Tenrox is able to help organizations accommodate these issues at a reasonable cost for companies with ten or more people involved in the purchasing cycle; particularly if they are in different locations. One of the major benefits of their system is that it functions well, even for remote users relying on browsers and the Internet. Other than a reasonably current browser, no software need be installed on the users’ machines. Supporting electronic documentation can be attached to a workflow directed requisition/purchase cycle to facilitate quick input from remote locations and/or from people outside the organization without compromising the security of data or extensive training. Proper implementation of the software prevents information overload as people begin to rely on the system rather than over burdening their colleagues with unnecessary e-mail, “…just in case they need to know….” Or “…For Your Information”. Usually they do not need to know. I am sure many readers are well aware of issues brought to their attention unnecessarily. The flow of the consulting/purchase cycle can be directed both generally and by exception, based on logic determined by management and need not be sequential. Examples include:
Each of the above and similar steps can be inserted or removed as needed, using standard and user defined fields. Assistance with any feature and sending requests for more features and documentation is possible and imbedded is always context sensitive and readily available help system. Note, the above list includes consulting services as well as the traditional purchases of tangible goods. Tenrox Purchasing can be obtained as a stand-alone product, or as part of Tenrox PSA, Tenrox’s Professional Services Automation (PSA) tool. The combination facilitates services management and distinguishes Tenrox from other systems, which focus on materials only. Professional firms including temporary placement agencies are able to benefit greatly. Locating and allocating scarce skill sets and reducing the billing cycle are important success factors in many service providers, particularly ones focused on projects. Service providers themselves are major consumers of services, both internal and external. Tenrox Purchasing integrates with several mid market and enterprise accounting packages to facilitate authorized, timely, and efficient accounting and payment for purchases and assists in managing currency exposure by tracking purchasing in multiple currencies. Enhancements to Tenrox Purchasing in February 2002 will expand the range of computer environments and practical uses of the software. Some of the planned enhancements include better support for the DB2 format, more pre-built triggers such as milestone billing, and increased use of OLAP (On-Line Analytical Processing). OLAP reduces the cost of getting information to the decision makers and the inherent delays associated with custom programming. Designed for multi-site purchasing, innovative applications of this software could include franchise organizations attempting to achieve and share the benefits of better purchase management with franchisees while assisting them to comply with buying covenants often found in franchise agreements. Migration to Tenrox Purchasing is facilitated by the Tenrox Professional Services team; particularly during setup and when making workflow changes. The software incorporates the popular time saving techniques such as assigning people to groups and or roles, and then implementing policies and procedures based on the group or the role rather than the individual. Tenrox also provides hosting and backup services if desired or can help implement their software as part of an existing structure. Tenrox Purchasing is a part of a family of products developed and sold by Tenrox, to a wide range of medium to large companies and institutions. Joseph Macdonald, B.Comm., CA
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